It hardly needs saying that, although I’m going to take a break from posting here, I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to concentrate on the second round of the writing project, which is already proving to be much more difficult than the first. “That’s as it should be” sounds glib; “That’s how it had to be” is more like it. The first round produced a very readable piece of journalism, not without interest but no more demanding or memorable than a magazine article read to pass the time. You can imagine that it took awhile for this realization to stop stinging. As a memoir, it was somewhat uncertain, and I eventually learned from it that I did not want to write a memoir. And then what happened got in the way of explaining why I think the things I do.

But here’s something that happened. I don’t remember why I remembered it out of the blue the other day, but it has kept me laughing ever since.

I was somewhere between ten and twelve, I think. My friend Joey’s piano teacher had an annual recital for her pupils at a place in the City. This turned out to be what we now call Weill Recital Hall. Joey played his piece, and then we fooled around. We ran up and down the corridors, and when we got tired of that we started opening doors. There was nothing interesting behind any of these doors until we got to the last one. When we opened it, a blast of sound such as we had never heard in our lives, coming from somewhere far away down in a hole, threatened both to knock us flat where we stood and to suck us into the abyss. Of course we figured out that this was Carnegie Hall, in the middle of a concert, with a packed audience, and that we shouldn’t be there, but our bodies were so shocked by the sensation that we couldn’t move. We just stood there, transfixed, momentarily unworried about getting in trouble. If you’ve ever had a seat in the upper balconies of Carnegie Hall, you won’t have any trouble imagining our sudden vertigo. But the sound was just as disconcerting. We had opened the door on the climax of some grandiose romantic symphony, and although it was unbelievably loud, it was totally clear and not at all deafening. The audience, perfectly still and silent, may have thought it celestial, but when I remember it I think of opening the lid on Dante’s Inferno. After all, we had transgressed, and would go on transgressing until we closed that door!

The second time I saw Carnegie Hall, I was just a few years older, but already the most callow of adolescents. This time, I was a member of the audience myself, and I was sitting not in the balconies but in the front row of a center box. I can’t recall for certain — this is why I’m no good at memoir — but I expect I was too busy imagining myself as a royal personage to be reminded of my first encounter.

I’m not setting a date for return. Thanks for reading!

18 and 19 September

Tuesday 18th

Thanks to the republication of Iris Origo’s brief war diaries, I felt compelled to read up, for the first time, on Benito Mussolini, the Fascist forerunner and later junior partner of Adolf Hitler. Mussolini’s dark star has dimmed in recent times, largely, I think, because the Holocaust, the details of which were unknown to all but a few until after the end of the Second World War, is now the first and often the only horror that people associate with Hitler’s régime. Mussolini’s contribution to the Holocaust was half-hearted at most.

Deciding to begin conventionally, with a biography, I chose Jasper Ridley’s, because I’ve read his biography of Elizabeth I twice. Mussolini is a brisk double portrait, Ripley’s thesis being that, for several decades, Mussolini managed to ride two horses at the same time. We are familiar with what he looked like atop one of these horses: the bombastic thug. Since Ridley claims that, as an orator, Mussolini was unusually concise, I expect that the impression of bombasm owes to his ranting in Italian. But we still know him primarily from newsreels and other publicity sources. Atop the other horse, dressed in a morning suit, he was a charming man of the world, by all accounts, albeit one who showed his claws. The biggest surprise — because I’ve never heard this before — is that Mussolini was fluent in German and French, and fully apprised of political events around the world. His former compadre from early socialist days, Angelica Balabanoff, claimed that he lacked courage — not physical courage, but the moral strength to resist the desires of his supporters. Ridley puts it more nicely: Mussolini knew that his people would obey his orders without hesitation — so long as those orders were the ones that his people wanted to hear. He understood that he could never restrain them from beating people up and burning buildings down.

(I’m quite often reminded, reading about Ripley’s Mussolini, of Massimo Ghini’s performance as the Fascist Pooh-Bah of Florence, Leopardi, in Philip Haas’s Up at the Villa — suave but deadly.)

Mussolini was a man of the people, but he was not a peasant. His father was a blacksmith, and an ardent socialist. His mother was a schoolteacher. He may be said to have risen in the world by the most classical of means: as a rhetor, a public speaker. Unlike the Greeks and the Romans, Mussolini could take advantage of a still fairly recent invention, the mass-produced newspaper. But the arc of his transition from socialism to fascism reveals that he was richly endowed with another modern gift: he was an entertainer. What distinguishes the entertainer from others is not the ability to attract attention but the knack for holding onto it. Entertainers are extraordinarily alert to audience feedback, and capable of adjusting their performances minutely. Mussolini carried it one step further. He dumped an audience that he felt was waning, and took up with one that was growing.

Without belaboring the point, Ridley does observe that Italy came out of World War I almost as embittered as Germany. Its only gains from the Peace of Versailles were territories that Austria had been willing to concede if Italy, its sometime ally, would simply stay out of the war. Italy’s designs on Istria, the Dalmatian coast, and the Dodacanese Islands (to name a few) ran squarely counter to the principle of self-determination that so naively governed the Allies’ deliberations. Britain’s secret offer of Jubaland (today’s Kenya), dangled as an inducement for Italy to enter the war on the Allied side, came to nothing.

Worse, returning veterans were mocked by Socialists for having stupidly participated in a pointless war. Socialists ideologically denounced war as a bourgeois gambit, and soldiers were its dupes. Mussolini, a veteran himself, discovered that soldiers preferred to be treated as heroes, whether or not their sacrifices had achieved anything. From this kernel grew an organization that always had the tacit support of the Italian armed and police forces. It was also an anti-democratic one. The Fascist rank and file would much rather act than vote. They reveled in a political climate that glorified the homeland and in a régime that devoted considerable resources to matching the achievements — primarily in technology and sport — of its hitherto more advanced neighbors. Their achievements, however, were largely confined to more brutish demonstrations of male superiority.

Hailing these demonstrations of Italian vigor and virtue, Mussolini ever more stridently denounced the rot of the Western democracies — and the Western democracies merely frowned in response. What they would have done in other circumstances can only be imagined, but in the particular circumstances of the Twenties and Thirties, Western minds were overwhelmed by a dread of Bolshevism. It is hard for us to appreciate this dread now, partly because we conflate Bolshevism with Communism (a mistake that Bolshevists encouraged), partly because the dread was infused with Victorian nightmares rooted in Gothic novels, and partly because the imagined horrors of Bolshevism have been replaced by the actual horrors of the Holocaust. Suffice it to say that Bolshevism was regarded as an unspeakable evil, in comparison with which Mussolini’s Blackshirts were guilty of nothing worse than aggravated roughhousing. At every turn in Mussolini’s career, he was deemed to be not only preferable to but a bulwark against Bolshevists.

As Mussolini moves into the Thirties, the dictator, whose patterns were already established, recedes slightly in the growing chaos of international disaster, and an unexpected narrative thread gathers strength. From the first burgeonings of Mussolini’s political career, Ridley keeps us informed of the opinions of British observers. This might strike some readers as provincial, as if the author were boosting the importance of his own country’s dealings with Mussolini. But to me, the fractured response of Westminster’s shifting personalities to Italy’s activities in Ethiopia and Spain, and then to Mussolini’s somewhat dodgy interactions with Hitler, show as no other study that I’m familiar with the extent to which the minds of the pre-eminent Western democracy simply fell apart in the run-up to 1939. As the Soviet Union developed the conventional features of a modern nation, industrially at least, and as Italy and Germany did the same, sophisticated Britons began to suspect that they were out of their depth when judging such unforeseen novelties. Many of them had strongly believed that their parliamentary democracy would never flourish in “less advanced” polities, but the calamities of the Thirties proved that they had been only half right. They had had no idea of the malignancy of the tyrannies into which misbegotten parliamentary democracy would mutate.

And I suddenly see (although Ridley has not yet made this point) that Churchill’s great strength in all this mess was not so much his bulldog determination to fight on as his ability to know his own mind. He did not flounder. He admired Mussolini for many years, but when he came to share Angelica Balabanoff’s doubts about Mussolini’s courage, he did not fall back in disillusioned bewilderment. He did what he always did: he changed his mind.

But perhaps I anticipate incorrectly. There will be more to read when I’m done with Ridley’s Mussolini. But Ridley has completely refreshed a sad history by inviting us to ask some new questions. What happens when a powerful culture loses its analytical grip? And what happens when political leaders are in fact professional entertainers?

***

Wednesday 19th

In recent commentaries, Michelle Goldberg and Jia Tolentino have taken the #MeToo issue around a corner where there happens to be a strong ray of sunlight. What bothers them about the (mostly male) offenders is not what they did but that they don’t seem to understand that they did it to another human being. Both have been provoked by the creeping rehabilitation of such figures as Louis CK, John Hockenberry, and Jian Ghomeshi, all of whom appear to argue that they’ve suffered enough already. They’ve suffered! What about their victims? It seems that these gentlemen don’t have anything to say about their victims, except to mumble, “I’m sorry — can I go now?”

I think Ian Buruma has said it for them. I haven’t read his Slate interview with Isaac Chotiner, but Tolentino quotes a bit of it.

Buruma claimed to support the #MeToo movement as a “necessary corrective.” When Chotiner reminded him that Ghomeshi has been accused of numerous acts of sexual assault, “including punching women in the head,” he responded, “The exact nature of his behavior—how much consent was involved—I have no idea, nor is that really my concern.” What Buruma wanted to explore, he said, was the experience of “being at the top of the world, doing more or less what you like, being a jerk in many ways, and then finding your life ruined and being a public villain and pilloried.”

The phrase “finding your life ruined” is remarkably telling.

No, “being a jerk in many ways” is remarkably telling. I’m pretty sure that most men would agree that each of the members of the #MeToo rogues gallery behaved like a jerk. They might differ as to how much worse than being a jerk each individual might be — but all were jerks. Al Franken’s offense was nothing worse than being a wacky jerk, I daresay most men smiled when they saw the image of him mugging with his hands over the sleeping woman’s breasts — no touching! Now, the opposite of being a jerk is being cool, and cool means never getting caught. The safest and smartest way to avoid getting caught is not to act like a jerk (or worse). But let it not be imagined that the cool guys who will probably never face a #MeToo challenge regard women any differently from the jerks. All it comes down to is this: the difference between a cool guy and a jerk is that the jerk’s timing is off. (It is never the right time to hit anyone, not even when asked.)

I think that women who are waiting for men, especially men in middle age, to awaken to the damage that being a jerk might do to a woman are wasting their time. For bad or worse, older men grew up in a vanished world, and the only thing to do is to wait for them to die off. Sorry! The thing to do is everything possible to make sure that they’re not replaced, that boys and young men growing up understanding that women are not toys. For that’s the problem: it’s not that men don’t empathize with women, or understand the pain caused by their unwanted maneuvers, &c &c, but that they believe that women exist for their pleasure — otherwise, why don’t they please go away? Not all men, but enough. This is why women wear burqas: in some cultures, men grow up believing that a man who does not take advantage of an “immodest” woman is not a man at all. To resist a sexual impulse is not to have it in the first place: the urge establishes its bona fides by overpowering the susceptible victim, who is, of course, a real man.

The respect for women that shielded them from the kind of harassment and abuse that seem so common now may have been very effective, but it wasn’t something that we want to revive, if only because it wasn’t genuine respect at all. It was rooted in the belief that women were special, not human in the way that men were human. Consigned to their special, arguably “superior” sphere, women were surrounded by thickets of restrictions and prohibitions that prevented their leading full lives, especially if they were not drawn to the career of marriage and motherhood. The destruction of those barriers is one of the big stories of the Twentieth Century. But the effective if old-fashioned respect that was destroyed along with them has not been replaced.

There will always be a handful of truly dangerous sexual predators, but I think that most of the inappropriateness (and worse) that has been called out in the #MeToo revival tent is rooted in foolishness and showing off, not pathology. Young men with pocket money and free time naturally challenge each other to pursue dubious achievements, but these need not include treating women as playthings. How to instill an effective if not heartfelt respect for all women in adolescent minds is a practical problem that women and men are going to have to hammer out. Meanwhile, I hope that Michelle Goldberg and Jia Tolentino will stop waiting for a new respect to emerge from spontaneously enlightened men.

Bon week-end à tous!

11 and 13 September

Tuesday 11

Well, this Tuesday, the weather in New York is on the dismal side, humid, cloud-covered and glum. Nothing like what it was seventeen years ago.

(When was the last time the anniversary fell on the weekday?)

***

The more obtrusive anniversary is that of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Ten years ago this month, its fall precipitated a financial calamity that was forestalled by quick thinking and bold responses, but at a terrible cost. This cost wasn’t so much the amount of money that it took to restore confidence to the short-term credit market — without which such terrible-to-imagine outcomes as empty supermarket shelves might have ensued — as it was the way in which payment of the price was allocated. “Austerity” was the word heard in Europe, but the people at fault for the disasters were not the ones forced to tighten their belts. Here in the United States, the word was “bail-out.” The intrusion of this maritime term was probably bound to cause confusion. At the time, as I recall, one spoke more often of “pumping money into the system.” And the banks did repay, at least technically, all or most of the money that was pumped into them. But the pressure-drop that both caused and was intensified by Lehman’s implosion affected much more than the banking sector. Nobody rescued the victims of collateral damage; at times, it seemed that only the banks were going to recover. So the public and its journalists settled on an image suggesting that the beneficiaries of official largesse weren’t as deserving as the innocent bystanders who were allowed to go under. From the Tea Party to Trump, the results were pretty much what could be expected of bravura, emergency-room politics.

We’re celebrating the anniversary with almost daily predictions that there is going to be another really big crash sometime soon.

In case you’re bored by money, there’s William T Vollmann’s Carbon Ideologies, which critic Nathaniel Rich has called a “suicide note.” It’s not exactly cheering to consider that worldwide economic failure may be the only thing to prevent Vollmann’s scenario.

***

Just what prompted me to order a copy of Martin Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), I can’t say for certain. It must have been a review of Amis’s latest collection of critical essays, which apparently has a lot to say about luminous literary figures who happen to be male, and almost nothing about those who don’t. Is it condescension that I find so annoying, or indifference? Year by year, I’m more exasperated by the palpable extent to which many if not most men believe that, when it comes to important things, Women Don’t Count.

But what does this mean? And who am I to suggest not only that Women Count, but that I Know What They Count For, especially if what this statement really means is that I (claim to) Understand Women. I can’t run fast enough away from that implication.

The Rachel Papers is proving quite helpful in sorting this out. It’s the account of a very bright but very callow young man’s pursuit of a nice girl who, while pretty enough, lacks the vulgar attractions that adolescents fetichise. She is also not the brilliant, inaccessible creature that he takes her to be (just as he doesn’t recognize her as the hostess of the party where they meet). She does, however, have a boyfriend, and her detachment from him becomes the hero’s project. I suppose that it’s because he likes her that he dumps her at the end.

One of the troubles with being over-articulate, with having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions, is that every turn in the conversation, every switch of of posture, opens up an estate of verbal avenues with a myriad side-turnings and cul-de-sacs — and there are no signposts but your own sincerity and good taste, and I’ve never had much of either. All I know is that I can go down any one of them and be welcomed as a returning lord. (158)

Remember, before you dismiss Charles Highway (our hero) as hopelessly loathsome, that he is saying this on the verge of his twentieth birthday. Every bright young man (many bright young women, too, although they’re actively discouraged) has a vocabulary more refined than his emotions.

The observation is suffused with ignorance. The young man gets lost, but it doesn’t matter — why not? Because he lives in a world where men do not have to pay attention to anything but personal performance. Charles is obsessed with his; if you take out all the passages that relate either to the foreshadowing of decay that makes adolescence so fearful (the smells, the spots; the dirt, suddenly so noticeable, in all the body’s crannies; the endless grooming), the strategies and mechanics of lovemaking (Charles is keeping a dossier entitled Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis), the self-appraisal in mirrors, and the stage-managing of future encounters (“Enter without glasses on : put them on a) if don over 50, b) if don wearing glasses”), precious little of The Rachel Papers remains. The appearance of others is not altogether insignificant: aside from the few sharp men from whom pointers might be taken, humanity is grist for the cynic’s mill. But Charles is adamantly uninterested in anyone else’s inner life — perhaps because he’d give anything to escape his own.

Accordingly, the attention that he pays to desirable women is reminiscent of Cole Porter’s very funny but sadly overlooked song, “The Physician.” Random verse:

He murmured “molto bella”
When I sat on his patella,
But he never said he loved me

(And if he had, he’d have been lying.) There are breasts, and the “elusive shadows” lurking above the hems of short skirts; there is hair and skin and overall emotional climate. But the whole woman is more elusive than the shadows. Think, for contrast, of Jane Austen’s extraordinary range of leading men. The two military officers among them bear understandable similarities, but the others have nothing in common by way of personality; her heroines are rather more homogeneous. Austen, whom Amis somewhat grudgingly sort of respects, doesn’t understand this; he has said that her novels are all the same. But how can this be, when the men in them are all so different? The differences, moreover, are registered entirely in carriage and speech. Austen is famous for never having imagined a scene in which men interact without women, but there was no need for her to worry about the secret life of men. She had only to watch them carefully, as thoughtfully as appraisingly. She describes their appearances rather blandly, wisely letting her readers fill in the details, but the whole men appear with absolute distinctiveness. (It is impossible to settle on just how well Mr Knightley and Mr Darcy would get along.)

It’s not enough to charge Charles Highway with the self-important egotism of young men; that would miss his panic, a no less manly characteristic that can be revealed only in novels.

***

Thursday 13th

As I hope I suggested earlier this week, I do not propose myself as a champion of women. The only thing that women have ever asked from me is recipes.

A corollary of the notion that Women Don’t Count is that What Counts for Women Doesn’t Count. This is really just another way of defining “important things,” such as politics and leadership and business growth and military strategy, as particularly in need of masculine attention. And yet every campaign or operation begins with the establishment of a housekeeping unit — a quartermaster, an HR chief — to enable smooth running. Housekeeping chores are assigned on a spectrum of drudgery, so that the top guy never lifts a finger, while buck privates peel the potatoes. There is nothing sentimental about these units, and there is no intention of producing something like a home. Although absolutely necessary, housekeeping is not “important.”

One begins to suggest that masculine culture regards “necessary” and “important” as antonyms. Necessity pre-empts a lot of opportunities for making decisions; and decisions, as Hannah Arendt proposes in The Human Condition, are the summit of human action. Necessity is drudgery — work for slaves.

But there are problems with decisions in the larger culture. The larger culture is risk-averse. Mistakes that lead to broken bodies are not readily forgiven. Nor is the larger culture willing to endow anyone with the power to make sweeping changes. It is more difficult than ever to be a man. It would be nice to think that this difficulty might finally distract men from their fear of being mistaken for women — the panic that I mentioned the other day.

***

Women often write about trying to decide whether or not to have children. Quite often, they speak of “having a baby,” which confuses the spectacular achievement of producing and nourishing a living infant with the long-term commitment to caring for children who are rarely adorable. I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if they asked themselves whether they were willing to make a home — by which I do not mean some comfy little nest with all the modcons, and television sets in every room. (I wonder if what I do mean is a home altogether without television sets.) Nor do I mean a domestic order that requires anybody’s full-time attention. The domestic order that I have in mind is oriented less towards service and more toward cooperation. Do something about the problem of unpaid housework: pay children handsomely to keep themselves clean and their quarters ship-shape. Maybe with money, maybe with something else. Dr Johnson claimed that no boy ever learned Latin without having it flogged into him, which unfortunately became a good reason for giving up Latin. (It was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite subjects, though, and he wasn’t flogged.) Now that punishment has come to be widely regarded as an inhumane and unacceptable inducement to good behavior, the demands that parents make on children have dwindled to a handful of minimal daily requirements, largely centered on “doing well in school.” Whatever that means, it doesn’t involve being part of a family, or contributing to the health of a home.

A home is a place where people know each other well, and want to know each other better. A home that children can’t wait to escape is broken, whether or not the parents remain together. (Indeed, I can think of a couple of happy marriages that were so fulfilling to the spouses that there was nothing for their children to do except endure childhood. Roz Chast illustrates one in her memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?) At the same time, a home without children can still be a home.

Children, as we know, take care of themselves somehow or other. They deal with necessity as best they can. For good parents, providing children with the necessities is only the first step. Every other step requires the thoughtful attentiveness to people as they are that we call wisdom.

Bon week-end à tous!

4 and 7 September

Tuesday 4

In his new memoir, Every Day Is Extra, John Kerry apparently regrets not having been more aggressive about refuting the “Swift Boat” attacks that were made during his presidential campaign in 2004. I never paid much attention to them; they were obviously beneath notice. But then I wasn’t the candidate. Maybe, when you’re running for office, you have to deal with every clump of mud that’s thrown at you.

Pope Francis is not running for anything, so John Kerry’s advice does not apply. But his determination to ignore the reactionaries who are now his open opponents in the Church is certainly the most exciting thing going. Will he be able to pull it off? If his silence succeeds, it may transform journalism and create a new model of institutional authority. I will try to explain that transformation is a later entry. Right now, I want to take stock of the present moment.

With respect to Archbishop Viganò and his American collaborators, Francis has urged journalists to do their thing, and investigate the contentions, which are two in number. First, there is the nature of sanctions, if any, allegedly imposed on former Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI, and allegedly lifted by his successor. The twaddle about homosexual networks within the American clergy will to some extent be clarified by this investigation, insofar as any connection can be demonstrated between such conspiracies (if they exist) and the cancer of pedophilia that has undermined the health of the American Church.

The other matter is Kim Davis. Who said what to whom about her brief interview with the Pope on his Washington visit in 2015? Good luck with that one. The Times suggests that the Pope has muzzled those in the Vatican who could shed some light on the subject. I disagree. I think that the Pope is trying to keep the issue’s Rashomon potential to a minimum. Kim Davis was the most ephemeral sort of celebrity, and the only word for any Vatican attempt to assess her true value would necessarily be “slapstick.” It could not have been otherwise.

It becomes more clear every day that those calling for Francis’s resignation are reactionaries, and not conservatives, for the simple reason that they want to undo a revolution that has already taken place. It is also clear that Francis hopes to temporize for as long as possible, making pleasant but rather insubstantial gestures of reconciliation to those who have fallen away from Christ’s Body on Earth because of sexual and marital complications. Significant numbers of  Catholics in Western countries have rejected, in their own lives, the validity of the Augustinian settlement, which allowed sex — yay! — but only in the marriages of men and women. These largely quiet revolutionaries do not believe that all other expressions of sexuality are depraved. They also disagree that women are inherently inferior to men. (It goes without saying that this revolution, as well as the inevitable counter-revolution, is hardly confined to Catholics!)

