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Amis

2012-02-11T15:09:00.002-06:00

January/February 2012

Martin Amis: A British author who matches up to some of the American giants (Isabel Fonesca)

What's in a first name? If you're writing a literary biography of Martin Amis and call him Martin throughout, quite a lot. Assumptions of intimacy negate critical distance, the whole point of the book. Bradford's excuse — that he has to distinguish between Amis senior and junior, and that he'd seen a fair bit of junior when compiling his biography — might just wash, were it not that Amis the younger comes out of it embarrassingly well. Embarrassing, that is, for Martin.

It would be interesting to know what Amis thought about this. Did Bradford ask permission? In Amis's position I would have refused. If ever an author's reputation stood in need of a no-nonsense, non-matey biography to blow away media froth and straighten out judgments so frequently warped by envy and political resentment, and generally take an objective view, it is his.

Personally I believe that many of the novels — because that's what we're talking about, isn't it? — would still come out of it pretty well. Maybe the man too, though the English habit of focusing on the performer rather than the performance warps intelligent criticism; Degas was a misanthrope and a virulent anti-Dreyfusard, but look at the pictures. In the light of the wilful fault-finding and scabrous coverage of Amis the man a cooler perspective was overdue.

As chairman of the Booker Prize judges in 1995 I was amazed by the refusal of three fifths of the panel to admit that The Information (not his best book, admittedly) had any virtue at all. As if in chastisement of the Amis approach to writing a prissily didactic novel won. Against The Ghost Road by Pat Barker, whose First World War hero is a modern paragon-anti-war and a war hero, lower class but well-read and intelligent, and bisexual to boot-Amis's messed-up, woman-harming lead character never stood a chance.

Bradford shoots off in the opposite direction, giving us an image of author and novels so over-glossed you can smell the varnish. To a writer dogged by accusations of nepotism, celebrity-mongering, social alpinism, big advances, vanity teeth-fixing and the rest, surely this is a disservice to his hero? Inevitably critic after critic has underlined Bradford's partiality for his subject. To the old joke My Struggle, by Martin Amis, we can now add a critical counterpart: Mart: The Life.

Not that it's a bad book, and for someone like myself who was always more interested in the novels than the gossip there are revelations. A striking (and I hope not overwritten) chapter concerns his passage from self-styled teenage yob who had not troubled to read his father's books, let alone the classics, to shameless swot, who at 17 began toiling away at his Beowulf and his Keats and his Latin and got to Oxford on personal merit; with the sons of meritorious fathers, as one of the Miliband brothers reminds us, it was not always the case at the time. We are also given what I assume to be a true picture of the high social plateau inhabited by his women (boho aristos or equivalent, most of them frequently clever too) to set against the determinedly lowlife pastimes of the author in his twenties.

Throughout his novels and critical writings the word "talent" recurs with obsessive frequency, to the point where for Amis, you sometimes feel, it marks the great human divide. (Back to Degas: Amis would have relished, one suspects, the old boy's magisterial admonition to the feckless Whistler: "You behave like a man with no talent.") Except for a single slobby mate of his youth his charmed circle consisted of more or less gifted folk (Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Clive James, etc), an exclusive and nakedly ambitious clique with fashionable attitudes to match, and where Trotskyism was an indulgence, like drink or women.

His own wariness of politics when all about him were conforming to type was and remains to Amis's credit. Think of the damage to his work if he had reacted against his father's stagy rightism and toed the arts-person's political line: imagine the glorious John Self reformed, at the end of Money, and with a leftist agenda. But then Amis had too much sense of humour for earnest causes.

A major reason to enjoy his work is his Gogolian aspect. As in Dead Souls orThe Government Inspector, the objects of his satire are not so much sociopolitical entities as grotesque specimens of true humanity (think of the wastrel Khlestakov in The Government Inspector as Keith Talent, or the bully and cheat Nozdryov in Dead Souls as John Self). More democratic than the average British satirist, Amis looks down as well as up for his material, and could never have written a book as silly as Ian McEwan's Booker-winningAmsterdam, where a British Foreign Secretary is lampooned as a cross-dresser.

You could of course argue that domestic politics were too pettifogging and insular for his not too modest ambitions. When he finally engages with political events it is later in his career, and on a global scale: Stalin and his Western admirers in Koba the Dread, the Holocaust in Time's Arrow, and Islamism inThe Second Plane. And of course he has outraged the prejudices of his peers; hence in part the increased critical pasting of his fiction.

