After Kathleen left for the airport and her conference outside Miami, I continued reading about Claire Danes in last week’s New Yorker, but found it intolerably miscellaneous, even though I did finish the piece. (I haven’t seen any of Homeland yet). So I picked up Volume II of The Transylvanian Trilogy, They Were Found Wanting, and read a few chapters. Although I enjoyed the story, I felt that something had been violated — to wit, the form of the novel. Although Míklos Bánffy leaves plenty of loose ends at the close of the first volume, They Were Counted, a mood of finality hangs over the final chapters, and even if the characters go on living, the book comes to The End. Indeed, when the leading lady, Adrienne Miloth, makes a beguilingly indirect reappearance in Chapter Two, she has undergone such a transformation that she almost seems to be a new character. The change is plausible, fascinating even, because it reflects Adrienne’s awakening to love at the end of the previous book. But in the back of my mind I heard a deck being shuffled and dealt, placing the characters in new alignments. This is the technique that enabled soap operas to go on for decades. It is not, at first whisper, a characteristic of great world literature.

To dampen my disappointment, which was really very slight — so slight that a good night’s rest might muffle it entirely — I decided to watch a movie, simultaneously deciding that this movie would be The Third Man. Years ago, we had a VHS tape of the film that was so grainy and dark that the famous sewer scenes at the end were unintelligibly murky. It was so frustrating that I came to think of The Third  Man as The Unwatchable Movie, which I’ve by no means forgotten, so that the Criterion Collection’s sparkling remaster always comes as real treat. Another real treat is Alida Valli, one of the great mid-century beauties of the screen, and a powerful actress as well. (Don’t even think about contesting this claim until you’ve seen Visconti’s Senso.) She brings to the role of Anna something of the grandeur of a Strauss heroine — she’s a Marschallin in extremely reduced circumstances. (As was Vienna.) Then there are Carol Reed’s disturbing Dutch shots, especially at the beginning of the film, presenting everything slightly askew. These shots are more effective than the mounds of rubble, over which the characters occasionally scramble, at suggesting how unstable Vienna was after the War. Finally, there is the frighteningly good-looking Orson Welles.

I believe that Graham Greene wrote the novella after the screenplay, which makes it just possible that it was Welles’s idea to echo The Great Gatsby — at the time (1949) just beginning its steady rise from the obscurity into which it almost immediately fell after publication to the classic status that it holds today — by having Harry Lime recurringly address his friend Holly Martins as “old man.” It’s as disturbingly bogus as Gatsby’s “old sport,” and whether or not Greene or Welles or anyone intended to make a connection, the phrase sets The Third Man in the same mode of American disenchantment as The Great Gatsby.

Trevor Howard: I’d forgotten about him. He’s perfect in The Third Man, because his sharp, compact features make a perfect foil to Joseph Cotten’s wooliness. It is always difficult for me to trust any character played by Joseph Cotten; his Uncle Charlie, in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, is one of the great cinema sociopaths, playing to the audience as well as for the film. You want to give him a break even after you know better. But that’s precisely why, like Teresa Wright’s Niece Charlie, you can’t forgive him; his appeal is a form of abuse. At least for me, this quality sticks to the actor himself, and gets carried from movie to movie. There is also Cotten’s strange accent, which wants to be Groton but isn’t.

***

Over the weekend, I swallowed whole a new book by David Priestland, an up-to-date Oxford don, called Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes. It did not go down smooth. I enjoyed the book very much, but I also mistrusted it, not only because I’ve become wary of schemes and systems. I couldn’t possibly write anything like a review of it, because I argued with it the whole time, even when I agreed with it. The book is clever and fast, and it left me impressed but dazed. At gunpoint, I might venture that the book is a rather disorderly piece of jewelry, composed of stones both priceless and otherwise. Make no mistake: there are priceless insights in Merchant, and the book really must be read (or at least improved).

The idea that there are ways in which to be exceptional (and so to rise above the status of the ordinary laborer), as either a warrior or a priest, has a provenance dating to Antiquity. Indeed, the division is salient in the earliest recorded states. But like so many ideas of ancient vintage, it applies only tenuously — little more than metaphorically — to our times. Human nature may not have changed beyond recognition, but its complications have expanded exponentially. Consider the warrior. Think of him as a knight on a horse, dealing death with a sword or some other weapon. Think of him as a bold hero of blind courage. Now put him back in the glass case. The only warriors who fight like knights are the ones who can’t afford better equipment. Or who are unlucky enough to be pitched into the brutalizing guerilla war that seems to be the only game being played these days — the knight of old at least knew who his enemies were. Modern warfare is waged by technical experts, not swashbucklers. Modern armies may be warlike on the surface, but they operate as implacable bureaucracies. And bureaucrats, in David Priestland’s typology, are sages, the descendants of priests. Do we regard today’s military man as “soldier” or as “sage”?