At the moment, we are watching what I hope are last-ditch efforts, by men and women who either don’t want to lose unearned privileges or don’t want to assume personal responsibility for familiar arrangements, to thwart this revolution. The Pope is doing his part, to thwart the thwarting, by saying nothing. Augustine’s teaching has informed Church dogma for a very long time, and there is no conceivable Rose Roseannadanna to sigh, “Well, never mind.” Nor has the revolution touched recently-converted non-Western congregations, many and possibly most of whom are engaged in open and unseemly competition with unreformed Muslims for adherents. Rome won’t be rebuilt in a day. As I see it, the Pope’s job, any pope’s job, is to play for time.

Being the Pope, Francis cannot say different things to different people. He can, and ought to, punish subordinates who press for premature resolution. I hope that he will gain the institutional strength — he doesn’t have it now — to deter the complicity of American prelates with their Evangelical pals in the pursuit of a reactionary social agenda. But to the faithful at large he must remain genial and non-committal. He can only pray to be followed on St Peter’s throne by a like-minded man.  Some day, that throne may be occupied by a like-minded woman, but not anytime soon. For the time being, what the sexual revolution needs most is the peace and quiet of deep shade. What the Church needs most is for Francis to go on smiling, and with a closed mouth.

***

Friday 7th

To continue with the thread that I left dangling on Tuesday: the Pope’s decision to give Archbishop Viganò’s malicious and opportunistic allegations the Silent Treatment, so far as the press is concerned, may prove beneficial in two ways. First, the press will have to clarify those allegations itself as it investigates the story pursuant to the Pope’s invitation, and the exercise may sharpen its scruples about succumbing to the excitement of a saucy news story and giving gravitas to an irrelevant bombshell. Second, that invitation may reweave the ancient relationship between authority and secrecy.

Taking up the second possibility first, it has become fairly clear during Francis’s incumbency that, while he is no fan of murky, same-old same-old ways of doing things, he is not a puritan reformer, zealously committed to bringing the Church’s irregularities to light, whatever they may. He wants to do the best possible job going forward, but he understands that the Church’s age alone contributes to the proliferation of shady corners and dodgy deals, many of them innocent even if inadvisable. There is little reason to believe that the Vatican mind, which has been reproducing itself from generation to generation for well over a thousand years, has taken note of the fact that the Church’s territorial assets have shrunk quite drastically in relatively recent times. While every secretary and bureaucrat in the Holy City is surely aware that Bologna is now part of the Republic of Italy, and no longer the Holy See’s auxiliary capital in the north, it is probable that not every longstanding habit of thought has been edited in accordance.

Rather than mount a crusade against the procedural irregularities that have threatened to hurl the Vatican into the abysses of insolvency and moral corruption, counting on the good guys in the Church to wipe out the bad guys and risking cosmetic changes that leave the bad guys sitting pretty, Francis seems to be challenging disinterested journalists to do the job for him. The two scandals that I mention come together in the person of George Cardinal Pell, the Australian prelate whom Francis asked to help organize the Church’s finances but who was soon embroiled in pedophile scandals back home.

Pell’s Wikipedia page states that Francis “allowed” Pell to return to Australia to defend himself, but I should say rather that the Pope declined to protect him. The modern function of the press with respect to criminal matters is to force prosecutors to consider bringing charges in pursuit of a definitive judgment; it is a function of the modern world that prosecutors don’t work for the Church. If Francis’s treatment of the Pell case becomes truly exemplary, then the last sinews of the doctrine of “benefit of clergy” will have been severely abraded, and the Church might finally abandon its medieval claim to the right to discipline its members in purely secular matters — such as sexual abuse. That will be a far more effective method of cleaning out the stables than promising to reveal all of the Vatican’s secrets in an orgy of transparency. All Francis has to do is stand out of the way, and he seems to be pretty good at that, even if it hasn’t won him many admirers. He prefers to exert his authority where it is needed, as for example in condemning capital punishment tout court.

***

We can only hope that the Pope’s conduct so far has induced a round of soul-searching among journalists who succumbed to the thrill of reporting Archbishop Viganò’s bold claims without registering that they had been timed with the Pope’s journey of reconciliation of Ireland in mind, and thereby encouraged the public to confuse two utterly unrelated issues. The Archbishop obviously intended to create a connection between the “homosexual network” of American priests (the actual subject of his outburst) with clerical pederasty without making it explicitly himself. He could rely on the “coincidence” of the Pope’s Irish pilgrimage — and the avidity of journalists for stories of outrage and catastrophe.

A Times story over the weekend, written by Laurie Goodstein and Jason Horowitz, asserted in different parts of their report that, as of July, former Cardinal McCarrick “is appealing” the judgment that demoted him to mere archbishop status, and yet that “in June” (the previous month), Pope Francis effectively defrocked him (“decreed that the cardinal could no longer work or minister as a priest in public”). In another story, McCarrick was reported to have “accepted” the latter judgment. What, then, is the status of his appeal? This is nitpicking, of course, but making sense of the Vatican requires an advanced degree in nitpicking.

***

About the anonymous Op-Ed piece in yesterday’s Times, which I found its presence in the paper deeply demoralizing, I will only say that I agree with Masha Gessen — expecially that the piece wasn’t really newsworthy. I mention only because by the end of the day, I’d had a brainwave.

The news, apparently — it’s in Bob Woodward’s book, too, which is why the Times ought to have let Dwight Garner’s review, in the day’s Arts Section, make the point — is that the President’s assistants are manipulating his agenda by nipping documents from his Oval Office desk before he can sign them and make them official. (Even Gessen admits that this may be good for the nation in the short run.) I expect that the President will go through the motions of indignation. But I don’t think he really cares. He regards working at his desk as one of the most boring parts of his job as the star of the reality show that he has hijacked a near-majority of American brains into letting him produce at no personal cost. He prefers running things from his bedroom, where he watches TV news, writes his Tweets, provides remote, phoned-in interviews, and talks to his cronies, men who wouldn’t be caught dead in the West Wing — not, at least, tasked with any responsibilities. His bedroom is where the action is. He has no reason to doubt that, soon enough, this outrageous story will die down, like all the others, to make room for new episodes.

I also agree, this time with Mark Leibovich, that the Donald ran for president because the NFL owners wouldn’t let him into their club. (Maybe for the good reason that he can’t really afford it.)

Bon week-end à tous!

28 and 30 August

Tuesday 28th

This Web log is becoming difficult to maintain. It is hard to think, much less to write, with all the background noise of crumbling. And is this noise a sound effect, an illusion projected by our growing confusion? Or is the world really falling apart?

Somehow, I manage. But I’m having an unusually hard time today, trying to assess the damage done, or at least intended, by Archbishop Viganò’s demand that Pope Francis resign. Such a demand has not, I think, been made since the Middle Ages, when complaints were made by armed forces, not open letters. It is the archbishop’s position that the pope protected the recently defrocked cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, and, behind McCarrick, a network of homosexual clergymen in the United States. The letter (which I haven’t read) doesn’t connect this network with the rash of pedophile abuses that have once again surged to the fore in the news cycle, thanks to a grand jury report in Pennsylvania. That’s an important point, one that I daresay many will miss. I have no doubt the archbishop hopes they will. In the prevailing confusion, many may take the archbishop to be accusing the pope of protecting pedophiles.

In parallel to the secular civil-rights struggle that has been irritating the American body politic since the Sixties, a fight for the spirit of American Catholicism has been raging for just as long. The contenders in both conflicts have had much the same objectives: conservatives who defend the status quo on one side, campaigners for the social justice of ending all kinds of outsider status on the other. Notwithstanding all the political rhetoric, this is nothing less than a battle for the nature of God. Is God righteous, or is he merciful? Does he love his creation, or does it disgust him? Did he endow man with a brain so that man can think for himself, or is the whole purpose of intelligence to praise what God has done? Doctrinally, the conservatives are on firmer ground; it is difficult, I think, to find support for inclusive social justice in the writings of Scripture, which bristle with anathemas. The question is whether the old doctrines still have much support.

The Church purports to be unchanging, but of course it cannot be in a world that changes constantly. Catholic authorities have developed a knack not so much for adapting to new circumstances as for retouching aspects of the past to make them look more like the present. This requires a good deal of cleverness, but in the end it is the sheer limits of common memory that do the work. Nobody today can remember a religious climate in which people could be condemned to death for their views on the Trinity. When confronted with such horrors, contemporary believers blame the long-dead authorities, not the Church itself.

Enlightened opinion from 1750 on regarded the Church as moribund, unlikely to survive the century. And, in a way, enlightened opinion was right. The Church did not disappear in the Age of Revolutions, but it underwent a metamorphosis — or rather, the opposite of a metamorphosis, for the outward Church appeared unchanged. The abstract doctrines that had dominated scholastic debate even after the onset of the Renaissance were shelved; the Church now stood ready to protect traditional ways of life, which of course presupposed membership in the Church, but also placed a new emphasis on the conformity of lay behavior to age-old norms. This has degenerated into a defense of “family life” against claims of sexual autonomy. The real issue is the superiority of celibate males.

Over the centuries, the purely practical reasons for taking a vow of celibacy have dwindled, at least in the West. It is hard not to sound cynical about this, when all I mean to do is sound humane. Why should a healthy heterosexual man renounce sexual pleasure and intimate companionship? I am not talking about monks here, retiring into bastions of piety. I’m talking about secular priests, living among and ministering to the laity. In any case, vocations have fallen, and American diocese are staffing parishes with priests from poorer countries. One must wonder where this trend will end.

For a time, it now appears, an increasingly significant practical reason for joining the priesthood was its accommodation of homosexual life. It is important here to distinguish pedophilia from any variety of adult sexuality: pedophilia is an erotic perversion that finds pleasure in commanding the powerless. To Archbishop Viganò, I suppose, the differences between pedophilia and homosexuality, considered as perversions, are not very interesting. As I say, it is hard to doubt that the timing of his letter is opportunistic. But the recruitment of gay men to the priesthood, on a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis, was an early response to the drop in the number of seminarians. Unlike the Protestant denominations, whose ministers are free to marry, the Church has never been able to afford a rigorously inquisitive approach to its priests’ private lives. Archbishop Viganò and other conservative leaders want to change that. They want it so badly that they are prepared to force the resignation of a pope who seems to have grown up not very uncomfortable, given the press of other, more spiritual concerns, with the tacit tolerance of sexual deviance.

What kind of God, indeed.

***

Thursday 30th

A few minutes ago, I finished reading Ian Parker’s piece about Glenn Greenwald in The New Yorker. It filled me with a sensation that I can only call “the narcissism of small differences,” but that’s not right, because it not a feeling of antagonism toward Greenwald, whom I have always vaguely regarded, from the distance of someone who avoids all forms of media strife, as a troublemaker. It was, rather, an inquisition into why I, surprised to find that I share Greenwald’s conviction that American institutions were in very bad shape long before Donald Trump came along, and also, but not with the same intensity, his belief that anti-Trump “resistance” is little more than a campaign to restore the status quo ante (the only explanation of the resistors’ embrace of the FBI and the CIA), why I don’t share his outrage.

Aside from differences in temperament — I am not a debater, which according to Parker Greenwald very much is; and I find that hostility is always an expense that exceeds its value — I conclude what damps the sparks that might ignite an angry outburst is my pessimism about the prospects of a democracy in a population that is too addicted to excitement to pay attention to what is actually happening. More and more, I regard Trump as a sort of Biblical plague, unloosed by a Jehovah indignant at his chosen people’s violation of the covenant.

This covenant incorporates what have come to be called The Federalist Papers, a series of epistolary essays designed to explain to the literate voters of the United States, from every angle, the nature of the constitutional democracy that the Federalists proposed — and the harm caused by human weakness that it was designed to mitigate. James Madison and his colleagues would have been horrified by the pride with which later generations would praise the Constitution as “a machine that would go of itself.” The Constitution was no machine, but only a guide, and a guide only as valuable as the quality of attention paid to it.

I often blame television for the low standard of public life, but I have come to see that doing so is no different from blaming the current president for long-standing evils. Television is simply the latest in the series of intellectually undemanding solutions that Americans have preferred ever since the Revolution, when impatience with the British government’s hostility to the colonies’ westward expansion fueled popular support for an élitist undertaking. The Founders’ tragedy is that Americans overall were always unworthy of their noble experiment. Once the Founders’ aura wore off — long before two of them, Jefferson and Adams, both contrived to die on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of independence — Americans rolled up their sleeves and greedily exploited the cornucopia of resources that was theirs for the taking. Andrew Carnegie would write a tract called “The Gospel of Wealth,” but he might better have said “of Taking.” Taking was justified by the takers’ knack for making something out of their loot, whether it be railroads, washing machines, or profits to be invested in new kinds of production, but during the 1970s an even better solution was hit upon (heavy irony intended) when the money men figured out how to put wealth to use in the production of more wealth. This, I predict, will be the last apple on the tree, after which we shall all be expelled from the dream of Easy Living that Americans have always hoped for, after which it will be necessary to think much more seriously about work.

Which is not to say that we’ll have to work harder. We’ll just have to pay more attention to what we’re working on — to what we’re doing. We’ll have a lot less time for idle watching.

I agree with Glenn Greenwald that, since the Second World War, the United States has inflicted more harm and death on the world than any other outside force. It is difficult to read the history of recent times without reaching this conclusion. (My phrasing is designed to except domestically-induced famines, in China and elsewhere.) What gives this awfulness its peculiarly American flavor is the fact that most Americans are genuinely unaware of the nation’s record abroad. For too many Americans, the kinds of “abroad” that are not represented at Disney World simply don’t exist.

Some Americans are very attentive — they’re paid to be. Recent books such as We the Corporations and Tailspin illustrate the cleverness with which lawyers and politicians hired by organized money have misled and bamboozled Americans who can’t be bothered to tune into anything but scandal and catastrophe. Paying attention does not usually involve the thrilling detective work of a Sherlock Holmes. It is often quite boring, and it requires a long memory. Engineers — notorious for dullness — pay scrupulous attention to the facts of the physical world. That’s simplicity itself, compared to the complicated sympathies that the citizen of a democracy composed of diverse human beings must exercise.

The pity of it is that Americans have so enthusiastically and even successfully pursued every other kind of virtue.

Bon week-end à tous!

21, 22 and 23 August

Tuesday 21st

Reading the novella, “Reading Turgenev,” the first of two that William Trevor collected under the cover of Two Lives, I was reminded of a short story that I was pretty sure was also Trevor’s. In the short story, too, as I recalled, a girl rode a bicycle out of a small town into the countryside and visited a clever but sick young man in a remote house at the end of a drive. What I suppose it was about this motif that caught my attention was the unconventional inversion of the elements of a familiar trope: usually, it is the young man who rides out in search of the beautiful, but perhaps imprisoned, maiden. In any case, when I finished “Reading Turgenev,” I hauled down the bulky tome that contains all of Trevor’s stories up to 1992, and, after a good deal of searching, I found what I was looking for. It is called “Virgins.”

What the story and the novella have in common is the life-changing quality of the visits. But the young men are very different, and so are the visitors’ circumstances. Actually, there are two girls in “Virgins,” and each of them is altered by a parallel conviction that the charming invalid has chosen her. That they never discuss this between themselves is perhaps the first indication that they will soon outgrown their virginity; when the story begins, decades have passed, and the girls are now wives and mothers, tourists in Italy. They have not kept in touch. It will turn out that, during their second meeting with the dying boy, he asked both of them, quite separately, to write to him. Two much-treasured romantic correspondences ensued. Then the boy died. Because one of the girls is much more outspoken than the other, only the quieter girl fully understands what has happened; she knows about the boy’s humiliation of her friend because he wrote to her about it. But as she hasn’t acknowledged her own letters to and from the boy, she can’t express her sympathy. As it is, the other girl’s suspicions sour their friendship.

Laura, the more circumspect girl, knows why the boy humiliated Margaretta, because she grasps that the boy was playing with them. But that knowledge is her humiliation, and she keeps it to herself. The boy was dying; he needed amusement, and he enlisted the correspondence of two girls who would be away at school, writing to each of them exactly what she wanted to hear, and receiving no doubt flattering responses. Actual visits were unnecessary to this game, and actively discouraged. Margaretta was humiliated, in fact, because she ventured to pay an unsolicited, one might even say forbidden, visit to the house at the end of the drive.

It is sad and even a bit sordid, this story. Two girls are taken advantage of by an unscrupulous young man, and eventually horrified by the knowledge, in one case, and the suspicion, in the other, that they have shared both him and his mistreatment. “Reading Turgenev” is utterly different. Trevor’s virtuosity, usually implicit, becomes palpable when the story and the novella are considered together. He has put one rather striking motif (girls riding bicycles to visit dying young men) to two highly contrasting uses.

Mary Louise, the girl in “Reading Turgenev” is also a virgin, but disastrously. She has married a prosperous shopkeeper in order to escape the family farm. The marriage has not been (and never will be) consummated; the man, like his wife a virgin at the altar, too late discovers that she does not arouse him because she is not “his type.” The new bride is persecuted by her sisters-in-law, but she learns to ignore them. Then one Sunday afternoon, aimlessly cycling home from a visit to her parents’, she passes a familiar drive, at the end of which lives her aunt. The aunt’s husband was a feckless gambler who left her with a crumbling house and an invalid child. Years ago, when the boy went to school, Mary Louise had a crush on him, but she forgot about him when he stopped coming to classes (transferring her affections to James Stewart, whom the reader might not at first recognize as the movie star). Now, upon visiting him, she learns that he has always loved her, that he came to her wedding but stayed away from her wedding party because it would have been too painful. He takes her to an abandoned graveyard, adjacent to the burned-out hulk of a church, that nobody else knows about. There they have many Sunday-afternoon meetings, chaste until the very last one, when Robert kisses her. That night, he dies in his sleep. But Mary Louise knows what love is now, and it sets her free.

The freedom is purely internal. At home, over the shop, her mischievous disregard for the wickedly obsessed sisters-in-law eventually presents them with the opportunity they’ve been looking for. Mary Louise is interned in a home, where she spends thirty-one years, reading Robert’s beloved Russian novels, over and over, and eventually, one might say, she moves into them. It is not really madness; Mary Louise knows where she is. But she pays it no mind. She is disappointed when her husband comes to visit; “I thought you might be Insarov,” she tells him, referring to the hero of On the Eve.

I wish I could explain why “Reading Turgenev” needs to be about ten times longer than “Virgins,” beyond the obvious point that Mary Louise is a vessel of transcendence, whereas Laura and Margaretta are just pretty girls growing up. As teenagers, they have no reason to experience the desperation that prompts Mary Louise to accept the proposal of a dull draper who will take his first step into alcoholism on their marriage-night. They will have no reason to find out what really matters.

***

The other novella in Two Lives is “My House in Umbria,” which was made into a lovely motion picture starring Maggie Smith, for whose voice, indeed, the novella seems written. The movie is quite faithful to Trevor’s tale, although it amplifies the careless indulgence of Mrs Delahunty’s drinking. Also, there is no Giancarlo Gianni character, no charming, English-speaking detective to share her conclusions about what happened in the train. And the end — well, one knew that William Trevor could never have compassed it.

***

Wednesday 22nd

Oh dear, another “End of Trump?” piece at The New Yorker online. How many have there already been? Haven’t they heard of jinxes?

But what’s on my mind today is misogyny. There are men who really don’t like women, who use them (or don’t) for sex, but have as little else to do with them as possible. Clear misogyny.

But there are also men who regard women as delightful decorations, and who like being intimate with them. Some of these men steer clear of “challenging” women. There are (still) plenty of women who are happy to please a man, especially a well-behaved one. Some of these women are genuinely dim, but some are very clever Sheherazades. Some of the men who like women don’t mind an occasional challenge and are happy to spar with them on a recreational basis, perhaps even to lose an argument now and then. But these men, probably because they equate seriousness with their own masculine habits of mind, can’t be brought to believe that women have a place in public affairs.

Are these men, who like women but who also want to keep them “in their place” misogynists? Is there perhaps a better word?

“Please give an example of masculine habits of mind.”

Here’s VS Naipaul, in a Paris Review interview from a while ago, when the writer was in his late sixties.

You see, a writer tries very hard to see his childhood material as it exists. The nature of that childhood experience is very hard to understand—it has a beginning, a distant background, very dark, and then it has an end when a writer becomes a man. The reason why this early material is so important is that he needs to understand it to make it complete. It is contained, complete. After that there is trouble. You have to depend on your intelligence, on your inner strength. Yes, the later work rises out of this inner strength.

Have you ever heard a woman talk like this? It’s interesting that, throughout the interview, Naipaul never speaks of women. He expresses a number of sentiments that I expect most women would approve — he hates cruelty and appreciates generosity. He is no thug. But his concerns with power and strength and darkness and transformation might make it difficult for a woman to tell him about her day.

Many people who knew Naipaul in the Fifties were shocked to learn that he was married, that he had been married since Oxford. Then, when they did find out, he was not thought to have treated his wife as well as he might have done. His second wife appears (on a quick glance) to have done the Sheherazade thing.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the clear misogynists whom I mentioned at the outset are people who simply don’t regard gender as a determinative characteristic. It is much more significant, one might almost say that it is much more appealing, to be kind, or bright, or imaginative, than it is to be a man or a woman. Gender is an accident; kindness and attentiveness are not.

The question is what to call the men in the middle.

***

Thursday 23rd

Collecting the mail yesterday, I found lovely new magazines in the box: a New Yorker and Harper’s. Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, each contained a first-rate piece about American depravity.

Depravity is both the act and the consequence of surrendering to a meretricious rationalization in order to render odious and immoral conduct permissible. In practice, having surrendered to a rationalization of fairly limited scope, we ever more comfortably accumulate a stack of further exemptions from decency until, step by step, we wind up with things like major-league football, in which white blowhards pay big bucks to see black giants trash one another’s bodies, and “activist investing,” in which rapacious fund managers upset firms and the people employed by them because they can, for the hell of it. No right-minded society would permit either of these depravities, much less sing their praises.

At Harper’s, Kevin Baker sits in the Easy Chair — a sweet name for the magazine’s monthly seat of judgment — and holds forth on the all-but-explicit racism of Donald Trump’s tweets and rants about how football ought to be played. He believes in a frankly gladiatorial fight to the death — by CTE if not quicker means — waged by players who check their humanity in the locker room, which Trumpsters believe ought to be easy to do because these guys aren’t human in the first place. One wonders how often such games, minus the flashy outfits and the snack-riddled stadiums, were staged by plantation owners and overseers in the ante-bellum South. Certainly the spirit is the same: righteous protest is registered as disrespect, as if the flag belonged to whites only and whites were somehow deserving, just by being white, of anyone’s respect.

Baker notes that football used to be “a very different game.” Most players played both offensive and defensive positions. How interesting it is that this began to change in the wake of the Civil Rights struggles of the Sixties.

Playing one-way football also allowed for the development of the sort of freakish physique that is now ubiquitous in the NFL — linemen who weigh 350 pounds or more, with bellies hanging over their belts, but who can run a forty-yard dash in less than five seconds. Players who increasingly injure themselves just by falling down, who look like so much of American livestock, purposely bred to be short-lived, walking meat vessels.