His only concession to bien pensant fashion was an impetuous commitment to nuclear disarmament, perhaps as a counter to those who said he was lacking in beliefs of any kind. But then what do "commitment" or "anti-nuclear" mean? I do not recall too many bomb-lovers from my time as a diplomat dealing with Soviet and Chinese affairs, in need of an epiphany about the awfulness of these weapons. It is not as if Amis engaged in an informed critique of arms reduction strategies, and suggestions of a better way. Nothing so solid, or so tedious.

It would be wrong to be too hard on this book. When linking the novels to the life, Bradford has his moments. A frighteningly talented, hard-nosed girlfriend, Mary Furness, was the model it seems for Nicola Six in London Fields, whose ball-breaking image scandalised two female Booker judges in 1989. The real scandal of course was the pusillanimous failure of the chairman, David Lodge, to come off the fence and ensure that this superb novel won. Instead it was Ishiguru's deathly Remains of the Day, a kind of no-garden of a novel, but then the English can never resist a butler.

So there is real meat here, but everywhere the veneration intrudes. Throughout the book the swell of eulogy grows into a wave that breaks in the last chapter, in which Bradford drowns in his own hyperbole. Yes, Amis is superior to Barnes and McEwan (is that saying so much?), but superior to Nabokov, as he at one point claims? Wonderful as it is, is Money up there with James Joyce and Ulysses? And is the (admittedly over-derided) Yellow Dog in fact a "brilliantly orchestrated" masterpiece?

Bradford's book is an opportunity lost. Here we have that rare thing, a modern British author able at his best to match up to some of the American giants, but his biographer spoils it by cosy excess, unable it seems to contemplate the possibility that his subject is not always at the top of his form. The result is another example of the wearisome boosterism that has come to characterise so much of British culture. With a PR smoothichops leading the country and a circus barker as Mayor of London, must we go in for unseemly puffery in the arts as well? More selective praise would have helped cut the ground from under Amis's purblind or rancorous detractors.

The best critical passages are a reminder of the man's quality, so much greater than his father's, and of the seriousness beneath the humour. In this regard, more could have been said about Amis's The War Against Cliché and his prowess as a critic. Recently reviewing Public Enemies, the exchange of letters between Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq, I found myself casting around for a pair of British essayists who could pull off a similar performance: only an Amis/Hitchens correspondence occurred to me. And on the subject of what Amis might have written, the great mystery is why he has never taken on the pop industry. Don DeLillo had a go in Great Jones Street, with his Bucky Wunderlick character, and Salman Rushdie with his rather cloying The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but with his lack of deference to the rock world and feeling for gargantuan pretence, Amis would be the natural man to do it.

In a literary market that has become toppy and frothy, as the City boys say when shares soar above their underpinnings, and in need of a correction, how does the Amis oeuvre look when set against his frequently bloated rivals? Let's take the simplest measure. People will be reading this work in 50 years' time, it is routinely and dubiously maintained of many an ephemeral Booker laureate. With the best of Amis junior, the prize's most distinguished non-recipient, they really will.

Tony Judt

2012-02-11T11:23:00.000-06:00

Thinking the Twentieth Century
by Tony Judt (William Heineman, £25)

“The twentieth century,” Tony Judt asserts in this luminous book of conversations with the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “is the century of the intellectuals.” What does it say about intellectuals, then, that the century in which they exercised so much influence on policymaking and public opinion was also the bloodiest in history? There are some sobering answers—few of them flattering—in Thinking the Twentieth Century. Published two years after Judt’s death from motor neurone disease, this book contains his final views on politics and economics and on a range of thinkers from Keynes to Eric Hobsbawm.

A relatively obscure British academic based in New York, Judt refashioned himself in the last decade of his life into a strikingly bold and prominent public intellectual. Published in 2005, his masterpiece Postwar, a panoramic account of Europe after the second world war, broadened his reputation as a scholar of French intellectual history. But Judt was to become even better known for his eloquent defence of the old values of good governance, social and economic justice, and his attacks on his peers—western liberal intellectuals—for having succumbed to the false consolations of dogma and the blandishments of power.

Judt valiantly tried to resurrect a faded ideal: of the unaffiliated intellectual who told the truth as he saw it, as opposed to those who appealed to the higher “truths” of nationalism, human rights, security interests, neo-imperialism, or some other abstraction. “The distinctive feature,” he argued in 2006, “of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest.” In the end, Judt himself did not overcome the failings of post-war liberalism that he so brilliantly illuminated. But few of his contemporaries seem to have been as aware as Judt of the many traps—the seductions of higher status as well as of ideology—which the 20th century laid for intellectuals.

