Gotham Diary:
Du Calme
20 January 2015
Usually, the difficulty is that I have nothing much to say, nothing ready to pour over the lip of my mind and splash onto the page. It doesn’t happen very often, but when I find it difficult to begin an entry, that is the problem. But it is not the problem this morning. This morning, I am stricken.
I am stricken by the pealing reverberations of having read The Transit of Venus and, for the first time, having understood what was going on in that book, including the horrific, but even more sad than horrific, final moment.
I am stricken by Leon Wieseltier’s call to arms in The New York Times Book Review. I am stricken by it, and inclined to read it as a call to arms, because I can still hear Marilynne Robinson urging courage upon the Nation staffers who recorded a discussion with her.
I am as stricken by these things as so many people seemed to be by the Charlie Hebdo/Hyper Cacher killings two weeks ago.
***
The Robinson interview — it was actually a Q & A — at The Nation made for embarrassing listening. The staffers, only partially identified — I caught the name of Deputy Literary Editor Miriam Markowitz, and I presume that the “John” who kicked off the discussion was John Palattella, the Literary Editor — did not speak particularly well. The women, as so many women do these days, made statements that sounded like questions — almost like apologies. The men correspondingly mumbled, as if terrified of giving offense. These presumably bright and literate people spoke as if they had no very clear idea of what they wanted to ask Marilynne Robinson. At the same time, they could not keep an unpleasant note of challenge entirely out of their voices. The one thing they seemed sure of was that they would not be, could not be hoodwinked. At the same time, they sounded — the men especially — as insecure as the rankest undergraduates.
I don’t think that it would have been much different anywhere else — not, that is, without sounding like a performance. This is how well-educated literate people talk today. They feel themselves to be under siege. Is anybody still reading? Has anyone bought a book lately? Has anyone received a piece of email that it was actually a pleasure to read?
The staffers seemed to be genuinely surprised by the relish with which Robinson embraces being a liberal. Politically, it may be that they found themselves further to the left than any liberal might be, but that’s not quite what it sounded like. What surprised and almost embarrassed them was Robinson’s cockeyed optimism about the United States, her expectation that it might go on to do great things.
Robinson has schooled herself, I suspect, to say as little as possible about the American South; when she mentions it at all, it is to remind us that they owned slaves down there. Her South is a swamp whose atmosphere is poisoned by racist miasmas. She barely hints that these exhalations have wafted north. In the Nation discussion, she attributed the collapse of liberalism to a “backlash” against the Abolitionist Movement, but she did not dilate. Certainly, as Louis Menand pointed out in his 2001 study, The Metaphysical Club, there was a surge of anti-idealism in American thought in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Thoughtful Americans abandoned speculative philosophy for pragmatism. Jim Crow was the price, paid by the very men and women that the late war had been thought to enfranchise. Now the cost of this pragmatism is more generally spread upon all of us. Just the other day, Maureen Dowd was complaining that filmmaker Ava DuVernay knowingly misrepresents the positive role played by LBJ in the Selma moment.
DuVernay sets the tone for her portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as patronizing and skittish on civil rights in the first scene between the president and Dr. King. L.B.J. stands above a seated M.L.K., pats him on the shoulder, and tells him “this voting thing is just going to have to wait” while he works on “the eradication of poverty.”
Many of the teenagers by me bristled at the power dynamic between the men. It was clear that a generation of young moviegoers would now see L.B.J.’s role in civil rights through DuVernay’s lens.
And that’s a shame. I loved the movie and find the Oscar snub of its dazzling actors repugnant. But the director’s talent makes her distortion of L.B.J. more egregious. Artful falsehood is more dangerous than artless falsehood, because fewer people see through it.
DuVernay told Rolling Stone that, originally, the script was more centered on the L.B.J.-M.L.K. relationship and was “much more slanted to Johnson.”
“I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie,” she said.
Could it be that the ever-unspooling curse of racism has tarnished the old ideal of an open, free society for men and women of all colors with the tinge of imperialist presumption?
Marilynne Robinson writes about her childhood, and about the personal point of view that developed out of that childhood, as though she had grown up in a pre-lapsarian, or at any rate pre-pragmatic America, as indeed her corner of the Northwest (in Idaho) might well have been. The legacy of the Civil War is in some ways thinnest in that part of the country. In others — the density of Mormons, the popularity of guns — it is very thick. But we must not romanticize the liberal New England that means so much to Robinson. In 1850, Harvard Medical School students staged an effective protest that overturned the admission of black men.
***
I don’t see anything in the past, including the American past, worth trying to recapture. Even the most glorious developments are founded on mistakes, and we almost always fix our mistakes with new mistakes. Our inability to encompass the complications of earthly life is a sad fact of the human condition. I do believe, however, that our understanding grows. Sometimes, it even grows too quickly, as it is doing today in connection with environmental matters. There seems to be no way of grasping the encroachments of environmental degradation without flying into panic or sinking into despair. And yet they were altogether unimagined by our great-grandparents. At the same time, human agency played no role in the advent of the ice ages, great and small, that human beings have survived. The best one can do is to pray: du calme.