And like those other animals, their shapes are made tenable only by drugs.

Mushrooming salaries have made these degrading opportunities irresistible to boys emerging from poverty. Prostitution is the only word for it.

At The New Yorker, Sheelah Kolhatkar writes about Paul Singer and his hedge fund, Elliott Management, and frames the piece with the story of Jonathan Bush, nephew and cousin to the former presidents. Bush had built a successful medical-records firm, but, something of a good-time Charlie, he was not the conscientious manager, at least as regards cost-cutting, that he might have been. He was also somewhat promiscuously photographed in fun-seeking settings, looking more like a spruce beach bum than a CEO. None of this ought to have been of interest to anyone but his near and dear, since his company was doing well. The right to argue, as did Singer and his lieutenant, Jesse Cohn, that it might be doing better, ought to have been reserved to the firm’s clients, since better performance ought to yield lower prices. But Singer cared nothing for prices. Better performance, in his view, would mean better returns for investors. Although Kolhatkar never makes the point explicitly, her piece highlights the irrelevance of investors in the conduct of a going concern. This is the reason why “capitalism” ought to be confined to the start-up, entrepreneurial phase of any business, and then quietly shed as investors are paid off once and for all.

Kolhatkar’s account of Singer’s battle with Argentina, moreover, illustrates the pernicious embrace of court-supported neoliberalism. Anticipating a restructuring of Argentina’s debt, Singer purchased severely discounted bonds, and then refused to agree to the restructuring. The bad faith of this opportunism is grotesque. In a protracted fight lasting for fourteen years, Singer squeezed out a $2.4 billion, 1270% return on his investment at a time when ordinary Argentinians were squeezed for everyday expenses. Sovereign debt, of course, is not an example of capitalist enterprise at all; international law ought to be adjusted so that holdouts to those restructurings to which a very high percentage of bondholders have agreed are forced to join in or lose everything.

The important thing is to recognize these outrages for what they are. They are not evil. They are not rooted in some dark, incorrigible recess of the human soul. They are, on the contrary, obvious excesses with clear explanations. They are social agreements that it is okay to do things that are wrong — things that everyone knows are wrong and that everyone usually frowns upon. These agreements, which are not compromises any more than they are evil, are the surrenders to momentary convenience or desire that, precisely because they are social, almost inevitably explode into full-blown depravity. It is up to all of us to withhold support, even if we can do no more than call depravity what it is.

Bon week-end à tous!

16 and 17 August

Thursday 16th

Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification.

— James A Garfield

What attracts me to this gem, found in Beth Macy’s stupefyingly discouraging Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Company That Addicted America, is certainly not its prosody, which I would characterize as homefalutin, a peculiarly American patois. I think that it’s the vintage that appeals. I don’t know when Garfield said it, but it wasn’t after 1881, the year of his assassination. Also, it’s a president speaking, expressing what I regard as a central fact about humanity. It concerns not individual humans, with their widely differing characters, but people acting in concert. No matter smart or well-intentioned those people may be, the organizations that they design inevitably fail — unless, as seems to be the case at Oxford University, they periodically renew themselves from within. Come to think of it, the British have a knack for stealth radicalism that may explain the uniqueness of such institutions as Parliament. (A good argument in favor of Brexit would be that membership in the European Community stifles the United Kingdom’s vitally important genius for muddle.)

Americans, who are really much more German than English, do not share this skill; Americans like their reform noisy — revivalist, almost. We also have a passion for writing brand-new laws instead of overhauling old ones. The other night, Kathleen and I were speculating on the benefits that might have accrued from a mid-Seventies re-think of the three major securities laws (which in this house we call the ’33 Act, the ’34 Act, and the ’40 Act), and it occurred to me that such an overhaul would have been a splendid occasion for folding the Glass-Steagall Act into the regulatory framework overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission. I doubt that, had he had to deal with the SEC, Sanford Weill would have had such an easy go of annulling Glass-Steagall — by violating it. (No event more directly precipitated the Crash of 2008, and lots of us predicted disaster when the knot was untied ten years earlier.)

A brilliant and well-seasoned lawyer recently told me that he believes that all human arrangements need to be reconstituted every hundred years. It sounds appalling at first — an invitation for organized highjacking. On reflection, I think it would be better not to wait so long. Let’s say that reform is designed and imposed by one clear-sighted generation. The next generation grows up with it, and the third generation takes it for granted. The fourth generation begins to specialize in workarounds, as circumstances and opportunities never dreamed of by the reformers develop in the normal course of social evolution. The backbone of the original reform may have lost none of its importance, but it may be embedded in stale and outdated provisions. For example, did you know that New York State public health law still requires movie theatres to staff glove-wearing matrons, to supervise children’s matinees? Well, it did in the 1980s, when Kathleen was working on a commission related to the secession of Staten Island. It was laughable then. Laws should never be laughable.

***

Dopesick is about two things: a pair of twisted addictions — to drugs on the one hand and to money on the other — and the hopeless mess that we have made of treatment, rehabilitation, and recovery. The addiction to money is illustrated by the nicely contrasting examples of Purdue Pharma sales rep bonuses, which were legal at the time (and may still be, albeit curtailed) and the story of Ronnie Jones, for six months the Shenandoah Valley’s heroin kingpin. Known in the trade as “DC,” Jones never used the drug. “He was much too scared of heroin to ever use it,” one of his henchmen told Macy.

But from the first moment he sent one of his subordinate dealers out in Woodstock to sell a gram’s worth of heroin he’d paid $65 for in Harlem — and the dealer returned with $800 in cash — DC was hooked on another drug. (153)

It is hard to believe that opioid addiction would have mushroomed as it has done without the boost that it got from money addiction. And let’s not forget the money addiction that drug addicts themselves quickly develop, as they lose their jobs, their homes, their assets, and in general all lawful sources of income.

As for the hopeless mess — I just can’t. I can barely read Macy’s crackerjack reporting. The nub of the problem is an only-in-America polarization between believers in medically-assisted treatment (MAT) and believers in abstinence, among whom figure the proponents of Twelve-Step programs. The message that the destructive effects of alcohol come nowhere near those of opioid drugs is not universally accepted.

Adding to the confusion is the plethora of organizations charged with partial responsibility for treatment, together with the authority of competing jurisdictions. There are programs at the municipal, county, state and federal levels. There are also religious and other charitable operations. Each of them may be above reproach, but taken together they inflict a lot of stupidity and faulty doctrine.

***

Friday 17th

The most extraordinary little book came my way yesterday. Published for the first time in 2017, and now appearing as an NYRB imprint, it was written in 1939 and 1940, the diary of an Italian aristocrat of complicated, Anglophone background. Entitled A Chill in the Air, it documents the slow-motion whirlwind of Italy’s descent into World War II. That is its only topic.

Iris Origo was the daughter of Bayard Cutting, an American millionaire, and Lady Sybil Cuffe, the daughter of an Irish peer. Her father died when she was seven, and her mother brought her up at the Villa Medici in Fiesole, above Florence. Although the girl’s ambition to go to Oxford was thwarted by her mother’s preference for débutante cotillions, Iris was educated by the galaxy of brilliant visitors to her mother’s salon, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Bernard Berenson among them. Craving a simpler, more purposeful life, Iris married the aristocratic scion of Italian industrialists, Antonio Irigo, in 1924. They settled down on a desolate estate in Tuscany with a view to restoring its agricultural fertility. The loss of their son, Gianni, to meningitis put a strain on the marriage, but as the warclouds gathered, Iris recommitted to her marriage and to her estate. It was at this point that she decided,

Perhaps it might be useful to try to clear my mind by setting down, as truthfully and simply as I can, the tiny facet of the world’s events which I myself, in the months ahead, shall encounter at first hand.

The diary runs from March 1939 to July 1940; Origo set it aside after the birth of her daughter, Benedetta — an event that is prefigured in the most unusual way. In an entry from the previous month (15 June 1940), Origo writes,

William Phillips has come up from Rome. After a second air raid last night, he does not recommend it to me as the most restful place for my accouchement.

There has been no earlier mention of a pregnancy. We do know that William Phillips is the American Ambassador and Origo’s godfather. She will be delivered at the American Embassy — and that will be the occasion for abandoning the diary. By then, of course, the ambiguity and confusion that set the tone of the diary’s atmosphere will have evaporated in open hostility, with Churchill’s Britain Hitler’s only opponent. But the rigor with which Origo’s attentiveness to “the world’s events” eclipses all merely personal notations is stunningly professional, and it goes far to recreating, in a way that I have never seen done, except perhaps in Jean Paul Rappeneau’s glamorous film, Bon Voyage, the nightmare of not knowing what’s going happen next in the world at large. (And the film, it must be noted, is riotously personal.) Most narratives of World War II focus on the terror of being hunted down, a horrific experience that disturbed relatively few people. The crisis that Origo covers affected everyone.

She is a privileged observer. This does not mean that her information is better than anybody else’s (although she has a great deal more of it than most Italians), or that she “really knows” what’s going to happen. In fact, she teaches the opposite lesson. Her richly-networked perch allows her to see something that the man in the street is unlikely to discover.

The truth is that, according to the company in which one happens to be, one knows beforehand what the opinion will be on any of the current topics. Among the anti-Fascists, Chamberlain is spoken of with contempt and Bonnet with loathing; Roosevelt is admired. In Fascist circles the odium falls on Churchill and on the Labour Party; Catholics unite to deplore the advances to Russia. Moreover one also knows beforehand where the blind spots will be. The Fascist averts his mind from the refugee problem [in the Tyrol] and the situation in Czecho Slovakia (“All very much exaggerated — one must allow for foreign propaganda.”) The Catholics turn a deaf ear to all accounts of executions in Spain; the anti-Fascist has seldom heard of any trouble in Russia. Only on one point are they all agreed: they don’t want war. (6 August 1939)

This lockstep chaos is magnified, of course, in the press, and in the radio broadcasts that, until the very end, announce nothing not already known. There rumors, of course, and the diary is stuffed with the lively anecdotes in which they’re embedded. (Origo has a good head for dismissing the baseless ones.) In an astonishing promotional gesture that I had never heard of, Mussolini had himself filmed in a cockpit, apparently flying through a storm, reminding viewers that you don’t bother a heroic pilot with unnecessary questions.

Even Mussolini didn’t want the war, but he had no choice — not in the summer of 1940. After the Fall of France, his only alternative was to invite a German invasion that would in all likelihood have repeated the French capitulation. As A Chill in the Air progresses, the contemporary reader’s chill is likely to emanate not so much from the uncertainty of war (which cannot be fully shared, knowing, as we do, what happened) as from the figure of Il Duce. The fact that, to the best of my knowledge, the United States is not currently anywhere near Italy’s pre-war crossroads, is the only source of warmth when I consider the following entry. The speaker, Count Senni, belongs to a “Black Roman” family, more loyal to the Papacy than to the Kingdom, notwithstanding which he has served Mussolini for years.

Count Carlo Senni has just been talking about his years with Mussolini, to whom he is whole-heartedly, but not wholly uncritically, loyal. He emphasizes one trait which strikes everyone who has ever worked with Mussolini: his unbounded, almost undisguised, utterly cynical contempt for his own human instruments. Except for his brother Arnaldo (now dead) and perhaps, to a lesser degree, his daughter, there is no human being in the world whom he loves and trusts. He believes in the ability of his son-in-law [Count Ciano]; he does not trust him. A sentimentalist about “the people” en masse, he is completely cynical about all individuals, and measures them only by the use to which he can put them to … Yet so great is his personal ascendancy that his underlings — knowing that they themselves will be kicked away as soon as they cease to be useful — to retain their personal devotion to him. (31 July)

Perhaps, in the case of Donald Trump, the ascendancy is less personal than symbolic: Trump stands for destruction. That is why, says the discarded Steve Bannon (if not in so many words), he is mobilizing for Republican candidates at the midterms: it will keep that wrecking-ball swinging. The awful truth is that some Americans do want war.

Iris Origo (1902-1988) was an accomplished biographer whose reputation has faded, as reputations do when new titles stop appearing. Until, that is, the writer is for some reason or other rediscovered. A Chill in the Air ought to prompt such a rediscovery. The woman certainly knew how to write.

Bon week-end à tous!

7, 9 and 10 August

Tuesday 7th

Nearly fifty years have passed since Jane Jacobs published The Economy of Cities, and nearly thirty since the appearance of its sequel, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life. Re-reading the latter, and interrupting that re-reading to read the former for the first time, I thought of two things that had developed since 1984. One, of course, was the Internet. In my ignorant way — understanding so little about the basics of economics and technology gives me the freedom to dream — I wondered if some inversion of China’s Internet, in other words an Internet connecting and available to the inhabitants of what Jacobs would call a “city region,” and only to them, might be tweaked to provide the feedback loop that Jacobs locates in sovereign currencies. That’s pretty much where the ignorant dream ends, though, at least for now.

The other thing was chaos theory, again something that I don’t understand very well. It turned out that Jacobs was not as unaware of chaos as I thought at first, as I discovered when I resumed reading Cities and the Wealth of Nations and encountered her discussion of bifurcation, and then the devotion of her final chapter to the idea of “drift.” These are both alternative expressions of chaos. Bifurcation is a form of discontinuity, an unforeseen tangent. Drift, it seems to me, is not the happiest choice of terms, for while it might, as the Japanese thinker cited by Jacobs proposes, suggest inadvertent discoveries, what it suggests more forcibly is the economic stagnation that Jacobs deplores. Drift is pretty much passive. What Jacobs has in mind in her final chapter is a partial passivity, coupled with dynamic engagement: unplanned action. This is, from a political point of view, contained chaos. I wish that Jacobs had written a third book, about how to encourage the fertile experimentation and shift in objectives that lie at the heart of her many tales of unexpected enterprise — such as the invention of the brassiere industry. But this imaginary third book would not have involved much reporting — Jacobs’s forte. It would have been speculative, like the dark books about politics that Jacobs did go on to write.

What I’m left with, then, is the model of an economy that is (a) devoted to the sustainable provision of everyday material needs, (b) protected from fear and violence by civic institutions that may or may not be political in nature, and (c) constructively dissatisfied with the commercial status quo.

The United States fails most glaringly on the first count. Owing, perhaps, to their history, Americans don’t know the meaning of “sustainable,” which may explain the glibness with which the term is retailed. Until a point very much within living memory, it was always possible, in this country, to move on to new opportunities, leaving old messes behind for others to worry about (or not). I needn’t belabor the environmental aspect of this problem. But “sustainable” also encodes an economic principle that is not very developed in our culture, as a corrective to the concept of “profit.” While financiers are perfectly alive to the meaning of profit, the man in the street often has a different idea, one much closer to breaking even. The man in the street might say that a businessman is entitled to a “decent profit,” meaning, however not genuine profit but just the extra revenue sufficient to pay himself for his troubles, or to repay his backers. There is a widespread vernacular misunderstanding that owners and managers (unlike rank-and-file workers) are paid not out of revenues but out of profits. Journalists focused on economic matters ought to be working hard to correct this.

From an economic standpoint — that is, from the point of view of the people participating in an economy, considered together — the ideal business is one that breaks even. Nothing costs more than it ought to cost, allowing for the compensation of managers and backers. This is where the difference between a genuinely capitalist enterprise and a mature business ought to be marked more clearly than it is. I have belabored this matter, in several earlier entries. A capitalist enterprise is essentially a gamble, in which the generation of revenue is uncertain. The revenues of mature business, in contrast, are quite predictable over the medium term, if not the long. Americans appear have developed an impatience with mature businesses, and for the past forty years have been needlessly subjecting them to capitalist gambles. (There is no other way to judge the private equity racket.) This may be nothing more than a side-effect of the constantly trumpeted message that we live in a capitalist economy. But for the purposes of this paragraph it is enough to say that the managers and backers of a genuinely capitalist enterprise are entitled to increased compensation, to make up for the managers’ trial-and-error search for revenue, and for the backers’ losing gambles.

Because we do not clearly understand the meaning of terms such as profit and capitalism, we flounder in a widening swamp of unseemly incomes and sickened businesses. It is a swamp because the United States is beset by a fear of what it calls “socialism,” an imaginary alligator that approaches unseen — unseen because it is not there. This is failure on the second count. Our civic institutions seem increasingly incapable of calming fear and preventing violence. Our depraved popular culture — a non-political civic institution — actually celebrates fear and violence, arguing somewhat disingenuously that doing so is just a way of telling it like it is. In America, socialism is a bogeyman, a Freddie Krueger waiting just around the corner. Politicians have been exploiting this monster since the interwar period; during the Cold War, it meant little less than enslavement by Russians. Socialism is a mirage in the same way that the large business corporation is a mirage. There can be no abstract “state” or “corporate” ownership of anything. It will always be people, individual people, who are running things, either overmastering managers or faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats.

We fail on the third count because American curiosity and inventiveness have been directed away from the nitty-gritty of nuts and bolts, or, in other words, how things work. I attribute this to educational fastidiousness, to the misapprehension that intelligent people do not get their hands dirty. At the same time, there is a lot of romantic nostalgia for dirty hands. The modern equivalent to the old dream of running away with the circus is the ownership of a motorcycle repair shop. Perhaps the introduction of the first mass-produced home robot will straighten this out. In the mean time, I would encourage a lot of would-be journalists to sharpen their inquiring minds on the resistance of the material world, and give opinions and eyeballs a break. And just to be clear, electronic circuits and the instructions that govern them (a/k/a “code”) are utterly material.

***

Thursday 9th

The manuscript of the writing project has been moved from atop the printer to the writing table, but otherwise it has not been touched since last year, when two friends read it. (A third never got back.) In all this time, I have often wondered where to go with it. One of the readers liked it very much, but I’m not sure that she would have paid for a copy. The other reader, more rigorous, noted tonal incongruities and undeveloped propositions. His judgment convinced me that I would have to start over. From time to time, I would have an idea for reshaping the material, but nothing came of these daydreams, not even the slightest sketch.

About two weeks ago, maybe three, I was writing to a third friend about my impasse. It was a bleak paragraph and I deleted it. Then I blurted out the remark that I was trying to convey an idea of what it’s like to be me. Intellectually, I mean. What it’s like to be curious and expectant, obsessive and undisciplined, accountable to no one. Well, I didn’t spell out the latter two sentences. But I realized at once that this was exactly what I had set out to write in July 2016. And what I had stopped aiming for when it proved to be very, very difficult. What I went on to write was a highly selective, rather jumpy autobiography.

I remember how hard it was to make the first section, the original material, intelligible, and how bit by bit the complications were simply erased. At the heart of the piece was an attempt to express the rapture, which had overcome me earlier that July, of reading a passage from the dinner party chapter in To the Lighthouse as though it were one of Keats’s odes. Something about Mrs Ramsay “diving” into the daube, in search of prize morsels for William Bankes, sparked the “festal lyricism” of the great poems that I had been closely reading, in Helen Vendler’s magisterial study. And the joy was mine. It was something that had always been promised, but never quite attained — until now. The part that was hardest to get across was this very postponement: why had it taken so long? And why hadn’t I given up the pursuit?

The whole thing was ecstatic and incoherent, a bog of uninfectious enthusiasm. A year later, after much revision, it remained the weakest section of the manuscript. With every revision, the writing project withdrew its commitment to intellectual atmosphere — what does it mean to say “Yes” to the question, “Have you really read all of those books?” — and invested more in amusing anecdotes, funny things that happened to me on the way to old age. The writing got easier and easier as I forgot what I had set out to do.

But the manuscript remained studded with souvenirs of the original enterprise, and my more serious reader fastened on these. Either they would have to be given more substance, or they would have to go. Hearing this stern advice, I didn’t grasp how far I had drifted from an arduous path. All I could think of was the dreadful facility with which I had edited the various sections into readable shape. It had bothered me very much that this was too easy.

What it’s like to be me. Abominable conceit, or recovery memoir? Either way, what’s different about me? I didn’t — and still don’t — know, but I hoped that the writing would show me. If it failed to produce this revelation, I see now, it might be because I didn’t work hard enough. I remember thinking that the important thing was to get something down on paper, but I succumbed to the temptation to regard this preliminary something as a finished product, a mistake that it became ever easier to make as my revisions kneaded the text into the contours of a slightly exotic magazine article.

I have an idea. I am going to try to explain an unusual but nonetheless characteristic episode in the growth of my mind. In 1972, I was inspired to teach myself Chinese by an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I expect that this is going to be nearly as hard to write about as the learning experience was. With a lot of effort and a bit of luck, I may even learn something new.

***

Friday 10th

For weeks now, the Times has been running environmental disaster stories above the front-page fold. Quite aside from the depressing attempt to capture some of the excitement of television with photographs that seem determined to tell us nothing that we don’t already know, the newspaper is ignoring the constellation of poor commercial judgments that lead to every kind of disaster except volcanoes and earthquakes — and where fracking is concerned, even the earthquakes are manmade.

Meanwhile, the Times’s business pages appear to be clueless about this causality. The spice of thrilling danger is unwelcome there. Wildfires are out of place amid the financial tables. But so are stories about suburban sprawl, lawn-grass monoculture, heavy automobile use, and other bad things that looked good at the time but that now need to be scaled back, arguably eliminated, in order to reduce wildfires. If the Times does not want to take a stand on these issues, can it not find organizations that speak out about them, or that attempt experimental alternatives?

It seems to me that the Times is stuck in the bind common to media that depend on advertising. Printing or airing ads (and collecting a fee) is only the visible part of the deal between advertisers and media. The invisible part is the media’s obligation to frame the reader or the viewer as a consumer, as someone who buys stuff. What advertisers don’t want is an audience of critics and fault-finders. They want people who feel good about themselves and the world — good enough, anyway, not to be demoralized by all the bad news (which, if it must be reported, ought to be presented as happening Somewhere Else.) They want people who look to the media for entertainment.

In a story about new limits on Uber cars in New York City, two reporters make a blandly passing reference to “the city’s failing subway and buses.” Why doesn’t the Times have a weekly special section, mapping out the parties (human beings) responsible for operating the subway, and exposing, if nothing else, how each of them can point to someone else as the problem. Feet must be held in the fire!

Bon week-end à tous!

31 July and 3 Augst

Tuesday 31st

Last week, I wrote a few lines about the anti-democratic thrust of neoliberalism. The neoliberal program endeavors to take certain economic options — principally the popular expropriation of foreigners’ property — off the local menu, using global institutions such as the World Trade Organization to enforce its safeguards. This enforcement, so far at least, makes no recourse to the violence of military solutions. Rather, it imposes economic sanctions that make non-compliance uncomfortable at best. It does nothing to prevent nations from committing political suicide, as Venezuela has done and as Britain is in danger of doing. But suicide is pretty much the only expression of democratic sovereignty that neoliberalism allows.