As Judt’s book relates, the raucously polemical century began with the obviously malign thinkers on the right such as the antisemitic newspaper editor Edouard Drumant and the fascist Robert Brasillach. These were followed by the idealistic thinkers on the left whose endeavour to make a better world for all of humanity ended in, as Albert Camus wrote, “slave camps under the flag of freedom,” and “massacres justified by philanthropy.”

After two world wars and the Holocaust came an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity in the west—the perfect interlude, you might think, for intellectuals to uphold their oft-asserted ideals of reason and justice. But the cold war seems to have enhanced the capacity of writers, academics, politicians and journalists for terrible ideological choices. Stalinism and the gulag did not lack for apologists in the west. Nor did the unconscionable nuclear build-up at home, and the destructive proxy wars abroad for the sake of the “free world.”

As intellectual life was professionalised in the postwar period, universities and think tanks expanded, bringing previously unheard-of material rewards for those pursuing the life of the mind. Various “systems analysts” and “game theorists,” such as Herman Kahn, a connoisseur of thermonuclear war, proliferated around military-industrial complexes. Many more scholar-experts like Walt Rostow and Henry Kissinger eagerly helped advance and justify American policies in the cold war.

In a prodigiously successful postwar America, the old notion of the freelance intellectual, who questioned all verities, including his own, was threatened with irrelevance. In his influential book The End of Ideology (1960), the American sociologist Daniel Bell proposed that the overwhelming superiority of the American model of industrial capitalism and democracy over communism had rendered intellectual debate moot. According to Bell, there was a “rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism.” Furthermore, Bell added, America’s “affluent” society could find a place, even “prestige” for even its most bitter former critics.

Indeed, no one moved faster to realise this possibility, and whisper advice to power, than the ex-Marxist radicals of Bell’s own generation: Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Norman Podhoretz. They were the first neoconservatives and precursors to today’s Washington-based intellectuals who derive their salaries from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the Weekly Standard and affirm their allegiance in turn to the right wing of the Republican party.

Towards the end of his life, Judt, born in 1948, became queasily aware that many liberals of his own generation—a “pretty crappy” one in his unforgiving assessment—had also followed the neocon trajectory, retreating, as he put it, “from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security.” Unlike Bell’s cohorts, who had their first political awakening in the mean 1930s, Judt’s peers “grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political.” His generation came to maturity as the bland postwar consensus in favour of the welfare state gave way, after the economic crises of the 1970s, to Reagan-Thatcher neo-liberalism. When the Berlin wall collapsed, Judt’s compatriots were ensconced in universities, the media and think tanks. Having lived with the menace of communism for most of their lives, few were immune to the belief that liberal democracy and capitalism had “won.”

Over the following years, from the disastrous social and political engineering in Russia by free-marketeers to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, many intellectuals were to ignore classical liberalism’s exhortation to moderation and self-scrutiny. Instead, they became vulnerable to the hubristic ambition that had once flourished among their communist rivals. Many adopted the view that political and economic systems originating in one small part of the world could be exported anywhere with sufficient application of will and resources. The Canadian liberal Michael Ignatieff approvingly described the United States as “an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known.”

***

Thinking the Twentieth Century, incandescent on every page with intellectual energy, recounts how Tony Judt managed to escape the delusions of his pretty crappy generation after a conventional start. He outlines in his conversations with Snyder a fairly orthodox career of an Anglo-American academic: stints at Oxbridge and Berkeley, specialist studies in French intellectual history, which in the 1980s broadened into an interest in east Europe, all of this interspersed with minor marital crises.

There seems something conventional, too, about Judt’s early cold-war liberalism. If he absorbed from the French intellectual Raymond Aron an obsession with Marxism, he took from Camus a broader distrust of vulgar instrumentalists—those who claimed that eggs had to be broken in order to make omelettes. This training made him contemptuous of communism and its variants, such as Maoism, that justified sordid means by positing noble ends.

Yet like many anti-communist liberals, Judt did not apply these principles to the practices of modernisation supported by the west in the third world. Meant to usher rural societies into industrial capitalism with western tools and expertise, these top-down measures were often, as with Iran under the Shah, accompanied by immense violence. Nor did he have much to say about the “free” world’s support of fanatical Islamists in Afghanistan.

It was as though Judt could not overcome the partial visions of liberalism—an “ideology of the rich,” the Irish critic Conor Cruise O’Brien declared once, “the elevation into universal values of the codes which favoured the emergence, and favour the continuance, of capitalist society.”

