Gotham Diary:
Goodness!
19 March 2014
In the new issue of Bookforum, there’s a photograph of Stefan Zweig, sitting alone on the upper deck of a Fifth Avenue bus, the unmistakable spire of the Sherry-Netherlands Hotel rising in the background. Zweig looks on top of the world — which he was, and therefore wasn’t. Benjamin Moser writes,*
But precisely because he was rich and famous, Zweig was constantly besieged by the less fortunate. If Jewish refugees in America were lucky in one sense, in many other senses, of course, they were not: alive, to be sure, but stateless, impoverished, unemployed and — because they usually didn’t speak English — unemployable. It was only natural that they should look to Zweig as a savior — as natural as it was that Zweig found the pressure they put on him unendurable. … [T]he writer was forever aware that anything he could do was but the tiniest fraction of everything he could not.
Zweig fled to Brazil, where, several years later, in early 1942, he committed suicide.
I wonder what was going through Zweig’s mind when the bus photo was taken. Specifically, I wonder what he was thinking about New York. That it was a bad joke, perhaps? Here was the city’s most famous boulevard — at the bottom of an Expressionist canyon, with not a tree in sight. It can have seemed no more natural to him — no more naturally civic or urban — than a computer-generated cinematic dystopia does to us.
But even as Zweig is having “the New York experience” — you can do the same today, although you won’t be alone on that upper deck unless it’s raining — I’m thinking, looking at the picture (which has the air of a publicity shot) how bogus it is. How definitely Out-of-Town. How many other great cities, I wonder, operate theme parks in their centers, locations in which the natives never linger, however often they may cross them? I have yet to meet a New Yorker who has gone to Times Square as one might go to Central Park — to be in the place. Times Square is a bizarre spectacle (especially at night, when darkness is defied) through which one passes on the way from one place to another. It is much safer than it used to be, but it is no more interesting. It is still a limbo for souls who have not found a perch in this town. (That many aren’t even looking for one heightens the ghoulishness.) Fifth Avenue is just as strange, and even less pleasant. Fifth Avenue is as gruesome as one of Saul Steinberg’s streetscapes of virago matrons and skull-headed cowboys.
And what, whispers a little voice, about the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Is that part of the theme park, too? An embarrassing question, because the Museum is the same, yes — but different. The difference is that while there aren’t any New Yorkers who think that it’s cool to hang out in Times Square, there are millions who complain that they ought to get to the Museum more often, but don’t, because — well, it’s there; you can go anytime. It was with this sort of thinking in mind that Kathleen recently said, of friends who were moving away from New York, that now we would see them more often.
Ruefully, I must admit that the New York shown in Inside Llewyn Davis is recognizable as the city that I have known all my life. It is not a place that anyone would want to visit, I don’t think; the Coen Brothers have captured how unattractive New York really is, and how unwelcoming. It is the city as seen by someone who has given up on it. Yesterday was perhaps not the right day for me to watch Inside Llewyn Davis for the first time. I was recovering from mild St Patrick’s Day excess, not hung over exactly but touched with the existential malaise that sets in when slick pleasures are withheld. This matched almost perfectly the malaise that I should have experienced had I been in Llewyn Davis’s shoes, and I didn’t need the double dose. Bad timing.
But not too bad. The film has begun to haunt me. I can’t get Carey Mulligan out of my mind — that scene, in Washington Square Park, in which she pours “vitriol” (Llewyn’s word) all over the man she wishes she hadn’t slept with, and you can see that it’s herself that she’s really so unspeakably angry with. And the scene at the Gate of Horn club in Chicago, where F Murray Abraham dispenses a dose of realism that would be astringent in a documentary. In real life, we know, people survive such dismissals; but vulnerable feature-film audiences oughtn’t to be asked to imagine doing so. And yet I can’t stop replaying the scene.
***
Also haunting me, the following passage from The Human Condition:
The one activity taught by Jesus in word and deed is the activity of goodness, and goodness obviously harbors a tendency to hide from being seen or heard. Christian hostility toward the public realm, the tendency at least of early Christians to lead a life as far removed from the public realm as possible, can also be understood as a self-evident consequence of devotion to good works, independent of all beliefs and expectations. For it is manifest that the moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness’ sake. When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness, though it may still be useful as organized charity or an act of solidarity. Therefore: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them.” Goodness can exist only when it is not perceived, not even by its author; whoever sees himself performing a good deed is no longer good, but at best a useful member of society or a dutiful member of a church. Therefore: “Let not they left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”
This is severe, I think, to the point of hysteria. (It appears on page 74 of my text, shortly into Section 10, “The Location of Human Activities”). Perhaps it reflects the limitations of pre-modern psychology, which is always uncomfortable with mixed motives and absolutely ignorant of the complexity of the brain. In its either/or world, it is only wise to aim for doing good without being aware of it, no matter how difficult this unawareness is to achieve. The alternative — the only alternative — is to be a vainglorious do-gooder, parading virtue to the point of hypocritical Tartuffery.
Our understanding must be more nuanced. We acknowledge, for example, that the recognition that one has done a good thing will probably make it easier to do other good things in the future, and that this in itself is a good thing. Aristotle, who had no conception of Christian goodness, praised the good man for his habits. To Christian ears, there is something weasely, wrongfully automated, about habits. Every sacrifice ought to be made from scratch, as it were. I believed this long after my faith (such as it was) lapsed completely. It was only in weary but experienced middle age that I saw that the zeal of eschewing habit was unnecessarily exhausting, and weirdly inhumane.
It’s important, also, to know that the thing that you’re doing is actually a good thing. This is not the simple matter that it used to be, and the inquiry that it fairly demands is incompatible with maintaining a cloud of unknowingness.
I am not sure that I value the distinction between the doer of good deeds (Arendt quite rightly understands that no one can be good) and the useful member of society, between the acts of goodness and acts of organized charity. It seems, in fact, rather vain to mark a distinction, to betray a concern for one’s personal salvation. I am reminded, for the umpteenth time, of the Hebrew school teacher’s dismissal of Hannah Arendt’s announcement of atheism: Who asked you?
*As of this writing, the piece has not yet appeared online.