I am unsympathetic to neoliberal objectives. For one thing, I believe, with Jane Jacobs, that local economies have to learn how to do their own growing. Simply importing capital investments is sterile, because local workers, no matter how well treated, learn little or nothing about doing business, and are therefore helpless when capital moves on to more lucrative venues. I also believe that trade between cities ought to be weighted in favor of short distances. I’m sure that you’ve heard that tale about the Scottish salmon that is sent in freezer containers to Asian processing plants for slicing and then returned to Scotland for sale. I believe that it’s true, but even if it’s an urban legend it’s repugnant, an example of something that shouldn’t happen. Finally, I regard the tendency of liberal economics to encourage the proliferation of rentiers as a weakness requiring counteractive vigilance.

But I was thinking yesterday that the mechanics of neoliberalism might provide the only solution to the problem of environmental degradation. Again, it’s a matter of taking certain economic options off the menu. But instead of xenos expropriation, the principal no-no of climate globalism would be consumer recklessness. Consumers are reckless when they insist on access to goods whose low prices are made possible by the exploitation of natural resources and disregard for the unpleasant side-effects of manufacturing processes. The American belief that ground beef ought to be affordable by almost everyone — not just available, but available at an every day price — is a particularly blatant instance of consumer recklessness. I daresay that the nation’s political system is incapable of confronting it, much less of curbing it. Sadly, American exceptionalism has already demonstrated our disinclination to subscribe to international environmental conventions.

I’m just about to finish reading a biography of Lord Palmerston, by James Chambers. Palmerston crowned his very long career as a statesman, principally in the Foreign Office, by becoming the first Liberal prime minister. Nevertheless, he remained steadfastly opposed to any expansion of the electoral franchise that would include uneducated voters without property. In his view, universal franchise in France merely resulted in the election of a tyrant, Louis Bonaparte. Liberal democrats have long since decided that, the risk of tyrants notwithstanding, every sane adult must be presumed to be smart enough to cast an intelligent vote. I often wonder if anyone today is really smart enough to vote. The implications of every choice are so often either bewildering or invisible. Somebody must decide what to do, but I wish that we were better at asking the right questions.

***

Friday 3rd

Is “category mistake” the term? Not really, but it certainly sounds apt. Regardless of their attitudes toward the President’s policies, pundits and their audiences discuss his Administration in political terms, looking for the political outcomes of institutional rearrangements. But this sort of talk is of no interest to his fans. Perhaps it never has been, to the fans or the foes of any president. But Trump’s fans are no longer pretending to evaluate their man in political terms. They judge him as an entertainer. I think that we all have to admit that he is indeed very entertaining, however gruesome the show is for those who aren’t amused. It’s a waste of time to regard him as a political figure. Trump may be a political zero (or worse), but it is meaningless to point this out, or to expect the observation to usher Trump off the stage.

There are many kinds of entertainment, but it seems to me that Trump owes his success to a mastery of the forms of entertainment that have replaced, in many parts of America, what used to recognized as religion. American religion used to be noted for its rejection of the entertaining qualities of high-church, old-world, mainly Catholic services. Even American Catholics have learned to live without them. But whether or not God is dead, Hell is certainly on the fritz. Now that the threat of hellfire is no longer a prod to virtue, austerity has given way to simplicity. Now that Americans have gotten used to being entertained wherever they go, rituals have been replaced by rallies. And in the age of the smart phone, a rally can be attended by masses of people who don’t leave the house.

Similarly, the Republican Party has succumbed to a hatred of politics. The only thing that gives Republican politicians any pleasure is winning elections. They’ll do anything to win elections, not so that they can exercise legislative power but so that they can prevent its being exercised at all. A dynamic legislature confutes the belief that entertainment is the only thing that matters. Republicans may not be capable of being entertaining themselves, certainly not as a body, but they’re making sure that the spotlight rarely wavers from the White House.

The question is whether national political life can be revived without having to be recreated from the ground up.

Bon week-end à tous!

24, 25, and 26 July

Tuesday 24th

Last night, I finished reading Jane Jacobs’s The Economy of Cities for the first time.

I had paused in the middle of re-reading her Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it finally struck me, what ought to have been obvious much sooner, that Cities is the second half of a two-volume treatise on urban economies. I read it, when it came out in 1984, in all ignorance of this fact; I hadn’t even read The Death and Life of Great American Cities (though I’d heard of that one). I learned so much from Cities, most of all the possibility of a humanist economics, that what I missed from not having read the first book might only have gotten in the way of my burgeoning grasp of something I’d never given much thought to (political economy) — had, that is, I read The Economy of Cities in 1984 as well.

Reading The Economy of Cities now, nearly fifty years after its appearance in 1969, my first reaction was an explosion of rage. Why was I not taught this book in school? It was unbearably mortifying to know that I had been holding forth on all manner of subjects for half a century without being aware of, among other nuggets, Jacobs’s brilliant hypothesis that agriculture originated in cities, not in the countryside! Ignorance of such an elemental insight threatened to invalidate every notion that I’d ever had.

When I simmered down, though, I saw that there were a few things that I would have missed way back then, no matter how forcibly Jacobs tried to express them. The less important of these blockages would have involved the singularity of the Industrial Revolution, which initiated all of the urban activity that Jacobs talks about, aside from those Stone-Age speculations about agriculture. Fifty years ago, it was easy to imagine that the Industrial Revolution was going to go on indefinitely. Even Jacobs, in her final pages, suggests that this might not be the case, but I’m not sure that I’d have taken the hint. The more important issue is one that, although she certainly describes it, she never identifies, and that is chaos.

Chaos is really nothing but unpredictability. When everything is unpredictable, life of any kind cannot be sustained, but a healthy economy requires a kind of organized unpredictability that continually refreshes the world of work. It’s important to state right away that we don’t know how to create or manage such organized unpredictability; at present, we can only appreciate it in retrospect. Unpredictable successes might be imagined as trains that go off the rails, only instead of heaving into disorder, these very special trains create new rails. Jacobs tells many interesting stories involving such felicity, and my  favorite is the one about Ida Rosenthal, the inventor of the brassiere. As a New York dressmaker, Rosenthal was unhappy with the fit of her clothes on her customers, so she designed an undergarment to improve it. But the thing about the invention of the brassiere is not that Rosenthal came up with it but that she decided to devote her working life to it. She stopped making dresses and started Maidenform, manufacturing brassieres first in New Jersey and then in West Virginia.

Another dressmaker might have been prompted, by the same dissatisfaction that motivated Ida Rosenthal, to invent the brassiere, but then that dressmaker might also have simply gone on doing what Rosenthal did at first: she simply gave brassieres to her customers. We might, were we privy to all the ins and outs of the current state of dressmaking in 1920, have been able to foresee something like the brassiere, but we should never have been able to predict that its inventor would decide to change careers, to give up cutting and sewing individual gowns in order to take up the mass production, cut and sewn by “workers,” of a single product.

The only thing that we can be sure of is that unpredictable successes are undertaken almost exclusively by the self-employed — or by those who are in a position to become what Jacobs calls “breakaways.” Another fine instance of creative chaos is provided by the young engineer in Southern California who left Douglas Aircraft after the war to start up a business manufacturing furnaces. The furnace idea turned out to be a bust, so the engineer took up sliding glass doors, a novelty for which there was a market in booming Los Angeles. There is no way that Douglas Aircraft would have sponsored the research and development, and then the manufacture, of sliding glass doors. The customers of Douglas Aircraft were not looking for sliding glass doors. Only stand-alone producers can decide, as Ida Rosenthal did, to change their customers.

For every success story, though, there are at least a few, and possibly dozens, of failures. To say that trial and error do not guarantee eventual success is to indulge in cruel understatement. Trial and error lead nowhere without help from the Mercury of chaos, whom we call luck. Meanwhile, who is to pay for all the effort that, while arguably not absolutely wasted, fails to make a sale?

Now, as we all know, Jane Jacobs hated planners. But The Economy of Cities is itself, at least implicitly, a blueprint. If you want your city to have a robust economy, it says, then here’s what you need. And what you need, although Jacobs quite understandably doesn’t emphasize it, is a lot of money thrown out the window. Who’s going to sign up to be in charge of that department? Who wants to play VC to breakaways that are only going to break down? How do we plan for innovation in a world where, when most trains run off the rails, nothing but disaster ensues?

Fifty years ago, none of these questions would have occurred to me. I’d have imagined instead a world in which, thanks to the discovery of the right scientific secrets, everyone would be Ida Rosenthal.

***

Wednesday 25th

There’s a big piece about Brexit in the current issue of The New Yorker, by Sam Knight. Having assiduously followed the Times‘s account of this slow-motion disaster, which still seems to me to be much worse than anything happening in the United States, and having been tipped from the start by what has turned out to be a spot-on analysis of Theresa May’s political character, published by David Runciman in the LRB a few months after she took office, I was not surprised by anything new in Knight’s resume. But Knight did capture a comment, made by “a senior EU official” in response to the resignations of Boris Johnson and others that followed May’s Chequers ultimatum on 6 July.

“It’s a moment that should have happened two years ago,” the official said, of May’s late attempt to soften Brexit. But the official stressed that the E.U. still would not accept her plan, which aims somewhere in between a free-trade deal and the more integrated ties of the E.E.A. nations. “The point of departure for the U.K. is ‘We are exceptional,’ ” the official said, sighing. “They don’t understand.”

Perhaps it was always going to be a problem for the former seat of empire, the ruler of the planet’s oceans and the overseer of its international compacts to see itself as no more than the equal of neighbors to whom for centuries it condescended. Knight captured another, even pithier comment, this one made by Kristian Jensen, Denmark’s Finance Minister. According to Jensen, there are two types of nations in Europe: small nations, and nations that don’t yet realize that they are small. Great Britain, which during my lifetime has staggered from the imperial metropole to the den mother of a ceremonial association of former colonies whose half-siblings have little use for each other, to the frequently mortified junior partner of a “special relationship” with the United States, often behaves like a reduced gentlewoman who insists on privileges she can no longer afford.

The purpose of Brexit, seen in the best light, is to restore total sovereignty to the UK. Easier said, it turns out, than done! Those who voted for it doubtless assumed that interfering Continental regulations were all contained in a book that could be binned. They had no idea of the “acquis,” the extensive interpenetration of those regulations into hundreds of English statutes, such that nobody can now tell the domestic from the foreign — because, as a matter of law, there is no difference! From the start, it ought to have been obvious that the only way to achieve Brexit’s goals was from within the EU.

The Brexit campaign, as everybody understands now, was a dog’s breakfast of Leave’s grotesque misrepresentations of facts and figures fermented by Remain’s criminal complacency; as with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, there will probably always be many who believe that the winners always intended to lose. As such, the vote ought to be stamped invalid. The referendum itself was engendered by such deep cynicism that there ought to be no talk of a second try. Parliament ought simply to direct the Prime Minister to proceed to Brussels on bended knee to beg that the Article 50 filing be rescinded. Then, and only then, can the twenty-eight members of the European Union take up the issue that bothers all of their populations: Has the EU gone too far? Or, as I put it, are France and Germany too big? What a difference it would make if Berlin and Paris ceded their authority to the constituent states and regions of the Union’s principal founders!

Beyond that, Europe must put a great deal more effort into creating a future in which non-Europeans are happy to remain where they are. The unsavory aftermath of colonialism must be cleared away. In other words, Europe will have to turn its back on global neoliberalism with a firmness that makes American persistence even more embarrassing than it already is. It is time to stop exploiting and “developing” the less fortunate economies of the world, and instead to help them grow flourishing markets of their own — and on their own terms.

***

Thursday 26th

Having finally pushed my way through the final chapter of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists, after letting the book settle at the bottom of the pile for a dangerously extended hiatus, I’m considering whether or not it makes sense to continue my meditations on the word “liberal.” The word signifies too many different things, some of them good, some of them almost vile. Actually vile, as Domenico Losurdo makes clear in the pages of Liberalism that critique the staunch liberal case for slavery.

A word about Globalists: it was one of those books that leave me at sea. I could never tell from the text itself what Slobodian made of the theories that he was summarizing; only in the introductory material does he suggest that his book is an act of atonement for not participating in the Seattle manifestations of 1999. I looked in vain for a description of “ordoliberalism.” The term “cybernetic” was never quite properly grounded: what exactly did it mean to Hayek and his friends? Slobodian makes explicit the more recent neoliberals’ allegiance to property rights and corresponding opposition to democracy (that is, to democratically instigated expropriations), but he never comments on it. Whatever he might think of it, though, I did not find that this particular res simply spoke for itself. And, while it would have taken him on a tangent, how could he resist the hypocrisy of neoliberals such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, who claimed to be passionately committed to democracy in Iraq, when what they really wanted was a régime that would protect the property rights of foreign investors?

I also think that Slobodian might have invested some effort in explaining the imperial origins of neoliberalism. Imperial globalism was a peculiar and manifestly impermanent blend of developed economies and territories of commodity extraction. The goal of developing former colonies into actual competitors with the former centers of empire was never sincere, which is why it has never succeeded.

If neoliberalism is antagonistic to democracy, then, what about just plain liberalism?

The relationship between neoliberals and colonial populations is not quite the same thing as that between liberals and peasant populations, but there are certainly similarities, if ultimately the outcomes were different. (Until recently, that is.) If neoliberalism is a mutation of liberalism caused by imperial and post-imperial conditions, it is also true that liberalism itself was deformed by the Industrial Revolution. The origins of liberalism do not lie in democratic impulses.

The first liberals were grandees who intended to put a stop to royal caprice. After the liberal triumph of 1689 in England, the monarch was no longer free to interfere with private property — which, at the time, meant the private property of great landowners and merchants. (The property of middling people, such as it was, was protected by local customs with which the crown had long since ceased to interfere, a quiescence which has done much to give England its reputation for precocious democracy.) Among the property rights of these grandees was felt to lie the right to an orderly government, and as I have written earlier, it was established, in the decades following the Glorious Revolution, that the king could take the advice of anyone he liked, so long as that person were the chosen leader of Parliament, with a strong preference for the elected leader of the House of Commons. In the Eighteenth Century, the liberal dispensation of British politics, which is still in force, began to flourish.

With the Industrial Revolution, however, the nation was confronted by a new phenomenon. As grandees put their property to work in the development of factories and the like, they drew forth from the countryside a population of peasants who had never owned much of anything, and who therefore had little or nothing for the law to protect. These peasants did not, to say the least, vote; they quite literally counted for nothing. The idea that every human being owns his or her own body, and that, in parallel to the grandee’s expectation of orderly government, anyone might claim of the body politic a minimum of human decencies, in the way of food, clothing, shelter, and access to a better life — that, in short, the truly liberal state must liberate each and every person — citizen! — from any condition suggestive of bondage — took a long time to develop. The oppression of workers in the new factories might be universally deplored as cruel, but it was not for a while regarded as necessarily illiberal.

I think it safe to say, though, that liberal democracy, as it grew through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, not only greatly extended the protection of property rights but augmented the range of property protected. Professional credentials, for example, became “as safe as houses.” Home ownership, perhaps not a very good idea in itself, made a mini-grandee of anyone who could afford it — and it was made very affordable. Unfortunately, the growth of liberal democracy was repeatedly defeated wherever it came into conflict with pre-existing racial bigotries. Eventually, liberal leaders would create a social crisis whose measure still remains to be taken when they committed their governments, in response to Communist equalitarianism, to overruling racist exclusions. That is how “liberal” became a term of abuse.

Meanwhile, empires came and went, leaving the neoliberal commitment to a globalism in which property rights were “encased,” as Slobodian nicely puts it, or protected from local government interference. Foreign investors were to be granted “xenos rights” that might exceed the property rights of natives. Inevitably, this global arrangement altered the commercial fabric of the developed countries, leading among other things to the familiar phenomenon of job exportation. Workers in the United States found themselves no more protected from globalist currents than workers in Borneo. For reasons not hard to seek, “liberal” became a term of quite different abuse, hurled by people who might well consider themselves the political opponents of those who complained of “liberal politicians.”

A mess, but such, I think, is the state of play.

Bon week-end à tous!

17, 18 and 19 July

Tuesday 17th

While the commentariat is fixated on the arguable treason of President Trump’s response to his meeting with Russian President Putin, I’m bemused by other grounds for this most serious of charges.

The other night, realizing that irritations inflicted upon the characters in a long Mavis Gallant story, “The Pegnitz Junction,” were going to make it difficult for me to get to sleep, I confronted the bookcases and noticed a volume that, hving lost the latest round of musical chairs, was lying horizontal atop a tight row of up-and-down spines. Easy to grasp, it proved equally easy to imagine reading. Its title, The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism, might not seem very restful, but I knew that its author, William Pfaff, who died a couple of years ago, never wrote anything that wasn’t measured and considered. I read the book when it came out, in 1993. Regular readers will know that nationalism has been much on my mind lately, and it seemed providential that a brisk study of the subject was all but handed to me.

Indeed, Pfaff’s prose soon restored my mind to comfortable temperatures. But the next afternoon, when I continued reading, the substance of Pfaff’s discussion began to disturb me. I was hearing something beneath the explicit text, a meaning of which Pfaff may or may not have been aware. At the end of his second chapter, “Nations and Nationalism,” he quotes “the most eminent of contemporary students of nationalism, the late Hugh Seton-Watson.”

… a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one. (58)

Ever since last summer’s clash of demonstrators at Charlottesville, the president has displayed, sometimes ostentatiously, a comfort with groups of Americans whom all previous Postwar presidents have taken care to keep at an official distance, whatever their private sympathies. White supremacists, male supremacists, armed supremacists — extensively overlapping groups of Americans, in short, whom the educated classes have been taught to regard as bigots, and who have therefore been denied a forum on the media that the educated classes control. The president, simply by voicing his interest and support, has thrown a spotlight of encouragement on these people, and, much like Christians in the time of Constantine, they have been given an unprecedented opportunity to assess their own numbers. That they are nationalistic Americans hardly needs saying. But I wonder if the groups against whom they define themselves — Mexicans and Moslems notoriously — are not proxies for those other Americans who do not so define themselves, who, indeed, are too secular to define themselves at all.

These erstwhile bigots — isn’t Trump encouraging them to consider themselves to form the nation of Americans, resolved to throw off the oppression of the established authorities of the United States?

***

Wednesday 18th

Reading on in William Pfaff’s The Wrath of Nations, I came to the late chapter on American nationalism, and read it in the light of an idea that I know I didn’t have twenty-five years ago, and that I didn’t expect Pfaff to have, either. It came from David Nasaw’s Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, a book that appeared about five years after Wrath. I didn’t read Going Out until many years later, but I read enough about it when it was published to absorb what might be its thesis, which is that the exclusion of African-Americans (the descendants of slaves) from amusement parks, theatres and other venues of commercial entertainment made it much easier than it might have been for those who were not excluded, particularly “swarthy” or “dark” immigrants from Mediterranean Europe, to attain genuinely American nationality. In other words, by representing the unacceptable other, blacks served a catalytic role in the making of modern America. It was a very simple test. If you were not black, then you were acceptable — at least at the movies.

So simple! If you were not black, then you were not the child of people who had suffered inhuman degradation. Therefore you would not arouse feelings of defensive hostility in the children of those who had inflicted that degradation. Nor would your white neighbor think of you, reflexively, Thank God I’m not him! You might be strange-looking, and you might speak English poorly, or with a heavy accent, but no one would wonder if you were actually, really human. If you weren’t black, you must be white, and all whites were welcome everywhere.

This is an essential element in the formation of an American nation, one that never quite breaks the surface of Pfaff’s account. It would be tedious to recapitulate his chapter here; perhaps I fear that I wouldn’t do it very well. It is always difficult to describe an absence. Pfaff is certainly aware of the inequities of black status, beginning with “the grotesque standing of three fifths of a free human being” prescribed by the Constitution for census purposes. He sees the Civil War as the event that transformed the citizens of various states into citizens of the United States, but he also mentions the “ignominious” survival of states’ rights rhetoric in the defeated South. What he does not mention is the shabby treatment of blacks elsewhere in the country. Elsewhere in the country, new immigrants (who tended to avoid the South) slipped right in to new American lives, simply on the strength of not being black.

In Nasaw’s book, this is an important but incidental point; Nasaw is primarily interested in the amusements themselves. It would hardly be surprising to find that nobody wants to address the institutionalized inferiority of blacks as a condition precedent to the easygoing homogenization of all other Americans. (Does the involuntary sacrifice never end?) We are willing enough to see that what was done to blacks was wrong. But we prefer to believe that any benefits conferred by this wrong to whites ended with the Civil War. That is not true. In the age of mass immigration that directly followed the war, white Americans had a new use for blacks, and blacks were tied to this new task with much of the bondage of slavery.

It was when that new use was put to an end, officially at least, in the “civil rights era” of the Sixties and Seventies that nationalism became a problem for many Americans, a problem to be ameliorated, if not solved, by waving a lot of flags. Many metaphorical feet were broken after having been caught standing up for the heavy, slamming door of the American War in Vietnam; there has been much limping since. Oblivious of the solvent role formerly played by blacks, but increasingly uncomfortable with economic dislocation, many Americans wondered why they could not return to a world in which cheerfully inclusive white men supported stay-at-home wives. It did not take long to develop a picture in which those who had no desire to make such a return marked themselves as un-American. In this picture, blacks are, quite understandably, all but invisible.

It is essential that this picture become visible to everyone in this country, and now.

***

Thursday 19th

At the other site, I referred to “a particularly vacant edition of the Times.” A little reflection suggested that this is not the newspaper’s fault.

The problem isn’t fake news. It’s no news. There is only the reality television show of the Trump régime’s entertainment cycle. Round and round it goes, and it threatens never to stop.

Events usually have consequences, but not for Donald Trump. This has always been the case. When, way back in 1980, he demolished the Bonwit Teller signage that he had agreed to preserve, there was a lot of moaning and groaning, but moans and groans break no bones. They didn’t then and they haven’t since. Trump’s businesses have undergone multiple bankruptcies. Not a problem! Now the president has unleashed an array of mutually-assured destructive tariffs, which something tells me he is not going to be the one to clean up.

We were ready for Trump, I suppose; we had it coming. Mass shootings, mounting evidence of environmental degradation, increased inequality directly attributable to our hopeless enthrallment to neoliberal ideas about capitalism, systematic social injustice inflicted on Americans of color — the repetitiveness of these stories has taken on that of the Super Bowl for quite some time. What else would happen? Could happen? Even an alien landing would have a hard time puncturing the bubble of our settled narrative tropes. Donald Trump is simply the epitome of our pre-existing inconsequence.

It terrifies me to imagine the violence that might be required to put an end to this pointlessness.

Bon week-end à tous!

10, 11 and 12 July

Tuesday 10th

Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism is not a fun read. It’s as well-written as it can be, I suppose; as the history of a line of economic thought, it’s clear even when its subject isn’t. If nothing else, it has pried my attention away from Friedrich Hayek.

