Gotham Diary:
Kant’s Thief
10 March 2014
It’s no wonder that I loitered away the morning beneath the counterpane. Skies were cloudy, the barometer low and falling. I was equally exhausted by reading done over the weekend, in two books that couldn’t have been more different on the surface, yet whose roots palpably intertwined in the soil of a rich, womanly humanism. The first was the Hannah Arendt book that I’ve written about already, Between Past and Future, and the second was a volume that I’ve mentioned, too, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Having closed Arendt’s book after breakfast on Sunday and then written a doubtless bewildering letter about it to a friend, I sat down with the novel, intending to read for an hour, or sixty pages, whichever came first. I ended up doing nothing else for the rest of the day.
What do I mean by “womanly humanism”? An anti-heroic cast of mind, unimpressed by pointless bravery. Take the following, from Arendt’s final essay, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”:
The astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Heisenberg’s man — the man who will be the less likely ever to meet anything but himself and man-made things the more ardently he wishes to eliminate all anthropomorphic considerations from his encounter with the non-human world around him.
A habit of regarding humanity as an element in the landscape, not distinct from the rest of nature but in fact inconceivable without it.
Francie knew that autumn had come. Let the wind blow warm, let the days be heat hazy; nevertheless autumn had comed to Brooklyn. Francie knew that this was so because now, as soon as night came and the street lights went on, the hot-chestnut man set up his little stand on the corner. On the rack above the charcoal fire, chestnuts roasted in a covered pan.The man held unroasted ones in his hand and made little crosses on them with blunt knife before he put them in the pan.
Yes, autumn had surely come when the hot-chestnut man appeared — no matter what the weather said to the contrary.
As to the difference between the two books: there are nearly thirty Post-it flags in Arendt, and only three in Smith.
***
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is, above all, an odd book. The only reader unlikely to find it odd is the beginner, someone who hasn’t read very much before and who is probably a teenager. Such a reader can’t yet know that novels tend to be either much more shapely or much less thoughtful. “Literary” or “mass-market.” Almost all novels are more focused and restricted in register. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is hardly artless, but its anecdotal construction, stitching together episodes of widely-varying length and style, indicates a lack of interest in discrimination that is sometimes no less awkward than a glimpse of the hem of a slip. We might more comfortably read it as a memoir were it not for the modulated, sometimes high-flying prosody and the slipperiness of the speech patterns. Somewhere in the middle of the book, a sympathetic teacher warns the heroine, Francie Nolan, that she must tell what really happened, reserving what might have happened for writing down. Smith seems to be alternate between the two.
I have a hard time reading about hunger, especially the hunger of children. It is an injustice, like torture, that swamps my readerly tranquility. The Nolans, working-class German-Irish living in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, at the beginning of the last century, spend what little money they have on clothes and rent, and freeze in their flat during the cold months while bobbing just above starvation. Pride makes reliance on charity impossible. The father, although a dear man, is fecklessness personified, and his death is both a deep loss and a liberation. The widow lands in comfort at the end, but not before a period of hair-raising reliance on her daughter, who is not only clever but able to pass herself off as old enough for work in an office. Characteristically, I read the last chapter early on, so I knew that Francie would (phew!) go off to college, but this only heightened the suspense of approaching that outcome. The finale of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is nothing less than the dénouement of five or six possible novels.
The tree that grows in Francie’s yard, an ailanthus that springs back after having been chopped down, is as much weed as tree. Despite its delicate canopy, it is not made for landscapes. It may not have much to do with the stories that Betty Smith set out to tell, but it is the perfect symbol of her manner of telling them.
***
David Carr, exulting with faux guilt in the glories of “TV’s new golden age,” reports that the profusion of dramatic series offered by cable networks is leaving him little time to read.
My once beloved magazines sit in a forlorn pile, patiently waiting for their turn in front of my eyes. Television now meets many of the needs that pile previously satisfied. I have yet to read the big heave on Amazon in The New Yorker, or the feature on the pathology of contemporary fraternities in the March issue of The Atlantic, and while I have an unhealthy love of street food, I haven’t cracked the spine on Lucky Peach’s survey of the same. Ditto for what looks like an amazing first-person account in Mother Jones from the young Americans who were kidnapped in Iran in 2009. I am a huge fan of the resurgent trade magazines like Adweek and The Hollywood Reporter, but watching the products they describe usually wins out over reading about them.
And yet he continues to write. He reminds me a little of Kant’s thief, a figure whom Hannah Arendt is fond of mentioning.
The thief, for instance, is actually contradicting himself, for he cannot wish the principle of his action, stealing other people’s property, should become a general law; such a law would immediately deprive him of his own acquisition.
Quite aside from the tendency of non-reading writers’ pens to dribble into cant.