Gotham Diary:
A Little Cold
3 March 2015
It’s Wednesday, so I must have a doctor’s appointment. Yes — the dermatologist again. I’m on the verge of canceling, because I have a little cold, my second in three weeks. It would be great to fluff up the pillows, climb back into bed, and plow through Fathers and Sons. (I feel a Turgenev binge coming on.) Why, I am wondering, does Turgenev feel so relaxed, where Dickens seemed so crabbed? The comparison prompts me to consider Dickens as an experimental writer, if you can imagine. This poses great problems for my understanding Shirley Hazzard’s judgment that Great Expectations is “the most greatly realized novel in English.” I’m not sure that Great Expectations is a novel at all. There’s too much parable in it, and of course too much advocacy journalism. (One answer to my Where’s Compeyson question might well be that the actual villain of the piece isn’t Compeyson at all, but the English establishment.) There is a measure of journalism in all good fiction; novelists must observe their chosen corners of the world with critical intelligence. But we do not read novels for news of the world. We read novels to test our understanding of human nature by judging how people fit into stories. Turgenev is one of the great natural novelists, which is to say that he writes novels that define the form. Most satisfying!
(It ought to be clear, I suppose, that I do not subscribe to the view that a novel can be anything that a writer wants it to be.)
I have never been to Russia, and the Russia that Turgenev writes about was swept away long ago, at least in its visible details. But the setting of Fathers and Sons seems very familiar, or exotic in a very familiar way. There’s the house in the country, which ought to be idyllic but can’t be, because there’s not enough money. There’s the drawing room “in the latest style,” and there’s Pavel Petrovich in his tailored English clothes. There’s naive, youthfully fatuous Arkasha, and boorish, troublemaking Bazarov. There’s the question, why doesn’t the sweet-tempered Nikolay Petrovich marry Fenechka, the mother of his newborn son? The possibilities for comic but rueful disappointment stretch out before me like a field of Russian snow, and my bed, with its pillows, blankets, and quilts, would make the perfect sled in which to cross it.
The little cold hit me yesterday afternoon, as I was finishing the tidying in the book room. I had meant to go on with some paperwork, and even to do some ironing, but I could do none of this. I felt exhausted. But it was not just exhaustion, I see now.
***
When you get to be older, there are days when dying doesn’t seem so very bad. One isn’t going to live forever, so what would be the harm in missing a rough patch or two, not in one’s own life but in the larger world. There are days when things really do seem to be going to the dogs, and sometimes this impression is created by what seem to be new and unimagined developments, such as the oafish thoughtlessness of young people with their devices (knowing that one would have been just as bad); and sometimes it rises from the sheer tedium of watching things happen over again, such as the crossness and dislocation of the Sixties. Young people have no idea how like boomers they are in their hope — I think that it’s a hope, not quite a belief — that the world’s problems can be fixed without resort to political activity. By “political activity” I mean “organized compromise.” Young people aren’t alone in disdaining it. Tea Partiers don’t believe in it, either; they’re convinced that their compromises have loaded them with burdens but withheld benefits. If fewer and fewer Americans believe in government, government has less and less interest in Americans. Look at the way government has allowed itself to be captured by business organizations, how addicted it has become to governing by means of obscure, coded laws buried in haystacks of legislation. Look at the way government has sent waves of volunteer servicemen and -women off to foreign lands to engage in pointless and ill-conceived battles, none of which seem to have changed anything. Something must be done in Syria, clearly, but there is no reason to look to the United States for any good ideas. As in the Sixties, we have come to an impasse: the old ways don’t work, and the new ways aren’t new. Who wants to go through it a second time?
But my political despair is but a passing fancy compared with my horror of American violence.
In a recent piece in The New York Review of Books, Nathaniel Rich asked, “What, then, explains football’s appeal among Americans?” His enumeration of possible factors concluded thus:
I thought about this as I watched this year’s Super Bowl, which was one of the most thrilling sporting events in recent memory. My fandom has only increased in recent years, against my better judgment (and even as my New York Giants have foundered). I didn’t have to think very long. The source of the game’s appeal is obvious. It’s the violence. The NFL understands this. Why else would it risk lawsuits and moral indignation? If violence wasn’t a crucial element in the sport’s appeal, the league would institute two-handed touch tomorrow.
Rich’s final paragraph begins, “America is addicted to violence; America is addicted to football.”
Every now and then, some sociologist prances along with findings that fail to establish causality leading from the violence vicariously experienced in video games, superhero comics, and “sporting events” to acts of criminal violence. But this reminds me of an exchange that I had with a European who complicated my country on its relative lack of corruption. “But you see,” I replied, thinking of lobbyists, “in this country it is all quite legal.” So with violence. To be sure, we don’t tolerate criminal gangs’ running amok and breaking each others’ bones. Put those gangs in uniform, however, and oblige them to follow a few simple dance steps, and they can thrash away while pretending to chase a ball. We don’t tolerate holdups, but we make firearms easily available to disturbed individuals — men who are already challenged by the violence in the air. You tell me: Why is American Sniper such a hit? Because it has tapped a nerve of patriotism? In your dreams! American Sniper is a movie about a guy who gets to shoot people, bang, bang, bang, they’re dead, and be praised for it! Hallelujah! The horror is not so much the extent of American violence — all violence is horrible — as it is the extent of okay violence.
I know where it comes from. It comes from the angry disenchantment of white men. I can remember when a white man who acted responsibly would almost certainly be granted a place at the table as of right, and not only that, but also the automatic respect of all those who were not white men. These privileges have been inexorably eroded during my lifetime, with the tacit permission of elite white men at the top of the socio-economic heap. As another bit of fallout from the Sixties, American white men stopped acting in solidarity and began adhering to different class and cultural norms. (Archie Bunker was a figure of fun.) Sauve qui peut!
But now I’ve got to get ready to pay a visit to the dermatologist.