Ten years ago, I don’t think I’d ever heard of Hayek. Maybe fifteen. When I looked into him, I couldn’t figure him out, or pin him down. I still can’t. I even read a book about the Mont Pèlerin Society (Angus Birgin’s The Great Persuasion) and remained mystified. It seems to me that Hayek was an earnest but not very clever man. Dim bulbs don’t cast a lot of light.

What with the fuzziness surrounding the use of “liberalism,” it’s no wonder that I found “neoliberalism” indigestible when it emerged into general commentary about twenty years ago. When journalists spoke of the “neoliberal” supporters for intervention in Iraq, I thought that they were referring to tough-minded, pro-democracy policy makers, most of them Jewish and not fond of Arabs. That their motivation was essentially economic never crossed my mind.

Even until the day before yesterday, I thought that “globalists” were businessmen who dreamed of free markets and the world peace that would ensue if everybody bought the same Nikes and ate the same McDonald’s. I sensed that they dreamed of everyone’s taking home the same pay, too, but I couldn’t believe that American statesmen would ever permit American workers to suffer such impoverishment. Even though that is precisely what they seem to have been doing.

Slobodian has cleaned up all of this sloppy thinking. I now grasp that the slipperiness of “neoliberalism” is attributable to its uncertain regard for democracy; it is certainly not pro-. I see that “globalist” is almost a euphemism: who can be against bringing the people of Earth together? But of course that’s not what neoliberalism is about. Neoliberalism is about securing the property rights of international businesses against the “caprices” of local sovereignties. Its idea of democracy is centered on consumers: one dollar, one vote. I can’t believe I never figured this out for myself, but I am certainly shocked by the extent of neoliberal influence within the Western democracies.

“Democracy” is the whitewash on the sepulchre.

A conspiracy conducted out in the open, by the Heritage Society, the American Enterprise Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce, and so on. I thought these were all just sort of conservative, right-wing organizations. In true liberal élite fashion, I didn’t consider their ideas worthy of consideration. And maybe they’re not. But now I know that they’re expressed in an open code.

***

Wednesday 11th

Of course, reading the thoughts of von Mises, Hayek, and Röpke that are quoted in Globalists reminds me how often I have said the same things, pointing out “the problems of democracy.” A hasty reader might well conclude that I’m a neoliberal myself. But I regard the problems of democracy as challenges: democracy is the important thing. It isn’t for the neoliberals. For them, business is the important thing, and neither democracy nor any other form of government ought to be allowed to interfere with it.

Mind you, they say “capitalism,” not “business.” You don’t have to wonder why. “Business” sounds like the shop around the corner, while “capitalism” brings the Vittorio Emmanuele monument to mind. But capitalism has little to do with most commercial activity.

Why is this not more widely understood? Let me ask another question: why is the history of economy, or the history of economic thought, not on the syllabus? The short answer is this: we’re still too new at these things.

The social sciences, so-called, as we know them were all launched in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. They were all hived off from what prior to 1800 was called “philosophy.” In each new field, methods were devised for replacing Aristotelian rational description with dynamic critical analysis. In chemistry, for example, “fixed air” gave way to “carbon dioxide.” The first term indicated an inadequacy for respiration. The second explained it.

Like the railroad terminals in Paris and London, the new disciplines built their various redoubts: history, social studies, psychology, political theory, economics, and of course all the “hard” sciences. The student of one would never, following his proper course of studies, arrive at another. It took more than a century for interdisciplinary studies to emerge, the history of science being among the first. In fact, the history of ideas — intellectual history — is still somewhat rudimentary. I would attribute this lag to Plato’s grip on many educated minds. There is no room for history in Plato; Plato hates change. If an idea is good today, it will be good a millennium hence. And there are no new ideas. The idea of a history of ideas makes no sense in the Platonic worldview.

That’s, I think, why there is not much in the way of a history of economics. The field of history history, the kernel of which was the rise and fall of nations, did, on its own, eventually generate an interest in the history of political theory, and the upheavals and catastrophes of the early twentieth-century brought changes in political thinking out into the open. What’s still needed is a history of political economy. It’s precisely owing to the lack of such a history that terms such as “liberal” and “capitalism” are used with such incoherence.

***

Thursday 12th

Over the weekend, I read something about “Europe” that stuck with me. When I went looking for it, I was pretty sure that it was in the Times — and it was, but in Saturday’s paper, not Sunday’s. Max Fisher’s “Borders, Nationalism and the Fight for a Unified Europe” underlines the EU’s most embarrassing weakness. From the start, in 1949, European leaders envisioned a post-nationalist future, but, as Fisher writes,

instead of overcoming that barrier, European leaders pretended it didn’t exist. More damning, they entirely avoided mentioning what Europeans would need to give up: a degree of their deeply felt national identities and hard-won national sovereignty.

In short, pro-European leaders did what paternalistic meritocrats always do: they misled the public with a combination of silence and distraction. They ignored the problem of nationalism, and they promoted economic improvements and the convenience of border-free holiday trips. The recent refugee crisis, coming hard on the heels of a much-resented austerity program, together with the crazy upset of Brexit, have finally outed the supra-national mission of the European Union, and everyone is blushing, not at the emperor’s old clothes, but at having managed to ignore them for nearly seventy years.

Fisher’s phrase, “hard-won national sovereignty,” however, sticks in my craw. It’s not that Fisher is mistaken to assert it, but rather that the idea is so rankly bogus. European nationalism, quite famously, dates from the 1790s, when the French took to singing about their “nation,” which in fact did not exist: most of the people then living in today’s France could not speak standard French — could not, that is, be understood by “Frenchmen” living more than at the distance of few dozen kilometers away. The history of the idea of a French “nation” is not exactly obscure, but it is very ironic, given the outcome: according to proto-racist theories popular among French aristocrats at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, France’s nobility was German in origin, long ago imported to maintain order among the unruly, semi-barbaric natives, a mongrel bunch. A hundred years later, populist revolutionaries projected the outline of national (racial) unity on this rabble, now known as “the people.” No longer defined by subjection to the deposed king, they were forged into solidarity by their negative identity: they were not blue-bloods.

Then, thanks to Napoleon, the infection was carried throughout Europe. Before the Corsican was even carted off to St Helena, seeds of language-based nationalism were sprouting everywhere. Your speech expressed your race.

It was a terrible idea, but a better one for organizing Europe in the wake of the fall of the French monarchy (which would be echoed almost everywhere in Europe throughout the next one hundred fifty years) does not appear to have been on offer. Because, in Central Europe especially, millions of people were governed by authorities who did not speak their language, nationalism became the antidote to what was now denounced as foreign oppression.

This is not to suggest that, prior to 1789, all men were brothers. At a popular level, almost everybody hated the French, because the French sat right in the middle of Europe and were immensely rich (if also immensely wasteful). Having been defeated in their foolish attempt to conquer most of France, hundreds of years earlier, the English particularly loathed the French. But they also hated the Spanish, their newer rivals in the quest for empire. The French despised the Austrians — marrying an Austrian princess to a future king of France was perhaps the worst mistake in the entire history of French diplomacy. Und so weiter. The prehistoric hostility to folks living on the other side of the hill persisted everywhere. But these tensions were more like the feelings that run among today’s European football fans than the insane hubris that nationalism would spark. Before nationalism, everyone acknowledged the obligation to play by the same rules. After nationalism, the Nazis believed that they played by different rules, not because they were better at the game but because they were too good for it.

We would all be much better off without nationalism, patriotism, and all such swollen sentiments that find no natural expression in ordinary human life. We are all local creatures, with local allegiances, unless we are not, in which case our allegiances are not of a higher, more generalized order but simply vacant.

The real problem in Europe, however, isn’t the centrifugal force of national sovereignty. It’s the condescension of of disingenuous meritocrats. If their experiment in European union fails, it will have been largely their own doing.

Why didn’t they slap down Boris Johnson when they had the chance?

Bon week-end à tous!

26, 27 and 28 June

Tuesday 26th

How many times have I quoted a passage from one of David Brooks’s columns only to say, “Yes, but…”? It doesn’t bear counting. My reservations, my hesitations, my qualifications are usually rooted in the things that Brooks doesn’t spell out. On the face of it, I have no quarrel with this, from today’s Op-Ed piece, “Republican or Conservative, You Have to Choose.”

As Scruton put it in his bracing primer, “Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition,” “The question of which comes first, liberty or order, was to divide liberals from conservatives for the next 200 years.”

The practical upshot is that conservatives have always placed tremendous emphasis on the sacred space where individuals are formed. This space is populated by institutions like the family, religion, the local community, the local culture, the arts, the schools, literature and the manners that govern everyday life.

Agreed, but what if those institutions are mildewed, as I believe was the case when I was growing up? What if community and culture have been denatured by discrepancies too great to ignore? What if other institutions, such as the free market economy, are inimical to home and school? What if everything that a conservative treasures is actually ersatz?

When I look back on my home town, Bronxville, New York, and consider it as “the sacred space where individuals are formed,” I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up. Even today, Bronxville is largely white and Christian; when I was a child, there were absolutely no exceptions. The Jewish merchants who owned and ran the shops had to live somewhere else. For all intents and purposes, local culture was a matter of athletics, and manners were insincerely perfunctory. In school, we learned about the American Revolution and the Civil War. The American Revolution that we were taught was not the real revolution (the one that happened in 1789, when the “Founding Fathers” overthrew the ramshackle government concocted when independence from Britain was achieved earlier in that decade), and the Civil War was a civil war only along the border separating Dixie from the Union. Never was it even suggested that both misnamed conflicts were wars of secession. (In the South, at least they get the second one right.) But what difference did it make, if the only point of school was to produce successful executives and their supportive wives? At home, I was supposed to pretend that I was my adoptive parents’ child, or in other words that the weird gulf of alienated misunderstanding that separated us was my doing, and not symptomatic of the lack of shared DNA. It would take years to unlearn all the nonsense that the sacred institutions of Bronxville tried to stuff into my head. I am a born conservative, but I insist on having something worthwhile to conserve!

What seems to me to be the insoluble problem of American conservatism is the corruption of the sacred space by African enslavement. Whites naturally minimize the impact of this wickedness, while blacks are just as determined to deny the effects of persistent degradation. Every day, it becomes harder for me to believe that the Refounding that America needs can be achieved without the preliminaries of a bloody and this time genuine civil war, or perhaps an even worse collapse into paranoiac chaos, with everyone fighting everyone. It becomes difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Donald Trump’s principal contribution to public affairs has been a terrifying clarity.

Finally, I agree that order precedes liberty. But I also believe that this is the fundamental liberal premise, even if it has never been advertised as such. The English liberals of the Seventeenth Century, no matter what John Locke said, sought to replace the constant risk of feudal anarchy, which fluctuated with the character of hereditary monarchs, with a suite of regular processes, or political order, that would encourage cooperative liberty. If they accentuated property rights, that was because they believed that good fences make good neighbors. With trumpeting irony, the liberal régime became, in the course of a century, the sacred space that conservatives sought to defend, from the nightmare of the Jacobin movement.

The phrase “social justice” fills me with Terror. In the end, I’ll sign anything that David Brooks wants me to. But I wish that he were more demanding.

***

Wednesday 27th

Here’s the thing about shaming: it requires consensus. Everyone in the community, or nearly everyone, must agree that shameful behavior has been committed, and that the person who behaved shamefully ought to be isolated by the community’s expressed disapproval.

If the community is divided on the matter, then shaming is tantamount to picking a fight. The shamed person will not be isolated, but on the contrary will probably attract overt support from those who believe that nothing shameful occurred. Considerations of right and wrong give way to partisanship, or, in today’s parlance, tribalism. Shaming without consensus risks the very disturbance that consensus shaming, by isolating and ignoring the offender, makes a point of avoiding. It is also an ugly and intrusive form of protest. It is one thing to picket an office, and quite another to upset someone’s dinner.

I haven’t seen anyone make a connection to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, as a source of provocation for the diners at the Mexican restaurant and the staff at the farm-to-table place. If nothing else, Masterpiece is a further instance of the complicated interactions of righteousness, fairness, and the law. You could say that, if it’s all right for the owners of the Masterpiece Cakeshop to turn down the order for a gay wedding cake, then it’s all right for the management of the Red Hen to ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party to leave the restaurant. But that’s to argue that two wrongs make a right. It also prolongs a train of ill-conceived litigation. I would have argued against bringing the wedding-cake suit in the first place. How else to justify it except as an attempt to shame? While it might be rational to expect a public business to serve its customers without regard to personal opinions — unless, of course, objection is supported by a genuine consensus, as, for example, the general opinion that a wedding cake in the shape of a penis would be in deplorable taste, tantamount to an insult to the ceremony; but of course there could be no talk of such a consensus on the issue of same-sex marriage — it is not reasonable to take a baker to court for refusing to bake a cake. It simply isn’t. If you think that it is, then your righteousness is out of control.

Nor is it reasonable to convert a public facility, without warning, into a private club, where only the like-minded are welcome.

Made somewhat uneasy by the suspicion that I’m having my cake and eating it here, I’ll admit that I’m very sorry that the full force of social-media activism was not available in the fight against Richard Nixon, the true begetter of our presidential calamities.

***

Thursday 28th

John Lanchester, until ten years ago an interesting, even promising novelist, has been a crack, indispensable reporter on political economy ever since he realized that the notes that he was gathering for a novel on the Crash of 2008 and subsequent Great Recession would probably be more gripping if presented as fact. In the new issue of the London Review of Books, he takes stock of the prediction, made by himself and many others, that “the aftermath of the crash would dominate our economic and political lives for at least ten years.” It looks like understatement now. What he might have said is that it would take ten years for the impact of the crash to become visible.

Because I’m in the middle of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, I saw, through every paragraph of Lanchester’s lengthy account of that aftermath, a very simple explanation for such wildly unforseeable phenomena as Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, and Brexit. While finance ministers everywhere continue on the neoliberal course — autopilot, really — voters throughout the developed world have become conscious, if not of the essence of neoliberalism itself, then at least that most of them are likely to suffer collateral damage from its successes. Not without a good deal of confusion, they are trying to throw monkeywrenches into its operations.

Slobodian’s book is a readable, even gripping history of the branch of neoliberalism known as the Geneva School, from its beginnings in the years before World War I, and mostly in the brain of Ludwig von Mises, to the Seattle riots. Unfortunately, it is also depressing. For the first time I think I understand what Friedrich Hayek and his colleagues in the Mont Pèlerin Society had in mind. And I see that what they had in mind has been brought into being: a global consumerist economy that seeks to prevent popular interference with international trade, no matter how much discomfort this imposes on national populations. Neoliberalism envisions a world in which standards of living for workers are equalized, and, as Lanchester points out, we are much closer to that “impossible dream” than we were ten years ago. The percentage of human beings living in what the UN terms “absolute poverty” has dropped from nineteen to nine since the crash, while incomes in the developed world have dropped while also becoming precarious. “Austerity” is the euphemism for this equalizing process. If nothing else, it’s dementedly single-minded. The inevitable result will be that the only shoppers at Wal-Mart will be the people who work there. What kind of business model is that?

Neoliberalism drapes itself as a defender of capitalism, but it is nothing of the kind. Capitalists absorb gains and losses as they come. Neoliberals keep the profits and offload the losses to the public. Noble as the goal of global economic equalization might be, neoliberalism imposes the very heavy tax of the so-called one-percent, the very rich getting richer, as wealth concentrates in the ever-fewer hands that control the insulated global economy. I expect that I’ll have more to say about Globalists when I’m done with it, although that may take a while, because the story that Slobodian has to tell is sickening. Neoliberal contempt for the working classes — which more and more includes everyone who is not living off investments — is so intense that it is unconscious.

Bad as political neoliberalism is, the reaction against it, which seems to be socialism, is worse. Socialism replaces heads for business with faces for beauty contests. It shorts the circuits of political economy, the challenge of which is to keep the two strands, politics and economy, intertwined but distinct. Liberal political economy, democratic by nature, seeks to erect a framework in which everyone is free to go about his business without being oppressed by the state or anyone else. Socialist democracy is a contradiction in terms, and has been ever since Marx wrote about it, postulating a framework that, in theory, dissolves into thin air, while in practice it calcifies everything it touches. We have had a century and a half’s experience to teach us the inexorability of socialism’s failure. Ironically, only twenty years have passed since that failure was universally recognized and celebrated. But that’s time enough for a generation to grow up in ignorance.

We are still so close, on the larger scale of human history, to the Industrial Revolution that we forget that a truly successful ongoing commercial enterprise simply breaks even. It does not incur losses, of course, but neither are its prices excessive. We are still so close to the age of new businesses that we unthinkingly regard managerial remuneration as drawn from profits, not from revenues. We associate not-for-profit enterprises with charity and volunteerism. We persist in the binary simple-mindedness of seeing capitalism and socialism as the only imaginable alternatives, even though capitalism, as I say, is nothing more than the necessarily risky phase of innovation. Very little of a liberal political economy requires capitalist investment.

It’s time for me to reread Jane Jacobs’s Cities and the Wealth of Nations. It persuaded me thirty years ago that global economy is a chimera, and that only a regional economy, centered on a capital city and heavily reliant on import substitution, is sustainable.

The whole idea of “the nation” is an unfortunate pipe dream of the French Revolution; “kingdoms” are built on the idea of territorial expansion (and defense). Neither nations nor kingdoms are truly capable of political economy. Socialism aspires to a global, unpolitical economy that cannot be squared with what we know about human nature — which it madly proposes to alter. Only in a well-run city-state are we free to disagree, to put our various skills to the test, and to enjoy our privacy; only there can prosperity flourish without great wealth.

Bon week-end à tous!

19 and 20 June

Tuesday 19th

I have something new, I think, to say against television. I don’t think that I’ve said it before.

Television is a dream.

Last night, as I was finishing up Thinking Without a Banister, a collection of odds and ends by Hannah Arendt, including interviews and panel discussions, I came across this, from an opening address to her students at the New School.

Plato, certainly foremost among all those whose texts have been taught and learned throughout the centuries, once said: “Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks he knows them perfectly, and then he awakens and finds that he knows nothing.” (513-4)

So it is, I saw at once, with watching television. Television is crafted to convey an illusion of knowledge and understanding. This illusion evaporates when put to the test, when the dreamer “awakens” and tries to contribute the new knowledge and understanding to a discussion with other people. Confusion ensues. Dreamers remember something of what they saw, but nothing about what it meant. Only vague and contradictory feelings persist.

Many viewers of television, of course, never awaken in this sense at all. They go on thinking that they know and understand everything.

In its infancy, television was regarded as a medium that would connect people to the world. Proto-MOOCs provided some of the earliest programming; Sunrise Semester debuted in 1957. By then, however, it was understood that the general audience was not interested in genuine edification. Learning is difficult, by turns tedious and scary. (Just ask any first-year law student.) People have enough real life as it is. What they want from television is entertainment and uplift.

I’ve got nothing to say against that, except that anyone with an education ought to find entertainment and uplift in superior formats. (It’s difficult to think of any that are inferior.) And to argue that presenting news as a kind of uplifting entertainment transforms it instantly into fantasy — a dream that never was and can never be. So it is with the monstrous (and partially scripted) reality shows, of which Donald Trump was a leading exponent.

For many, television is a dream of luxury and gratification in comparison to which their actual circumstances are matter for bitter resentment.

It is frightening to consider how much time and emotional investment the citizens of what is supposed to be the world’s most powerful nation spend on dreaming.

***

The other day, I concluded an entry at the other blog by quipping, “Men may make things happen, but it’s women who keep things going.” I thought that this was very clever at the time, but as soon as I repeated it to Kathleen, who did laugh, I saw how fatuous it was, because everyone has always known that it is true. What is new, what I neglected to say, is that women’s ability, or determination, to keep things going is no longer to be attributed to some mysterious female essence, inborn or hermetically inculcated, that a real man could never comprehend, much less imitate. If feminists have accomplished nothing else, they have exposed traditional women’s work as a grim regime of unattainably smooth routine pursued behind a mask of false placidity. They have traded in the model of keeping things going that men had in mind for something more humane and sustainable. And there are men who do know how to keep things going. Engineers come to mind. Now if we could only get teenaged boys to pick up their rooms.

(This was never an issue for me. By the time my mother got through with me, and I was living on my own, I found the sight of an unmade bed deeply unsettling.)

If only, that is, we didn’t have to wait for men to find out that there is nothing inherently special about being male. What’s special about being male is living in a culture that believes it to be the case. In our culture, this belief is somewhat vestigial. The principal traditional manly virtues, courage and stoicism, are no longer so blankly admired. Courage turns out to be surprising. It is not something that you have, but something that you express (or don’t) in an uncontrollable, often spontaneous situation. Sometimes, it’s hard to distinguish heroism from recklessness, the reach for glory from vanity. As for stoicism, it’s a cop-out, a learned inability to feel. There is something nihilistic about playing tough. If life is a struggle, then it ought to be for the sake of improvement, not for acquiescence.

Still, courage and stoicism — and let’s throw in honor while we’re at it — are often what keeps a man, especially a young man, from behaving like a rank pig, from collapsing into a black hole of selfishness. From expecting life on earth to follow the script of a pornographic film. Simple decency would do the job just as well, but one of the hiccups of receding machismo is the idea that decency is for losers.

The very concept of losers betrays the tremendous anxiety of men who, mistaking masculinity for personhood, sense that their manliness is “under siege.” (If so, by whom? By women? Ha! By other men, that’s by whom.) Losers are traitors who let down the side. Have a look at the Ngram: it’s interesting that the surge in usage coincides with the advance of feminist policies. I don’t think that men who use the word “loser” are afraid of becoming women. I think that they’re afraid of not being, ipso facto, special. It’s painful to lose privileges, especially unearned ones.

***

Wednesday 20th

Perhaps my favorite piece in Thinking Without a Banister, the Hannah Arendt collection that I mentioned yesterday, is entitled “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt.”

Even before I became familiar with the work of Hannah Arendt, I shared her habit of beginning by defining terms, by making distinctions, in her case often surprising ones (between “power” and “violence,” for example). I know that it imparts a potentially tedious atmosphere of the treatise, teasing the reader with a suspicion that the preliminaries are never going to come to an end, but I don’t know where I stand if the words representing ideas are untethered to clear limitations.

The key word in the following discussion is going to be capitalism.

I’ve just read a piece by Ross Douthat in which he discusses the evaporation of feminist opposition to surrogacy.

You can tell a number of stories about why this happened. Defending the legal logic of abortion rights — my body, my choice — pushed feminism in a libertarian direction. The benefits of in vitro fertilization made a lively trade in eggs and embryos seem desirable or at least inevitable. The gay rights movement created strong social pressure in favor of allowing male same-sex couples to have children as close to the old-fashioned way as possible. And biotechnology advanced to a point where most commercial surrogacy became “gestational,” meaning that the surrogate carries someone else’s child rather than her own — which reduces the particularly agonizing aspect of the Whitehead case, where it was her own biological child that she had sold and wanted back.