Priestland is, like any sensible person, alarmed by the messy, volatile state of current affairs. He attributes it to the hegemony of short-sighted merchants. I could not agree more heartily! But his analysis is almost as messy and volatile as the world it attempts to describe. You simply cannot dispose of today’s power networks in “three castes,” and Priestland doesn’t really try. Starting on page 63, for example, he breaks the merchant caste into two phases, soft and hard. These are really not very different from Wall Street’s bulls and bears. The bulls (the soft merchants) believe in good times and easy credit. The bears show up after the inevitable collapse, and insist upon bills’ being paid (austerity). I think we knew all about this already. Priestland’s valuable point is that giving merchants the hegemony over political affairs that they have enjoyed in modern times greatly exacerbates the excesses of both phases of commerce, and conduces to the hegemony of warriors — the last thing any sane merchant wants to see.

The sage caste proves to even more fissiparous. Sages enjoyed their moment of hegemony in a period now best known as Les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty years of stunning climbs in the Western standard of living that followed World War II. Priestland, emphasizing the caste’s failures, considers the period in terms of the inevitable breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement. There are at least two problems with this view. The men who assembled at the Mount Washington Hotel were more merchant than sage. And the agreement, reached while the (Hot) War was in its final phase, was tweaked to suit the imagined imperatives of the Cold War that followed. Tony Judt’s assessment what-went-wrong (with the welfare state) is far more clearly made in Postwar, and it is as assessment with which Priestland would, by his own account, concur. In his concluding passage, “An End to Caste?”, Priestland writes,

The real flaw [in the Hegelians’ argument about history] came from their failure to understand that individuals have limited memories. People do learn from history, but they are most affected by what is happening around them when they are young adults; earlier history seems rather too remote, abstract, and irrelevant. Thus, policy makers in 2008 learned some limited lessons from 1929: that they should not impose austerity at a time of financial crisis. But the experiences most imprinted on their minds were those of the 1970s and ’80s, and they are convinced that the power of the state must be constrained at all costs. They find it very difficult to combine these experiences with the lessons that are really relevant — those from the 1920s.

Lessons from the 1920s, for example, that produced the Glass-Steagall Bill, which remains to be replaced after having been foolishly scrapped in 1998. Perhaps because we are both lawyers, and Kathleen a securities lawyer at that, my wife and I were appalled when the protections of Glass-Steagall were removed, and we believe that subsequent events have validated our horror. We were still in our forties when Sanford Weill mounted his arrogant undermining of the walls between retail and investment banking; we not nearly old enough to remember the 1920s. But we had learned about them, really; we had been educated well. History is not necessarily “remote, abstract, and irrelevant”; it can be brought to life by good teachers (and the writers of good histories). The problem as we see it is that educations such as ours appear to be uncommon, and have no necessary relation to brand-name institutions of learning. Something must be done to make history intimate, concrete, and relevant, if not to every man and woman in the street, then to the exceptional men and women who run things — men like Robert Rubin and women like Hillary Clinton.

So it was with the welfare state: young people forgot why the safety-nets had been put in place, and they resented the fact that the beneficiaries had changed. Immigrants in Europe, blacks and immigrants in the United States, were by the late 1970s taking the place of “natives” as the objects of social welfare. It was forgetful on the part of the sages to understand that the welfare state had to be reconfigured — reinvented, really. That is a recurrent failure of sages: having solved a problem, they think they’ve done so for all time.

In the end, sages remain somewhat mysterious in Priestland’s treatment. Are we all to be sages? And what kind of sage? There are several types on offer: sage-technocrats, sage-creatives, and so on. But it is telling that Priestland has nothing to say about “wisdom.” It is clear that the technocrats whom he discusses, most notably Robert McNamara, lacked it, to the point of not seeming to know that there was something called “wisdom” to seek. It is also clear that smart people usually lack the wisdom to carry their expertise graciously, seeming rather determined to make others feel stupid and then resentful. In this, sages are rather like warriors — show-offs.

It is very much a muddle. Not Priestland’s book, but life. Things fall apart. Things are always falling apart. Wisdom, insofar as it is not simply a wry form of resignation, enables us to envision a world that falls apart better. Merchant, Soldier, Sage is stuffed with elements of wisdom, and if the author’s playful schemata make the economic history of the modern world more vivid to general readers, I shall be the last to register any serious complaint.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, September 9th, 2013 at 11:59 am.