Dear Diary: Smart
If there is one word that Will’s mother does not want him to hear, ever — applied to himself, at least — it is “smart.” Whether or not it’s a word that anyone would ever think of applying to my grandson, I quite agree. Certainly nothing endangered the promise of my own life more toxically than being told that I was very smart. I became addicted to the notion that hard work was infra dig and déclassé. Indeed, I regard myself today as a recovering smart person.
It would be gross disingenuousness to deny my delighted belief that Will is loaded with brains. But this does not at all mean that he is, or ever will be, smart.
“Smart” is an American virtue. It describes the ideal American intellectual capacity: a knack for beating the system. Europeans cheat the system, by not paying taxes. Americans believe in a combination of luck and smarts, with the smarts providing a blueprint for cutting corners (a/k/a red tape) and advancing directly to Go. This makes us love the system, by the way; it explains why socialism has never had a chance on these shores. Beating the system means leaving the suckers around you behind. When my father went to Harvard Law in the late Thirties, the incoming first-years, planted in their proto-stadium seats, were directed to look to their left, then to their right. One of the men that each man beheld would not graduate, they were told. This is what is meant by “socialism for the rich.”
One of the things that I love about my father is that he did graduate — barely.
My father thought that I was a lot smarter than he was, which was touching but very wrong. (Even he knew it: he used to say that I had more books than sense. True enough — at least for the first fifty years.) No matter how brightly I turn up the brilliance of my critical wattage, I am never going to be offered a seat on the board of Twentieth Century Fox, an organization that was happy to pay my father for his good advice as a director (a director of, not at) for nine happy years, during the last of which he got to hobnob with Princess Grace. Even though he never ever went to the movies and argued against investing in the original Poseidon Adventure.
It was Dad’s dirty secret that he worked very hard. So dirty that no one ever saw it happen. No matter what the season, Dad was never at home, and, when he was, he was asleep, zonked in the latest of a series of plush leather easy chairs.Â
It’s very Maureen Dowd of me to say so, but I do believe that my father slept his way to the top. Without ever taking his clothes off or getting into be with anyone else. In plain view of his family, in fact, while endless golf tournaments unspooled on the television set in the den. His example certainly makes Sir Joseph Porter’s polishing up the handle so carefully look downright grinding.
Whatever Will’s intellectual capacities might be, his life at the moment is sharply constrained by the skeleto-muscular limitations of life at thirteen or fourteen weeks of age. As such, Will faces a challenge that even the smartest kid can’t beat. If he were really smart, he would get the picture and stop complaining. Right? Â