But perhaps the simplest way to describe what happened with the surrogacy debate is that American feminists gradually went along with the logic of capitalism rather than resisting it. This is a particularly useful description because it’s happened so consistently across the last few decades: Whenever there’s a dispute within feminism about a particular social change or technological possibility, you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing, a more market-oriented view of what it means to defend the rights and happiness of women.

The logic of capitalism? What’s that doing there? Puzzling over the statement, I conclude that Douthat is attributing to the concept of capitalism the notion that everything is for sale, that consumerism will eventually prevail. I certainly share his concern, but I don’t think that it helps his argument at all to invoke capitalism. For one thing, it obliges him to claim that “the most serious form of cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty, that its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision.” Not only is it confusing to hear a conservative commentator derogate capitalism, but it heaps up further attributions that aren’t really proper to capitalism.

I have said it before, but I will say it again. Capitalism is a strategy for creating new enterprises — perhaps it’s the only effective one. In order to get a new business going, investors commit a pool of money (“surplus capital”) to entrepreneurs, who use the money to buy things and pay salaries and go into business and, it is hoped, make a profit. Profits are then repaid to the investors (the “capitalists”), replenishing and perhaps even augmenting their stock of surplus capital, so that they can go and invest in other start-ups. That is all there is to it. Capitalism itself is agnostic about the morality of the enterprise and its business methods. Those are social concerns, to be decided and enforced by behavioral norms or by laws. Many conceivable enterprises ought to be discouraged, or even prohibited, but it is not up to capitalists to decide which ones, because they have no interest in making such distinctions. It is up to society at large, not to capitalists, to decide what is for sale, and what isn’t.

We happen to live in a time when money is the only medium of value that is recognized by everyone. We all agree that a dollar is a dollar. We’re nearly as unanimous on the point that it’s wrong — unacceptable, criminal, punishable — to pay a third party to kill someone. It is wrong to kidnap children for ransom. If I put my mind to it, I might be able to come up with ten or twenty nearly absolute monetized no-nos. A trivial pursuit, in light of the perfect legality of covering acres of agricultural land with shoddy ranch houses and lots of pavement. This isn’t perceived as an instance of “dehumanizing cruelty” today, but I hope that it will be, in a generation or two. But the fact that today’s capitalists can invest in a tract housing scheme does not imply that capitalism is wicked, or even that capitalists are wicked. The dehumanizing cruelties of the early phase of the Industrial Revolution had never been experienced before, but they were quickly recognized as such, and duly curbed. It really cannot be argued that the activities of capitalists have not been substantially humanized — not that there isn’t room for improvement — since 1800.

“Capitalism” and “consumerism” are not synonyms, nor does one term subsume the other. Unlike capitalism, which is neutral in this regard, consumerism actually seeks to put a price on everything, to gratify every conceivable desire. As a vernacular, consumerism has become confused with self-realization, a projection of the soul onto stuff. Advertising has replaced scripture.

Now I will wrinkle the page a bit by positing two forms of capitalism, or rather a sequence of capitalist phases. The first, which is what I have been discussing, is risk capitalism: money invested in new enterprises. When I said that “profits are then repaid to the investors,” I was being idealistic, because that is what ought to happen. When a start-up is successful, and especially when a business stabilizes, the investors ought to sever their connections and move on to other gambles. This is pretty much what venture capitalists do. They sell the new operation to another class of investors: rentiers. I have nothing against those who spend their days clipping coupons and eating bon bons (pardon my dated image!), but I should prefer them to be creditors, not owners.

I raise this distinction between gamblers and rentiers simply to underline my belief that genuine capitalism is exclusively a matter of short-term ventures, and that mature business operations ought to generate and consume their own revenues without the distraction of passive shareholders. In other words: no profits, no surplus capital. Mature businesses, in my view, owe too much to the communities in which they flourish to entertain the concerns of profit-seeking investors. I hope it will be seen that I am by the same token opposed to government interference or ownership. The idea that, between them, rentier capitalism and socialism exhaust the possibilities of business operations is unintelligent.

Bon week-end à tous!

12, 13 and 15 June

Tuesday 12th

Looking for a book, a few weeks ago, I emptied a triple-decked shelf that I have not yet catalogued. I found what I was looking for, but I left the books that I’d pulled out in stacks all over the room, as a way of forcing myself to note what was where in the course of putting them back. That hasn’t happened yet, and the book room is a mess. But I’ve been doing some unexpected reading. That’s what the books are for, I suppose.

The shelf was at the top of the breakfront bookcase, and in theory it was shared by books on music and on film. (For some reason, most of these books are as hefty as, or even heftier than, history books.) Among the titles disturbed by my search for the score of Mahler’s Third Symphony was David Thomson’s The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. It came out at the end of 2004, right when I was beginning to keep a Web log. Is that why I didn’t get very far? (A bookmark was stuck between pages in the first chapter.) Or was it just not what I was expecting — a history of Hollywood. For it isn’t, not really. An historical meditation, perhaps. The Whole Equation assumes a familiarity with the nuts and bolts of movie history that I didn’t have fifteen years ago; even in those days, like most moviegoers, I knew what I liked, which was a lot, but that was about it. I wasn’t much interested in the business of making movies, which seemed to me to be so unlike, so almost at odds with, the movies themselves. That’s part of Thomson’s point, but I wasn’t ready to ponder it.

The title comes from the book that F Scott Fitzgerald hadn’t finished when he died, in 1940, The Last Tycoon. The narrator, a bright young woman roughly modeled on Irene Mayer Selznick, tosses it off as something that maybe only three or four men in Hollywood really understand. David Thomson doesn’t claim to know precisely what the whole equation is, but it seems to connect the many variables of gambling (with a view to winning big) to the psyches of millions of viewers sitting in dark halls, overpowered by colossal images — heads thirty feet high. Both sides of the equation are clouded by dreaming; there is a great deal of slippage between what the parties think they are doing and what they are actually doing. This distributed dreaming has the effect of absolving everyone of responsibility for the movies. No one is responsible for the box-office success or failure of a film. Nobody is responsible for the insidious effects of moviegoing on moral character. No one is responsible for the transformation of an audience into a mob. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

From the start, “no one in the race could see where it was going.” (44) The two leaders in the race were Thomas Edison and William Dickson in America and the Lumière brothers in France. Edison foresaw a profusion of kinetoscopes, each one controlled by a solitary viewer. The Frenchmen foresaw what we call the movies, with a crowd of people sitting the dark while the images fly before them, inexorably projected by an invisible power. Thomson allows that, in the end, Edison may have proved right, but it is unlikely that anything like the material in my large collection of DVDs would have been produced for a market of kinetoscopes. Right there is a point worth mulling over.

I never cared much for movie theatres. I hated crowded ones, always, especially when the crowds were diverse — which they certainly weren’t at the movie theatre on Kraft Avenue in Bronxville, or in the Engineering Auditorium at Notre Dame. In the former, I saw The King and I twice, the first repeat in my long life with the movies; in the latter, I saw a great many of the prestigious and sophisticated European films that buffs were supposed to have seen. In these venues, audiences behaved politely. Settling in Manhattan, I came to prefer sparsely-attended afternoon shows (with the result that Kathleen and I hardly ever went to the movies together), but even then I had to put up with the occasional whiner. I greeted videotapes with immense and immediate enthusiasm, for I had already learned from Million Dollar Movie that there were pictures that I wanted to see again and again. That I could also see them at will and at home seemed too good to be true, but it wasn’t. I am now content to wait for films to be released on DVD, no matter how loud the roar of approval. The last movie that I saw in the theatre was Get Out, last year — a movie that I quite agree is wasted on a solitary viewer.

By the time I began writing about movies here and at my other, earlier sites, it was fairly clear to my mind that movies were a kind of literature — which is to say that I gave no thought to movies without such literary values as structure and implication — just as serious music is another. Like books, movies and symphonies can be collected and organized and experienced in private. I find that this notional arcade that I have imagined does not accommodate the multi-year series that has become so popular. I collected the first two seasons of Mad Men, for example, but I let them ago, having lost interest in watching the show at about the beginning for the fourth season. While there are a few items in my video library that exceed by a considerable margin the conventional two-hour running time of most movies, almost everything that I have tells its story in the standard frame, a dramatic pulse to which my body as well as my mind have become thoroughly acclimated. When I sit down to watch a video, I know that, in a couple of hours, I’ll be doing something else. Thinking about the video that I’ve just seen will certainly be one of them.

The Whole Equation is like one of those advanced courses that are stamped with “prerequisites” — less-advanced courses that the student must complete first. Thomson’s take on Hollywood history is extremely impressionistic; he omits whatever doesn’t forcibly illuminate his search for the elements of the equation. Alfred Hitchcock, for example,was

a world unto himself in so many ways. Indeed, he hardly seems to have noticed the experience of being in America, beyond enjoying the more sophisticated facilities of the Hollywood studios. He was engaged in his own equation of film and suspense, as if it were a private mathematics.

How true this is! I often think of Hitchcock as a one-man studio, a master of every aspect of filmmaking who outdid the studio factories for sheer control over output. The mathematics was not entirely private, however. Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, which Thomson considers to be Hitchcock’s masterpieces, are

reflections on the very art or mathematics that obsesses Hitch. They are about looking, fantasizing, and what happens when the reality and the fantasy clash. Vertigo above all is a morbid analysis of fantasy involvement, and its resolution is not pretty or comforting. These films are something new and more disturbing than even Psycho. For they begin to ask the question: What have movies done to us? (303)

But the paragraph from which I have snipped these passages is the only one, in a book of nearly four hundred pages, in which Hitchcock is more than mentioned. Clearly, the book will be opaque to anyone who hasn’t seen a great many movies. After that, a history such as Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System — not that I can think of any “such as” — would be a helpful preliminary.

What have movies done to us? Thomson is pretty sure that they have increased the divorce rate. Not just because actors notoriously marry and remarry — their actual full-time occupation, my mother always insisted — but because every new movie promises a fresh start, a different course of action. And it seems clear to me that intelligent people learn protect themselves from flightiness by weighting the experience of seeing movies with knowledge about how they’re made, how they used to be made, changes in taste over the decades as well as a grasp of developing technology, so as to prevent the surface lightness from kiting them off to the crash of fantasy into reality. Studying film acts as a vaccine. (It can also render unusually powerful movies that rely heavily on cliché rather pathetic and ridiculous, and ultimately painful in an unintended way — I’m thinking of Titanic.) It can also act as fertilizer. Going to Woody Allen’s movies for the jokes is pretty dim; for every spoken line that’s funny there is at least one purely visual gag, often a reference to the sheer magic of the movies (in the Méliès sense), but you won’t catch it if you don’t know your movies. You can’t be dreaming if you want to feel the dream.

Many years ago, on a snowy afternoon in New York, a young woman who was my nephew’s girlfriend at the time and I left the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we had seen a big Diane Arbus show, and headed east along 82nd Street. I lapsed into a bloviation about the bourgeoisie, which so captivated that I had to be pinched by my companion in the middle of Park Avenue. “Did you see?” she whispered. “That was Woody Allen who just passed us!” Of course I hadn’t seen, but what I did see right away was that we were re-enacting a scene played out in several Allen films, in which an older man purports to instruct a younger woman. Of course, there is usually the hint that the older man harbors other designs, my utter innocence of which meant that we weren’t getting the scene quite right, but all the same, for a brief moment, Park Avenue, complete with snow, filled the interior of a sound stage.

***

Wednesday 13th

The plan was, to take some time off after the New Year, and then to get to work on an overhaul of the writing project. Instead, I relaunched the old Daily Blague, with a new focus (“the incidental housekeeper”). That’s going fairly well — yes, we’ll leave it at that: fairly well. Now, for the writing project.

There were to be three readers. One was an old friend from law school. She liked it, as I expected she would. The two others were former colleagues of Kathleen’s. I never heard back from one of them. The other spent an afternoon with me, going through the MS page by page, rigorously exposing the confusion in the text. I was grateful for his severity, really, but it wasn’t as constructive as I pretended. I wasn’t devastated, but the writing project was. Its shaky foundations gave way under my friend’s criticism. I had always sensed that he regarded me as something of a dilettante and now, without any malice, he effectively wielded the writing project as proof. I thought to myself: Well, it was awfully easy to write.

Of course, I hadn’t known, when I began the writing project, what it was supposed to be about. I complain all the time about that phrase, what the book is about. It’s — vulgar. Is Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, The Friend, “about” her taking a very large dog into her very small apartment, in a building that does not allow dogs, and running the risk of eviction? Of course not. But the dog story is an armature, on which Nunez erects overlapping meditations on men and love and men and art and men and age. Plus, of course, women having to deal with all of the foregoing. The dog story provides occasions for Nunez to come up for air, as it were, with an everyday situation that people who do not teach writing for a living can relate to. But the book is about the former lover, a suicide, whom the narrator addresses throughout The Friend.

I had created an armature for my story, but, like the tale of Apollo in The Friend, it wasn’t inherently interesting. The armature was a series of thematic chapters: schooling, working, growing up in Bronxville, sojourning in Houston, and, finally, settling in Manhattan. For many years, I had thought of writing a book with adoption at the center, as the big deal, but even before I began the writing project, two summers ago, I knew that it wasn’t the big deal. I couldn’t believe for a minute that adoption had wounded or deformed me. Quite aside from its placement in my childhood — at the beginning of the story — it wasn’t any kind of climax. So what was the point of this — this intellectual memoir, I took to calling it; but was it even that? My rigorous critic didn’t think so. I remember his saying at one point, this isn’t thinking, this is blogging. Ouch!

On most days in 2018, I have tended to think that my writing project is a dead thing. But I have never surrendered to this conclusion. If nothing else, the writing project taught me a lot about myself, or at least it raised a lot of questions. Why has it taken me so long to feel that I understand human life, and what does that understanding amount to? I won’t dilate on those issues in this entry, because so many others at this site are devoted to them. I’ll just ask one more question: is there anything specific to the life that I have lived that has predisposed me to reach the particular understanding of the human condition (the human condition of the moment, let me add) that I have settled on? And if the answer to that question is yes: I have become a housekeeper who reads and writes a lot, then so what?

Especially so what when you bear in mind my conviction that intimate personal matters are not revealing.

***

In the immediate aftermath of the writing project’s apparent collapse, I hit on the idea of beginning the rewrite with the portrait of my parents’ marriage. This would be a matter of shifting material that I had already written to the front, and I would set it up as something of a stunt, for it would only be at the end of the portrait that the presence of children would be introduced. I would show, what I had only told, that my parents had a great marriage, or at least a successful partnership, in which children were only so much distracting, unsatisfactory furniture. They would have been better without us — my younger sister and me. They would have been better without us but for the awkwardness of childlessness, very much a black mark in their world. Children were important, nay vital, accessories for an ambitious corporate executive couple. They were necessary handicaps, without which the game of Executive Suite might be too easy to play.

I did say stunt. My parents were not cynical people. But they did not understand human life very well. My father simply wasn’t curious, and my mother not only didn’t see but actively fought against seeing that her view of life was nothing but a heap of sentiment, hardly more substantial than Life According to Hallmark. She was ready and willing to do and to feel all the right things. And I don’t think that she ever felt let down by her ideals. She felt — she often said so — let down by me.

My portrait of the marriage would begin with the wedding album, with a book of photographs taken on Valentine’s Day, 1942. I would treat the album as documentary evidence, from which to extrapolate comments about the newlyweds’ families, expectations, ways of life. (I would make oblique use of the fact that no children appear in any of the pictures.) This was a simple thought at the time, last autumn, when I was still shaking a little from the reckoning and planning to set the project aside for a few months. I didn’t have to write anything down; it was easy to remember.

Gradually, however, as the year has ground on, I have come to see that, no matter how eagerly I would read such a portrait, I have no desire to write it — not again. What I’d much rather do is just describe the photographs. I have always liked looking at them, and in fact this was one of the things about me that let my mother down. It was odd. For her, the album was a keepsake, the covers a sort of box that she did not need to open. That the pictures were there, that the day had been memorialized, that was enough. Actual viewing evoked the awkward contingencies of ageing and death, not to mention the outmoded modes. That, of course, is precisely what I liked about the pictures. My uncle, always so boyish even in old age, really was a boy, barely twenty years old. My favorite aunts were so chic! And the flashbulbs revealed my mother’s mother’s bursting corsets, although I was nearly middle-aged before I figured that out. The setting was the only familiar element: the dining room and the ballroom at Siwanoy Country Club had always been familiar to me. And the loot. The last photograph in the album is of my grandmother’s dining table, loaded with wedding presents. I still have a few of the goodies. I used to have more, but it has been years since I stopped holding on to things just because they fell into my lap.

So the upshot is that my parents’ wedding album is not a souvenir. Although it is beginning to fall apart, it belongs to the present, because that is where I am when I look at it. It doesn’t take me back, even if does remind me of long-gone people having a fine old time more than 75 years ago. They don’t seem so strange — I’m 70 myself. What I see is the world I was born into. Now that I have fought my way out of it — but is fighting the right word? — I can see what I was up against. Not the least of which was how appealing it all looked, at least on a good day.

***

Friday 15th

In today’s Times, David Brooks introduces a term that’s new to me, personalism. It’s pretty much what I mean by humanism: a belief in the importance of according to everyone you encounter a life of complex, autonomous dignity. Whether you can behave accordingly is an endless challenge, but at least you have the right idea.

Personalism is a philosophic tendency built on the infinite uniqueness and depth of each person. Over the years people like Walt Whitman, Martin Luther King, William James, Peter Maurin and Wojtyla (who went on to become Pope John Paul II) have called themselves personalists, but the movement is still something of a philosophic nub. It’s not exactly famous.

As the label for a “philosophic nub,” “personalism” has pros and cons. It makes an important point that “humanism” misses, which is that we are all different. All different, but all, as human beings, worthy of the same absolute regard. It does not carry humanism’s train of contradictory religious/anti-religious baggage. In order to preach personalism, however, a bit of antiquarian etymology might be required. Rooted in persona, it is difficult to pin down. And the vulgar notion of personality threatens to cloud the understanding.

But Brooks is certainly right to say that this is what we need right now. Whether you call yourself a humanist or a personalist, calling someone else a “loser” is wrong.

***

Before going to bed last night, I read a New Yorker piece by D T Max about a new Facebook phenomenon called “SKAM Austin.” Skam is the Norwegian word for “shame,” and it is also the name of a public television show whose creator, Julie Andem, was brought to the US by Simon Powell, of American Idol fame, to collaborate with Facebook — Facebook Watch, to be precise, although I have no idea what that is beyond what Max tells me — in presenting a seemingly real-time high school drama, complete with comments and Instagram accounts. The characters in this drama do what high-school students do: they try to bury the fact that they are in school with clods of adolescent personality formation. (Let’s try to remember that “adolescent” means “becoming adult.” It is unhelpful — although I do this all the time — to use the word to describe behavior that is resolutely hostile to the idea of growing up.) According to Max, the show, which materializes in “dropped” episodes — that’s as in “dropped into the timeline” — is addictive, partly because of multiplying interactive ramifications. (Both characters and actual Facebook users post comments.) “SKAM Austin” sounds to me like a jigsaw puzzle. Once you fit two pieces together, you’re hooked. But working on a jigsaw puzzle is quiet, almost meditative. “SKAM Austin” sounds very, very noisy.

Just as I question the virtues of high school as a place for adolescents to spend time in, so I raise my eyebrows at the proposal that adolescence is interesting, or worthy of any kind of attention, especially from adolescents themselves. Until very recently, adolescent eyes were fixed firmly on the future that had been mapped out by fate; even for the privileged, options were not conspicuous. Ever since Enlightenment thinking was addressed to the circumstances of education, in the late Nineteenth Century, the best minds have been curious to find out what young people will do when given a free hand with the widest range of opportunities — only to find that the boys go in for organized brutality while the girls fiddle with eye-liner. Given choices, young people begin at home; instead of learning about the world, they study personal accessories. Before getting to the question of what you would do if you could do anything, the adolescent wants to decide on what kind of a person to be — and I’m not talking about moral fiber. Perhaps it would be better to say that the young person finds it essential to settle on a way of expressing given characteristics — sexual preference, for example. The problem with high school is that it is a cage of adolescents, an artificial hell. One of the reasons for putting adolescents to work in community service is the increased exposure to fully adult possibilities. This is a good thing about the bad old days that we ought to think about reinstating.

So long as genuinely learning about the world, and not just going through the motions, were regarded as a form of community service, as it certainly ought to be, I should have had a much better time in those awful years, with none but the other genuinely curious students in the classroom.

Bon week-end à tous!

6, 7 and 8 June

Wednesday 6th

More about the meritocracy: in today’s Times, a review of Steven Brill’s Tailspin: The People and Forces &c. According to Jennifer Szilai’s review, Brill charges the meritocracy with having recreated itself as an aristocracy more entrenched than the old-money class that it replaced. “This argument isn’t new,” Szalai points out, going on to mention Chris Hayes 2012 Twilight of the Elites. Both of these authors make use of the image of ladders being pulled up behind the rising new élites, foreclosing opportunity to others. It’s a nasty and depressing picture. I think it’s incomplete at best.

To me, the problem with the meritocracy is that nobody knows anybody. Oh, sure, people know their classmates from Harvard and Princeton, you can be sure of that. But connections within the meritocracy are not the problem, or, rather, they wouldn’t be the problem if there weren’t such a dearth of connections between the meritocracy and the rest of America. That statement needs refining, too. The connections that we need aren’t between a monolithic élite and the American population, but between individual meritocrats and the people whose lives they affect. What’s missing is local connection.

At lunch yesterday, a friend talked about various plans to subdivide the United States into more homogenous, governable regions. Like the meritocracy (toot, toot), this is something that I’ve discussed in the past. But I find that I have moved past such proposals, although I don’t dismiss them. When I look back on the old aristocracy, I see that it was rooted in hometowns. Young men from the better families went off to school and then returned, to take over from their fathers. There was an interdependency of economy, local tradition, even plain old gossip. I don’t mean to idealize some golden past. There was a great deal of atrophy in the old dispensation. But the community’s health was protected by a degree of human accountability that is difficult even to express in today’s globalist rhetoric. The local manufacturer might have the power to sell his firm to a conglomerate, or to shift his operations abroad, but the freedom to do so would be constrained by loyalty to the town, at least so long as he and his family wished to remain in it. And, where conditions were at least moderately harmonious, townsmen took pride in local prosperity.

The meritocracy that replaced this old local aristocracy was not itself local. It operated, and still operates, only at the higher, more abstract organizational levels. Local politics has been left to dubious figures, either developers or their creatures. Or to ambitious lawyers who intend to leave the locale behind. The talented young person who settles down on and to a local scale is either not making the best use of talent or maybe not all that talented. Meritocrats go far.

Mobility, like growth, is generally thought to be an inherently good thing. I agree that everyone ought to be able to make a home in a congenial environment. But I think that making more than two long-distance moves in the course of a career is a sign of the exotic instability that used to characterize the entertainment business (where movement is now too institutionalized to be either exotic or unstable). Rather than divide the United States into constituencies that are easier to manage from the top down, I prefer to encourage communities — and, in rural settings, counties — that manage themselves from the bottom up, with business organizations scaled to match. Maybe it’s time to learn from the food revolution: build economies of local sustainable commerce.

***

Thursday 7th

In the current, fiction issue of The New Yorker, Roz Chast has a three-panel cartoon entitled “Manspreading in Art.” I don’t expect anything to happen right away, but I can hear the canons caving as the triumphs of Western imagination are interrogated for the assumption that, because I am a passionate man, what I have to say is interesting, and not only interesting but true, and you have nothing better to do than to listen to me.

The film entitled 2001: A Space Odyssey is now fifty years old. If that weren’t bewildering enough, I can remember seeing the roadshow Cinerama presentation in Houston during the summer of 1968 as if I just walked out of the theatre. There are a few nerve endings somewhere in my body that have never quite recovered from the two boulders that hurtle toward the audience in the middle of the “Mission to Jupiter” sequence. And I can remember the quasi-religious feeling that 2001 was not “just a movie.” At twenty, I was just young enough to imagine, if not quite to believe, that Kubrick’s fable might be the gateway to a radically new kind of life on Earth. I can remember being very, very impressed by the movie’s fidelity to the silence of what we used to call “outer space.”

But because I was so young, and so forth, I did not appreciate the extent to which 2001 is a silent movie, or the extent to which, when it is not silent, it derogates language by refusing to make use of a single line of interesting text. There was something reassuring, I suppose, about the polite nothings that burbled from the mouth of bureaucrat Heywood Floyd on the Space Station and at the Clavius Base. He sounded just like my father. Nor did I make much of the nearly complete lack of women. That wasn’t abnormal in a space movie, and there was something about Kubrick’s austerity that reminded us, then, that the women who did appear in space movies were usually sluts. All he gives us is a handful of suitably-Stepford stewardesses and the estimable Margaret Tyzack, playing a Russian scientist. Oh, and the filmmaker’s little daughter, Vivian, who plays Floyd’s child on the picture phone. What was extraordinary about 2001 was how gracefully Kubrick pushed utter normality into awesome incomprehensibility. We young fans did not object to that incomprehensibility at all. It was the guarantee of quality.

Not the least of the explanations for why it feels only yesterday that I saw 2001 for the first time is that I have not watched it very often since. Perhaps four times between 1968 and the other night. (I saw it at least three times during its first year.) It is as though the original viewing planted a monolith in my brain that could slumber for half a century, to be awakened by the great anniversary, or at any rate, by Michael Benson’s Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece.

As books about the making of particular films go, Benson’s is good enough. Benson wisely avoids the film’s metaphysical projections and settles firmly on the material terms of its production. His account is somewhat skewed by the availability of surviving crew members, who recreate the atmosphere of a primitive village in which anxious tribesman try to conciliate a capricious god. Or, I should say, a mean god, a very mean god, as stingy with credit as he is with compensation; it’s his very occasional generosity that’s capricious. The bad habits of manspreading are usually critiqued in the context of mixed company, especially by women, but Benson’s book reminds us that full-blown manspreading is something reserved by the Kubricks of this world for the control and belittlement of other men. Kubrick not only routinely makes “impossible” demands of his costume designer and special-effects technicians but goes on to take credit for their work, so that it is he who takes home the film’s one Oscar. And yet, smoulder as they will, the crew worship him. He is the greatest filmmaker of all time, &c &c. Space Odyssey ought to be required reading for students of the psychopathology of project management in male groups.

In short, I couldn’t wait to finish the book.

I did, as I say, watch the DVD in the middle of reading it. I had thought to wait until I’d read it all, but there was so much talk of scenes that didn’t make it into the original film or were later cut before wide release that I needed to refresh my awareness of what actually happens in 2001. The film stands up very well. It does not seem dated at all; it seems period, rather. The difference is that datedness results when a style of moviemaking, including its conventions, has staled or fallen out of use. In this regard, 2001 is not so much pioneering as genre-setting. Its conventions, say, for representing landing pads, remain standard. The “period” of 2001 is a beguilingly split one, between a future that has yet to develop and a past, the filmmaker’s present, in which Pan Am was the world’s premier airline and the bell logo marked all public telephones. (Hilton — crediting with operating the hotel on Space Station 5 — is still with us.) I was especially impressed by the Dawn of Man sequence, which I had found tiresome as a youth. It used to seem very long; now, probably because I am better at watching film, it was brisk and lean. But the “Stargate” business still annoys me; I would later discover that acid trips are just as boring. What really surprised me was how fast the penultimate scene plays out. I was fascinated by the strange floorlit set when the movie was new, because I had never suspected that a decorating style that I admired could be perverted into a hellscape. For me, Dave Bowman’s final scenes were the most astounding.

Needless to say, I wanted to bash Benson’s head in every time he referred to that decorating style as Louis XIV. But, hey, it’s guys.

***

Friday 8th

Anthony Lane has reviewed The President Is Missing for The New Yorker. The review won’t appear in print until next week, but I’ve read it online — well, some of it; I couldn’t care less, really, about this silly collaboration. Wondering exactly how literary partnership works, Lane comments,

Bill Clinton, who can write, has hooked up with James Patterson, who can’t, but whose works have sold more than three hundred and seventy-five million copies, most of them to happy and contented customers for whom good writing would only get in the way.

It’s a great crack. But what is good writing?

Getting about as far away from James Patterson as it is possible to go while remaining intelligible, we find Helen DeWitt, who occasionally lurches into impenetrable mathematical discussions that can be parsed if not understood. Most of what she has to say is comprehensible, but it is loaded with references and elisions that many readers, I fear, will have difficulty catching and filling. Reading Some Trick, DeWitt’s collection of thirteen stories, I was often reminded of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s rarefied manifesto, Ways of Curating. One story, “The Climbers,” a send-up of literary hipsters, seemed to send up Obrist’s idea of what constitutes an interesting aesthetic experience, but by the very fact that it breathed the same very cool air, the story seemed to be making fun of itself. Well, having fun. I was certainly laughing.

At the center of a particular cluster of hipsters is Gil, and at the center of Gil’s attention is Peter Dijkstra, a Dutch writer, currently in Vienna, who has just emerged from five years in a mental hospital. On a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam — honoring another disturbed Nederlander — Gil impetuously purchased all of the Dijkstra books that had not yet been translated into English. These now stand on a shelf in his Tribeca loft, taking up thirteen of the eighteen inches of Gil’s collection of the author’s work. The remaining five inches are taken up by the translations that Gil is actually capable of reading. As interest in Dijkstra heats up, and Ralph, an agent who has made contact with Dijkstra, is proposing to bring Dijkstra to New York, Gil fears exposure as someone not hip enough to read Nederlands. In a meltdown, he retires to a local bar.

Ralph has learned that, although Dijkstra does not have a “book” in the works, he has filled fifty notebooks with texts in English, and written interesting words on a pile of file cards. He has sent a sample notebook and collection of file cards to Ralph, and Ralph has shown them to Gil. At a booth in the bar, Gil devises schemes for keeping Dijkstra in Vienna.

What if the normal rate for a room at this underground hotel [where one of Gil’s satellites met Dijkstra, who is living there] cost $79 a night. BUT, you could get a room with notebooks & file cards on loan from Peter Dijkstra for $299 a night, and the $220 goes to Peter Dijkstra. So he can keep his room indefinitely because it is paid out of lending out his notebooks &c. AND, there are SEPARATE ENTRANCES. So you NEVER SEE Peter Dijkstra. He uses one entrance and you use another, so he can go on working without interruption, and you can sit in your room with the notebooks. This would Be. So. Great.

It would be great if you knew Peter Dijkstra’s favorite restaurant. People go to the restaurant and they can just order a meal. Or, they can order a meal plus notebook and file cards for the cost of an extra meal, which is left on account for Peter Dijkstra. Who can turn up whenever he wants and finds his meal is already paid for!

Gil could totally see himself going to a restaurant and ordering a meal and a notebook and paying extra for the notebook. It would be better than going to a restaurant and having a meal with Peter Dijkstra and paying for the meal because there was no reason to think words from the mouth would have the intensity of the ink on the grid. (101)

As she demonstrated in her second novel, Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt has a fertile imagination for schemes of this kind. Schemes that appear to serve grand purposes while appeasing craven desires. Schemes that seem, for the moment, quite plausible, as clear as soap bubbles.

Most of Some Trick, though, isn’t funny. Oddly, the two really sad stories are the ones written in laddish patois, both of them involving disaffected rock musicians. Beneath their antic stories, “Stolen Luck” and “In Which Nick Buys a Harley for 16k Having Once Been Young” drag a bottomless melancholy. The first ends with suicide, and we do not find Nick buying a Harley in the second. At least, I don’t think we do. I am not sure that I followed that narrative, although I did grasp that DeWitt was ventriloquizing complains that she has made elsewhere about being in it for more than fame and money. Pete, the true artist in the band, recalls his misery with a dumb eloquence.

You know, just before our US tour we were in Gibraltar and I went over to Africa ’cause I didn’t think it would take that long to get back. It was just after our second album had come out, and Steve had changed a lot of shit to make it like the first album. And that album was really popular, the fans didn’t notice, so I felt the fans were total wankers. I felt betrayed, and Steve had booked us for a whole year of gigs, just playing the same shit the same way every time.

So I walked along the beach, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought it would be better just to walk into the water and die than go through the year, and I couldn’t understand how they could do it. They turned my life into something worse than nothing, into this torture, for the sake of extra sales, well couldn’t we just have enough sales and something in it for me? And how could they just decide like that that my life didn’t matter, it didn’t matter if I was in, like, agony. But the thing is they didn’t know they were doing it. They didn’t know what they were taking away because they never had anything real to know what it was like when everything was a fake. They could get a lot of money and blag about the business. The money was the only thing there could be for them, and they’d never have anything else. (164)

In the current issue of The New Yorker, James Wood ends his review of Some Trick with a very clever turn. He is writing about “Famous Last Words,” in which a man and a woman discuss the Death of the Author in the context of the deaths of authors Voltaire and Hume. At the same time, the man puts the moves on the woman. “What is woman?” he asks. “Is this the mark of woman?” The woman comments, “[He] puts a hand on my breast, cannily pursuing sous-texte sous prétexte.” Wood can’t resist. “He’s de man. But she’s de wit.” Forgive me for my presumption, but I can’t help but see DeWitt frowning over that.

Bon week-end à tous!

29, 30, and 31 May

Tuesday 29th

The most interesting thing about Donald Trump, I’ve concluded, is his abstemiousness. The man doesn’t drink. And what’s really interesting about this is that nobody comments on it, neither friends nor foes. Nobody exclaims that the president is bold because or reckless even though he avoids alcohol.

Like everybody else, Trump acts on a braid of conscious, intuitive, instinctive, and deeply learned impulses, and there’s no saying which are more important than the others, no point in trying to trace the intentions behind his behavior. But whether Trump is a teetotaler by taste or by prudence, it’s a simple fact that he is never “incapacitated,” not even “under the weather.” He’s all there, all the time. It’s amazing to me, with my very different bundle of impulses, that he manages to be himself all the time without seeking some sort of chemical relief, but he is apparently untroubled by it. His bundle of impulses works for him.

And, I mean, it really does work: the man is in the Oval Office! What does Trump have that other presidents haven’t had? My theory is that he has an unerring sense of what doesn’t matter, and that his not drinking reflects some awareness that he has to be stone cold sober to keep this sense alive. When you’re drunk, nothing matters, everything matters — things get all mixed up. Trump is never mixed up. He is probably ignorant of many things that a normal person of his background would not want to be caught not knowing, but he is not confused. His decisions may be inconsistent over time, but they are always the right decisions for the moment, or at least never the wrong ones, because, really, how could a businessman with his history of bankruptcy and general lack of verifiable financial success get a roomful of people to support him? Much less win the Collegiate vote?

It’s not that bankruptcy doesn’t matter. It’s that it doesn’t matter that much. As much as other things. Trump can calibrate to a fine degree the context of self-presentation in which other things outweigh bankruptcy to the point of making it vanish. Building a wall, draining the swamp. Compared to these, bankruptcy is just a less-interesting abstraction.

And he also knows who matters. Right-thinking people were genuinely shocked by his dismissal of Rex Tillerson by means of a tweet, but Trump knew that neither the position of Secretary of State nor the person of Rex Tillerson meant very much to most Americans.

Rather than produce further examples of Trump’s unusual discernment — tedious if not vomitrocious reportage — I suggest that we examine what he does in the future as so much evidence that he understands the world that we’re living in better than we do, and that we can learn from him what really matters in the United States today. Instead of deploring his grandstanding, follow him as if he were a Geiger counter.

When he attacks something, we add it to our list of things that need to be fixed. It’s going to be a long list.

***

Wednesday 30

In yesterday’s Op-Ed column, David Brooks wrote about what’s wrong with the meritocracy. Having written a few things about this myself, I read it with the greatest interest. Here follow some quibbles.

Exaggerated faith in intelligence. By “intelligence,” Brooks seems to mean IQ, and he also seems to suggest that we put too much stock in aptitude and raw brainpower. This overlooks the extent to which the humanities have been denatured by ideas of efficiency. I don’t just mean tests and language labs. I mean the buzz words and the jargon that reduce intellectual effort to dog whistles. When too many teachers want to hear students say the right things, students learn to say the right things without understanding what they mean.

The best teachers learn from their students. I don’t mean that they learn anything much about the syllabus, but rather that students, as a result of the best teachers’ prodding, reveal the limitless variety of human possibility. The best teachers, in other words, do not have an exaggerated faith in their own intelligence, and this is what they teach their students.

Sometimes, I’m reminded of the medieval disconnect between theory and practice, wherein scholars drew their schemata but never handled a tool, while masons erected cathedrals without the benefit of physics equations. Americans today distinguish between a higher learning that is pursued in classrooms and an everyday commonsense morality that is picked up in cafeterias and on playing fields. Crabbed and fustian as it was, the old public-school curriculum of studying classical literature not only for mastery of Greek and Latin but for moral exemplars seems comprehensive in comparison.

Why, I wonder, does Brooks make two points out of one? Misplaced faith in autonomy and Inability to think institutionally are the same thing. The old WASP élite enjoyed a proprietary interest in its institutions and its society: it quite literally owned almost everything. Meritocrats aren’t invested in society. We haven’t learned how to replace the old ownership equity with a moral equity, with a collegial authority by which the meritocracy is enabled to judge itself. The medical and legal professions’ attempts at self-regulation are pale and often ineffective copies of the powerful back-room councils that ran things in the bad old days.

Finally, Brooks’s paragraph about the Misplaced notion of the self fails to make it clear that character is a social phenomenon, not a spiritual one. Too often, character is regarded as a sort of Superman costume that is revealed only in crisis. In fact, character is revealed by every gesture, every statement, every smile, every frown, every angry word, every kindness. Character is not a sash of merit badges but a messy array of inconsistent behaviors. The good news is that most of us behave better when surrounded by others who behave well. The central flaw in the current version of meritocracy is its postulation of individual merit. On any truly meaningful test — testing the members of a class — cheating is impossible.

***

Thursday 31st

Just when I was wondering what was going to push Philip Roth off the screen, along came Roseanne Barr with her tweet about Valerie Jarrett. It’s still too soon, I think, to comment on that — although I must say the President, with his demand that ABC apologise for all the HORRIBLE things that it has said about him, didn’t disappoint — so I’m grateful to Dara Horn for her piece in the Times‘s Sunday Review, which in its online version is entitled “What Philip Roth Didn’t Know About Woman Could Fill a Book.”

Roth’s three favorite topics — Jews, women and New Jersey — all remain socially acceptable targets of irrational public mockery, and Roth was a virtuoso at mocking the combination of all three. “What are they, after all, these Jewish women who raised us up as children?” Roth’s narrator asks in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the 1969 novel that made his reputation. “It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech — look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic. Yes, yes, maybe that’s the solution then: think of them as cows, who have been given the twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg.”

One could generously say that jokes like this haven’t aged well, yet they were just as cruel in 1969 — and the misogyny isn’t really the problem. After all, if one policed literature for bigotry, there would be little left to read. The problem is literary: these caricatures reveal a lack of not only empathy, but curiosity.

**

Philip Roth’s works are only curious about Philip Roth.

To which I would add that the snippet of Roth’s prose reveals the disregard for grace that’s typical of impatient, unpleasant men. “[T]he twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg” might sound funny when you say it, but it falls flat on the page.

When Dara Horn says that Roth’s curiosity is limited to Roth, it sounds like a put-down. We’ve come that far, at least. When Roth was writing Portnoy’s Complaint, though, it would have been praise. In those days, Hamlet was the greatest work of literature, and what does Hamlet do but think about himself? The language in which he does so is grandiloquent, possibly immortal, but I prefer it in extracts. As I play, Hamlet is simply depressing: the cogs of a revenge tragedy grind in their inexorably noisy way, and the only thing slowing them down is the prince’s introspection. Hamlet was the perfect model for the Postwar school of alienated, existentialist writers convinced of the absurdity of existence. As also for the school of writers who dared to subject themselves to their own variants of Freudian analysis. This was a struggle that had nothing to do with women, except insofar as women were trophies, carried off in victory. The enemy was the vast phalanx of men who cooperate in soulless routines of bureaucracy and commerce, who plot to exterminate meaning. Only by studying himself could the author find freedom.

So many things that made sense during the Cold War — that made so much sense that men developed whole personalities around them — don’t make sense anymore.

As a young man, I watched this battle, you might say, from a point outside its Overton Window. I could root for neither side. I felt a moral — aesthetic? — obligation to stand up for the writers, because they were, after all, writers, artists, thinkers, and so forth, whereas their opponents were duped robots. But I wouldn’t have wanted to see the writers put in charge of things, either. If the conformists were boring, the writers were disagreeable. They had terrible manners, and were proud of this. They were very greedy, and not just for attention. They were terrible, terrible listeners. And they were not very nice to the women who were attracted to them. And women were attracted to them. That was the worst of it.

Has that changed? Perhaps we can say that the attraction has been infused with … complications. I can’t see Dara Horn fluttering on a park bench if Philip Roth sat down beside her with a Mr Softee and eventually, like Lisa Halliday’s Alice, in Asymmetry, retiring with him to his apartment for “Operations” sex. No. I hear her saying, you always use the language of possession when talking about love. And then standing up and walking away.

In time, the old battle faded away, as antagonists grew old and died, women entered the workforce, and Hamlet began to sound solipsistic. I got rid of a lot of novels. None by Philip Roth, though. I’d never had any.

Bon week-end à tous!

22 and 25 May

Tuesday 22nd

The anecdote appears on page 59 of Andrea Barnet’s new book, Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World (Ecco), in the chapter about Rachel Carson. After Carson’s The Sea Around Us appeared in the summer of 1951, a fan sent a properly-addressed letter but  began it with the salutation, “Dear Sir,” explaining that he (the fan) had

always been convinced that males possess the supreme intellectual powers of the world

and he could not now change his mind about that.

How jolly it would be to know that this sort of thinking no longer sprouted, much less flourished, in the minds of males. How nice to live in a world in which James Damore and Jordan Peterson had nothing to say!

As regular readers know, I’ve been plowing through books by and about women, if only because two very good ones, Michelle Dean’s Sharp and now Barnet’s Visionary Women, have just been published. I found myself asking just what sort of gifts women bring to the table. What special contributions do women make to the counsels of power? And how to evaluate these contributions? By the criteria established by men? By the criteria that men would endorse if they actually learned a thing or two from women? Do women fit in, or are they, as I think Peterson has it, “chaos”? Where to establish a point of view?

Probably because I sensed that I was proposing a very tedious project, I looked hard at the initial question and realized in a flash that women bring the table. Men bring the expression, the cliché, but their accessory is much more likely to be a handsaw, the better to facilitate taking away parts of something. Let’s not push the conceit. I’ve answered the question to my own satisfaction. Women bring people together, and the world with them.

Remarkable women, that is, women endowed with great critical intelligence. Women in our time, the first that has allowed women to speak. Women addressing the men of our time, who, in response to fear and uncertainty, have throughout the past century adopted the intellectual habits of the professional engineer, the applied scientist who insists on linear exactitude and dispassionate analysis. Men as gifted as the women, but men in whom the spark of humanism has been almost extinguished.

Whether the women bring something peculiar to women, or whether they insist on restoring humanist priorities, I can’t say. It doesn’t seem to be important anymore. Barnet quotes Wendell Berry’s distinction between nurture and exploitation.

The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health — his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of number, quantities, ‘hard facts,’ the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind. (444)

Women, perhaps only because they have not surrendered to the engineering outlook, understand that the gains of exploitation are, if nothing else, soon exhausted. Remarkable women remain unmoved and unimpressed by things that are done simply because they can be done, and they are disgusted by men who cannot be bothered to take care of what they have done. How much more admirable engineers would be, if, instead of designing new and “superior” airliners, they concentrated instead on reviving the vast web  of railroads in this country, and improving everything about it. Such a conversion might make America great for the first time.

On page 439 of Visionary Women, Barnet begins to present a panorama of the United States in the 1950s. It is a familiar picture, and every detail is important, so I won’t even summarize it. It’s enough for me to say that I was a child in those days, and that I remember them well, even if I didn’t understand them at the time. There seemed little to look forward to, if Walt Disney’s cartoon of Tomorrowland was anything to go by. In my town, few of the houses were genuinely old (only one or two were more than a hundred years older than I), but all were built in styles that echoed the past, and I was drawn to what had been far more than to what was to come.

The brutalism of the Fifties, happily, did not long survive the decade, and I agree with Barnet that, for all our failings and disappointments, for all the unpleasant consequences of good intentions, our world is a much better place than that of my childhood. I try to resist giving all the credit to women, but it is difficult. I wish I could be sure that the trend would continue, but the very wicked fairy who currently dominates the scene makes the techno-conformists of sixty years back look appealing by comparison. What’s clear is that women saved civilization, or at least kept it alive; now men need to learn from them how be of help. Men must become humanists.

***

Friday 25th

News of Philip Roth’s death was more interesting than I would have thought it could be, had I given it any thought. I’d have expected no more than a sigh of dismay, that Roth’s kind of writing could make anybody famous at any time. That his “themes” and “subjects” were generally — among literary journalists — could be considered the supreme American ones. Sex, death, rage, resentment, nitpicking. Well, no one praised him for nitpicking. But he did seem to be rewarded for having just been his neurotic old self, compulsively scribbling, writing in the voice of a discontented man muttering to himself. I had no use for Philip Roth.

But Ezra Blazer — I won’t go so far as to say that I found Lisa Halliday’s fictional recreation of her former lover much more appealing than his model, but Halliday at least made reading about him interesting. Had Philip Roth recommended Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness to the general public, in a Paris Review interview, say, I’d have half-guiltily shrugged it off, but when Ezra Blazer recommended the book to his girlfriend, Alice, I did think about looking for it my library, and then, within a day or two, when I came across it by chance, I did read it. Ezra Blazer’s wisdom never manifested itself to me in Philip Roth. In her very absorbing novel, Asymmetry, Halliday did what Roth could never do, making it conceivable that any woman (or other human being) could love him, even if only for a little while. The man as he presented himself was simply repulsive.

Daphne Merkin told a story a few years ago, in The New Yorker I think. She mentioned spending the night with an eminent writer at his place. I forget whether this was in the middle of an affair or just a one-night stand, but it would seem to have been the latter, because, when she was dressed and saying her goodbyes, he told her that, on her way out, she would find a box of books by the front door. His latest. Feel free to take one. Later, through the grapevine, I heard that the writer with whom Merkin had consorted was Philip Roth — no doubt about it. When I told the story to Kathleen last night, she scoffed at Roth’s self-promotion. Self-promotion? I disagreed. If ever there was a writer who needn’t promote himself, it was Philip Roth. The world took care of that for him. Largesse, rather, I thought. Even worse, said Kathleen. Once again, though, the man’s behavior is filtered and made bearable (or at least amusing) by a woman’s attention.

Philip Roth has been a large literary fixture for my entire adult life, and commensurately irritating. He was not alone. He stood in a grove of sex-addled Americans. Hemingway, Mailer, Bellow, Updike. But as the last to go, Roth bore the concentrated residue. How can I be sure that I am a man, and not just a sack of flesh with male generative equipment? What does having sex mean? Why do we have to die? With the exception of the fatally-glib Updike, these figures seemed to medicate such puerile anxieties by writing in self-important, often rather scraping tones. It is a relief to know that they are gone.

The basic question is this: are men undone by women? Or — the same question rephrased — are men undone by civilization? In the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, there was a great deal of worry about this, a reaction, so they say, to the over-upholstery of bourgeois life. Muscular Christianity and organized sports were conjured to the rescue. So was World War I — a calamity of chivalry in trenches of rotting muck. After World War II, the model was updated, and stoic knighthood yielded to the capable engineer, a man of few words. A bad fit for the men of many words who aimed for the Nobel in Literature! But an opportunity to recycle all the old fears. The only challenge was this brave new world in which women were getting used to speaking for themselves.

Also new, after the two wars, was the collapse of respectability as a barrier to what young people now call hooking up. In Kafka Was All the Rage, Anatole Broyard writes beautifully but painfully about how hopeless men and women were in the dawn of this freedom. Nobody knew what to do, beyond the tab-and-slot part. Nobody knew what to say, and only women had a clue about listening. On bad days, things don’t look any better now, what with boys learning about sex from degrading videos. Incels may be the heirs of the late literary giants, raising their fists to heaven and demanding the love of beautiful women.

I find my ironic eulogy for Philip Roth in Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel, The Friend:

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

Bon week-end à tous!

16, 17 and 18 May

Wednesday 16th

The weather got very hot yesterday, and then very windy: it was clear even without reference to meteorology that we were in for some storms. And they came, says the Times, as if on a conveyor belt, wreaking havoc on power and transportation. (But not in Manhattan itself, of course.) The temperature dropped twenty degrees in their wake, and we are now back to the cool and somewhat gloomy weather that has marked this month of May. All in all, the perfect climate for learning of the death of Tom Wolfe.

One had rather forgotten about him. Although I consumed The Bonfire of the Vanities as quickly as my eyes could travel, I was never a fan. I looked at From Bauhaus to Our House, but I did not read it. I gave up on A Man in Full after five or ten pages. Wolfe’s excited prose made me suspect that he was one of those men for whom the word “people” doesn’t include women — a very common failing, to be sure, but unforgivable in a writer. (In a thinker, that is.) I was astonished, even somewhat embarrassed, by the Times’s two-page obituary, much of it taken up by a photograph of Wolfe leaning against a lamppost. Wolfe lived two lives, the necessarily solitary one of the writer, for which, however, he seems to have dressed like a dandy, and then that of the dandy. The writer could be savage; the dandy was by all accounts courteous. Somehow, that strikes me as completely backwards. Shouldn’t the dandy be flamboyant, and the writer sympathetic? Either way, Wolfe cut an unusually public figure for a writer, and I daresay that’s what earned him the spread in the Times.

In an op-ed piece, Kurt Andersen says that he was inspired to become a writer by Tom Wolfe — he discovered him in ninth grade — and that a great deal of his own career was spent in open imitation of the older writer. He claims that Wolfe was a great inspiration for his work at Spy Magazine. I can see what he means, but I must insist that the inspiration could only have been partial. Tom Wolfe never made me laugh, while Spy very nearly laughed me to death. There was something anhedonic about the pile-up of words in Wolfe’s prose, something never sweetened by the giggling self-ridicule that gleefully topples David Foster Wallace’s mountains of clauses. Wolfe was a satirist, Wallace a comedian; the difference is that comedians never scold.

The style of Wolfe’s dandyism was of course the particular style of the Southern gentleman, the planter. This allowed Wolfe to wear his roots as a Virginian, as an outsider in the Big Apple, while looking much more presentable than most New York writers. Of course, if he had grown a beard, he would have risked comparisons with the colonel of fried chicken.

***

Back in 1968, the word “students” still meant “men”; I had to remind myself of that as I read Mavis Gallant’s “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook,” which was published in two instalments in The New Yorker in the autumn of that year. I ordered a copy of Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews, at the recommendation of Lisa Elkin’s Flâneuse, an interesting book that I may have been a little hard on in the other blog. Gallant, a Canadian, was already an established Parisian by 1968; what’s more, she lived around the corner from the university. The violence did not touch her immediate neighborhood, but the disorder did, and that is the subject of the Notebooks. Although the water never stopped running, the power was only intermittently cut, and the phones usually worked, most urban amenities were suspended, as workers, inspired by students, went on strike. Although deeply upset by this uncertainty, Gallant hoped that “the events” would lead to improvements in French affairs, if only by clearing the scene of the elderly de Gaulle, and she was very depressed when everything went back to normal. In fact, she left Paris as soon as she could, for her usual vacation in Menton, on the Riviera, and she declined to cover the conclusion from afar. But the Notebooks do not end on an abandoned note.

Bouleversante conversation with woman in travel agency, Rue de Rennes, where I cancel my auto-couchette reservation for last Friday. She begins by asking what I think. We both pussyfoot around the subject, and she then says, “Don’t you think that le social followed upon something perhaps more lasting and important?” Answer, “Yes, of course.” She becomes excited, says that she, for one, will never be the same again — that she will never accept anything at its face value, that “no one can stop her now” from asking herself questions. She pulls out from under the counter two morning papers, Le Figaro and Combat, and cries what may be the justification, finally, for the massacre of the trees: “Regardez! Je lis!” She says, “Je traîne, je lis, je pense.” Says she goes to the Sorbonne, to the Odéon, to a Catholic discussion group on the Rue Gay-Lussac: “J’écoute.”I say to her, ”What did you hope would happen? What did you want?” Seems taken aback, stares at me, says, “Je ne sais pas. Quelque chose de propre.” Can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this. Say, “Une merveilleuse abstraction?” She shakes her head. Doesn’t know.

The “massacre of the trees” is indeed the most heart-rending detail in the Notebooks. Gallant cries when she comes upon trees that have been cut down to make barricades, to improvise armor. So do most of the other women who appear in the Notebooks. This felling of slow green life is regarded as a crime that only thoughtless, ignorant young men could commit, emblematic of youth’s horrifying appetite for terror. The massacre of the trees is the very opposite of quelque chose de propre — something decent. But Gallant is prepared for forgive the students, amazed as she was to hear them chanting, Nous sont tous des juifs allemands!

Musing on Gallant’s memoir, Lisa Elkin decides that it all comes down to immigrants. The events of 1968, after all, were sparked by the insolence of a stateless foreign student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. If Elkin is right, we are all soixante-huitards, on one side or the other, even down to this day.

***

Thursday 17th

In the current issue of The Nation, which arrived on Monday morning with the Times, I read Bill McKibben’s review of Visionary Women, by Andrea Barnet. I ordered it, and it arrived yesterday afternoon. Sometimes I think Amazon knows what I’m going to buy before I do.

There are four “visionary women” in Barnet’s book: Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters. Add to these the ten women in Michelle Dean’s Sharp — Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm — and a trend emerges, a trend away from a movement. Few, if any, of these women were (or are) notable feminists. Reading about them has led me to conclude that feminism, formerly known as women’s liberation, has nothing to do with remarkable women.

The other night at dinner, Kathleen mentioned “incels,” which she had just read about somewhere, and then, without a break, told me about a show that she had sat through in the back seat of a taxi. After a moment’s difficulty trying to turn off the news feature, she gave up; at least she could mute it. Presently she saw Jennifer Lopez modeling inappropriate outfits inappropriately — striking poses that could most kindly be described as “kittenish.” We agreed that some women’s lack of judgment might be a good explanation of some men’s depravity, and that in fact it might be a case of depravity on both sides. Depravity is the belief in rationalizations that make misconduct permissible. The incels, as a group, have made misogyny normative among themselves, claiming a totally spurious entitlement. The behavior of women who imitate harlots is more puzzling. I can attribute it only to a lack of self-respect.

None of the fourteen women whom I have named suffered from a lack of self-respect. Although they made the most of such opportunities as presented themselves, they did not really require any kind of liberation. They made the most of what they had (minds, mostly), and the results were impressive enough to win admiring attention.

We have recently been treated to the appalling tale of the Washington Redskins’s junket to Costa Rica. During this pleasure trip, the team’s cheerleaders were advised to go about topless and to make themselves available for friendly encounters with rich hangers-on. Do we draw a line? Or ought the line have been drawn long ago, when cheerleaders’ outfits were downsized to their current skimpiness? And who would draw that line? Something tells me that it would not be any of my fourteen smart women. I can’t imagine any of them bringing herself to comment on cheerleaders, any more than correlatively smart men would take notice of drug lords.

The smart women and the cheerleaders do share the fact that they are not common. Now that people routinely marry for love, it may be that there are more beautiful people than smart people in the world, but beautiful people — beautiful people who are also just the right shade of young — are still unusual. (Psst! Have you seen Celeste Sloman’s extraordinary photograph of Gloria Steinem?) But beautiful people have much more in common with each other than smart people do. This may explain why beautiful people face such powerful challenges to their self-respect. Consider Pauline Kael. Kael was lured into a film-production partnership with Warren Beatty that nearly cost her her professional credibility; it was a terrible mistake to swallow this bait. But the bait was unique. It would have been neither offered to nor registered by the other women in my group-that-is-not-a-group. Whereas beautiful people in general are asked, sooner or later, to take off some or all of their clothes.

The object of women’s liberation, or feminism, is to develop the self-respect of ordinary women. Extraordinary women have nothing to contribute; on the contrary, their example may be discouraging — to ordinary women. In the forty odd years since the feminist movement became impossible to ignore, beautiful women have been so many spanners in the works, terrible distractions, insoluble conundrums. Smart, sexy, or both, unusual women make it difficult for an ordinary woman to figure out how to live. It would be nice if their presence on the Internet and in other media were more muted, if they were not presented as Kewpie dolls for the incels to shoot down.

***

Friday 18th

Reading about the shootings in Santa Fe, Texas — a town not far from Galveston, which my daughter and her family plan to visit this summer —I wonder if the modern public high school is not inherently unsafe. It seems to me to create an atmosphere of hostility. I say this even though I have not set foot in a school — any school — in many years, so feel free to ignore me.

High school used to be a place in which to grow up, to come to maturity. Few people went to college, so it was expected that high school graduates would be ready to take their places in the adult world as soon as they handed in their rented gowns. High school was a rehearsal for adult life in that learning was the student’s job. Ideally, among all the facts and figures that had to be mastered in different courses, students learned about the world that they would soon be entering. Perhaps it would be better to say that they were taught a vision of what the world might be if everyone brought his or her best to bear on it. By the final year of high school, students were expected to behave, at least, like adults.

What is high school today but a ghastly holding pen? Nobody takes a place in the adult world at the end of senior year anymore. The adult world is open only to college graduates, and its full richness is foreclosed to all but those who make it through postgraduate professional training. The high school student’s job is to get into a good college. This is not a job that all high school students may be willing or prepared to undertake. The postponement of adult entry postpones the end of childhood; instead of a rehearsal for “real life,” there is only a prolonged playground. The inevitably sexualized atmosphere of high school, no longer contained by the imminence of respectable adulthood, poisons the interactions of adolescents at different stages of development. Instead of appearing to be grown up (and self-controlled), kids in high school fall back on the quixotic project of being experienced.

The supposed collapse of educational standards is not what bothers me. It’s the collapse of educational seriousness that’s frightening. High school is a bad joke.

That solution that I propose is to insert a gap of three to five years between high school and college, and to overhaul business enterprises to welcome cohorts of high-school graduates with suitable jobs, jobs that today are reserved for college grads as a matter of employers’ convenience, not because college coursework is prerequisite but because a college degree indicates workplace virtues that used to be signalled by a high-school diploma. I am not arguing that fewer people ought to go to college, but rather that no one ought to go directly to college from high school except those few students who are probably going to spend their careers in the higher reaches of academia or professional expertise. (And even those gifted ones would probably benefit from a year out of school.)

There is nothing inherent in modern life that makes it take longer than it used to do to grow up. Keeping young people in elementary school until the age of eighteen is a vast civil mistake.

Bon week-end à tous!

8 and 11 May

Tuesday 8th

Lady Susan, an epistolary novel, appears to be Jane Austen’s first complete work of mature fiction. She made no attempt to publish it, however; her nephew appended the text to his 1871 memoir. So it exists in a limbo, between Austen’s juvenilia and the canon of six novels that begins with Northanger Abbey and ends with Persuasion. The Penguin edition, edited by Margaret Drabble, packages it with fragments of uncompleted projects, The Watsons and Sanditon. Austen abandoned The Watsons, but work on Sanditon was, in Drabble’s incisive phrase, “interrupted by her death.”

Although formally finished, Lady Susan ends with an abandoned air, too. There are 41 letters in all, but I suspect that there were a few more, which Austen scuttled with a Conclusion. Having brought her tale to its climax, she may have lost interest in laying out the dénouement in letters that could no longer shock or surprise. There was also the problem of a nice young man’s affections. Like those of Edwin in Mansfield Park, these required time to shift attention, from one lady to another, and the Conclusion informs us of this with a similar caginess as to how long it took. However long, it was time that the quick short term of Lady Susan didn’t have.

Lady Susan Vernon is a widow. Her father’s title is never disclosed, a detail that encompasses the mystery of how she came to be what she is. Still beautiful at 35, and more accomplished at coquetry than ever, she is in the middle of a torrid, adulterous affair when she writes the opening letter to her brother-in-law, announcing her intention to visit him. The reasons behind her decision to pay the visit are suggested in the second letter, written to a a bosom buddy in London, but Lady Susan is too intelligent to incriminate herself explicitly, so the full extent of her misconduct with Mr Manwaring, the tranquillity of whose home she has disturbed, emerges only at the end, when this lover, who like almost all the men in the novel does not write letters, is seen to be entering Lady Susan’s abode. In the third letter, we learn that Mrs Vernon, the wife of Lady Susan’s brother-in-law, is unhappy to receive her, given her notorious reputation, but feels obliged to yield to her husband’s generosity. Thus Lady Susan is marked as an eighteenth-century fiction. In the Victorian era that followed, Mrs Vernon and her real-life counterparts would not suffer such oppression. We don’t know if Jane Austen lived to see the full transformation; it is, after all, Sir Thomas Bertram, and not his wife, who refuses to take the disgraced Maria back to Mansfield Park.

In the fourth letter, Mrs Vernon’s brother, Reginald de Courcy, writes to his sister to “congratulate you and Mr Vernon on being about to receive into your family, the most accomplished coquette in England.”

… but by all that I can gather, Lady Susan possesses a degree of captivating deceit which must be pleasing to witness and detect. I shall be with you very soon …

Reginald’s leering, sneering tone is designed to set him up as a target of Lady Susan’s conquistatorial ambitions, and so rapid is his tumble that his father, in the twelfth letter, feels obliged to intervene. Sir Reginald’s formal understatement is almost funny.

You must be sensible that as an only son and the representative of an ancient family, your conduct in life is most interesting to your connections.

Just as almost-funny the outrage in Reginald’s climactic letter to Lady Susan:

But since it must be so, I am obliged to declare that all the accounts of your misconduct during the life and since the death of Mr Vernon which had reached me in common with the world in general, and gained my entire belief before I saw you, but which you by the exertion of your perverted abilities had made me resolve to disallow, have been unanswerably proved to me. Nay, more, I am assured that a connection, of which I had never before entertained a thought, as for some time existed, and still continues to exist between you and the man, whose family you robbed of its peace, in return for the hospitality with which you were received into it!

This from the thirty-sixth letter. In response, Lady Susan briskly dismisses Reginald with the expectation “of surviving my share in this disappointment.” The four shortish letters that follow make it clear that, with Lady Susan’s conquest of Reginald undone, the story has run out of air. Was Austen too squeamish to compose an  ending similar to that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, upon whose Marquise de Merteuil Lady Susan seems at times to be so clearly modeled (in the tone of her ruthlessness, especially)? In that book, the beautiful villainess is disfigured by a horrible pox that, together with her public disgrace, force her to retire entirely from the world. Her partner in crime is killed in a duel. Lady Susan has no partner in crime. Austen simply does not believe in melodramatic finales: the wicked, in Austen’s world, are made ridiculous. But none of her correspondents, save perhaps Lady Susan herself, has the wit (or the malice) for ridicule. If Lady Susan is to be condemned to marry the rich and foolish Sir James, whom she intended to foist upon her daughter, Frederica, whose dullness may be attributed to Lady Susan’s mistreatment and neglect, and if Frederica is to capture the affections of Reginald, then Austen is going to have to step in and tell us all this herself, as she does in the Conclusion.

In the Conclusion, almost-funny gives way to funny.

This correspondence, by a meeting between some of the parties and a separation between the others, could not, to the great detriment of the Post Office revenue, be continued longer.

One is put in mind of a powerful nanny who is breaking up a tiresome children’s game and sending her charges to bed, or at least to dress for dinner. The crack about Post Office revenue is pure Austen, as we know not only from the established novels but from her youthful sketches as well. Exploding the artifice of dramatically offended respectability, it is the joke of a well-behaved lady who has taught herself to write down what she cannot say, so that when the reader laughs, she is not in the room to scold. The satisfaction of Lady Susan lies in seeing how long Austen can carry on writing prose that, like her correspondents, does not seem to know what is really going on — the enrichment of the Post Office — and in enjoying how almost-funny the temptation to tell the truth occasionally makes her.

***

Friday 11

Duly, then, we watched Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Lady Susan: Love and Friendship.

It is, above all, a Whit Stillman story. The principal characters are attractive and at least apparently affluent young people, or youngish. (The only older woman, Lady de Courcy, is meltingly played by Jemma Redgrave; she sounds almost exactly like her aunt.) They are clever. Their manners are polished beyond effortlessness, to the point of unconsciousness. They regard enthusiasm as a bore. Aside from Frank Churchill, there is nobody like them in Jane Austen’s novels, not even the Crawfords.

A fair amount of the conversation is lifted from the letters, although, so far as I could tell, all the almost-funny bits were replaced by realistic remarks that weren’t even mildly amusing. Indeed, all of Love and Friendship‘s fun was invented especially for the movie itself, and put in the mouth of Sir James Martin. In Lady Susan, as I recall, we’re not given much in the way of examples, even indirect ones, of this man’s allegedly foolish speech; his boorishness is evidenced simply by his uninvited arrival at Churchill. He materializes with equal spontaneousness in the film, but then he never shuts up. He goes on and on about getting lost on the way to the Vernons’ house, because he could see the church, but not the hill; that this might be intended as wit is suggested when he collapses into mention of the great family of Blenheim, mumbling “no connection,” presumably but not certainly with reference to the Vernons. Later, when corrected about the number of Commandments — he thinks there are twelve — he wonders, then, which ones will have to go. Personally, he’d be happy without the commandment to honor the Sabbath, because it interferes with his hunting. Tom Bennett, the actor who impersonates him, punctuates Sir James’s fatuities with a perfect whinnying laugh, the likes of which I haven’t heard since Alice Brady. He’s really marvelous, but. It is impossible to surmise Jane Austen’s reaction to the cinema, but I really cannot imagine her sitting through the show.

I do wonder what she would make of Kate Beckinsale, whose Lady Susan is fetching enough but really rather harmless. She is obviously Stillman’s favorite character, and he can’t treat her harshly. The film’s sympathies turn to Lady Susan as flowers to the sun. It is she who breaks with Reginald de Courcy (an interesting, but possibly dim, Xavier Samuel). Far from suffering with Sir James, she imports the strong, silent Manwaring (upgraded to a lordship) into her immediate circle. There he is, standing alongside her, rather like — but in key ways not like — a Wooden Indian, at her daughter’s wedding reception. One wonders if the husband will ever learn that his favorite interlocutor has made him a cuckhold.

We rented Love and Friendship, and felt glad that we hadn’t bought it. It’s handsome and reasonably entertaining, and it has its funny bits. But it hangs uncertainly, like one of those rickety rope-and-plank bridges in action movies, between two aesthetic realms. Whit Stillman is no cynic; his beautiful young people face genuine moral problems, and try to do their best, even if the lamp that he burns for virtue is not as steady as Austen’s. But he is a filmmaker. No filmmaker since the Thirties, arguably, has filled his scripts with such intelligent badinage, but the point is that this badinage pours forth from men and women even more self-confident, and possibly better looking, than Myrna Loy and William Powell. As for Austen, the ruler of the land on the other side of the bridge, she is a writer. And the tale that wobbles over the chasm is the last one that she will allow her characters to dictate. Henceforth, she will tell the story, impersonal, invisible, neither rich nor beautiful perhaps but in complete command of the English language, and with a great deal more to say than any of her inventions. All that can be said for Lady Susan is that it is a milestone in Austen’s development, tremendously interesting as such but only as such. The true climax occurs only after she has rounded up all the quill pens, poured all the ink down the drain, and stated her regrets — her regrets, not those of Lady Susan or Reginald or anybody else among her correspondents — for the Post Office revenue.

Love and Friendship is the title of a late entry in the catalogue of Austen’s juvenilia; like Lady Susan it is epistolary in form, but its tone is entirely mock-gothic, and it was apparently intended to be read to the Austen family, provoking choruses of laughter. I think that it was a mistake of Whit Stillman to borrow this title for his Lady Susan — possibly a curse. The more I muse on the difference between the achievements of his film and her novella, the more like Sir James he looks. Had he consulted me, I’d have urged him to call his movie Finding Churchill instead.

Bon week-end à tous!