Liberalism had accumulated its persuasive power in western Europe during the heyday of industrial capitalism and imperialism. Battered and on the defensive during the intra-European conflicts of the first half of the 20^th century, it acquired, almost by default, a flattering self-definition during its ostensible struggles with the Third Reich and the miserable utopias of Soviet and Chinese communists. Many liberals came to see themselves as upholding a superior universalist ideology, an attitude that amounted in practice to an parochial disregard, even contempt, for other values and worldviews. Symptomatically, the “east” denoted eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the mainstream liberal perspective, not the vast unknown lands beyond the Aegean Sea, with whom Europe shared a deeply fraught history, and where the United States had, in the postwar era, picked up the white man’s burden.

Until the final decade of his life, Judt never seems to have been a vocal outlier. Before 2000 he had little to say about even decolonisation, which defined the second half of the 20th century, and was often violently resisted by the liberal-democratic west. On French colonialism in Algeria, Judt was prone to give the dithering humanist Camus an easier pass than did other critics. In Israel in 1967, Judt witnessed a country “that despised its neighbours and was about to open a catastrophic, generation-long rift with them by seizing and occupying their land.” But if the steady rise of settler-Zionism in Israel in the 1970s and 80s troubled Judt a lot, there is little hint of it in his writings. And Anglo-American Europeanists like himself, generally quiescent on economic issues, were hardly well-placed to take a stand against the neo-liberal orthodoxies that began their long reign under Reagan and Thatcher, or to point out that the Third Way of Clinton and Blair actually denoted, in the absence of a Second Way, a refurbished First Way.

Judt may have taken too seriously Raymond Aron’s straitjacketing notion, borrowed from Weber, of the responsibility of intellectuals: that they “must always face the decision of how to act in a given situation.” (In the case of Aron, a consummate “insider” in French politics, this meant keeping silent on torture in Algeria). In any case, before 2000 Judt never seems to have criticised the norms of an intellectual milieu where the concerns of European and American elites were paramount, and philosophy and history appeared essentially western in nature and provenance.

***

This is partly why Judt’s emergence as a critic of regnant wisdom in the wake of 9/11 caught many by surprise—especially those demoralised and depressed by the spectacle of western liberals (mostly American, but also some British and French) lining up to justify George W Bush and Tony Blair’s wars with such fig leafs as “humanitarian intervention,” “regime change,” and “democracy-promotion.”

Christopher Hitchens, overwhelmed by some “exhilarating” ideological clarity about “Islamo-fascism” on 9/11, had to dramatically renounce long-held principles and acrimoniously debate old mates. Many liberals of Judt’s generation didn’t even have to work this hard. For them it was the “good Fight,”—“reassuringly comparable,” Judt writes, “to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism.” In reality it resembled more the ideological manias of the first world war, which turned a European liberal like Thomas Mann into a chest-thumping chauvinist and the American pragmatist John Dewey into a war-monger.

Eastern European intellectuals ennobled in the 1980s and 1990s—Václav Havel and Adam Michnik—also stood behind Bush and Blair. The temptation to follow his old heroes would have been immense for Judt. And such was the intellectual climate of conformity, particularly in America, that few liberals openly questioned the dominant narrative in which liberal democracy was under siege by “Islamo-fascism.” (In Britain, the dissenting voices were relatively conservative figures like Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Max Hastings, John Gray and Simon Jenkins). Ian Buruma’s mild reservations about the Islam-baiter Ayaan Hirsi Ali was to provoke a book-length assault on him by Paul Berman; Martin Amis’s sadistic fantasies about Muslims went unnoticed long after he first confided them to The Times; and a soft bigotry about Muslims and Islam in general has been the norm among many European and American liberal intellectuals.

Nevertheless, as Judt tells Snyder, “it seemed to me increasingly urgent… that we discuss uncomfortable matters openly at a time of self-censorship and conformity.” Judt also recognised his unique freedom and responsibility as a tenured academic. “Intellectuals with access to the media and job security in a university carry a distinctive responsibility in politically troubled times.” It helped, too, that Judt also possessed a subtle understanding of the paradoxes of the militant humanitarianism advocated by liberal intellectuals. Liberty is indeed, he tells Snyder “a universal human value.” But “ever since the nineteenth century, we have moved rather too easily from one man’s freedom to speak of collective freedoms, as though these were the same kind of things. But once you start talking about liberating a people, or bringing liberty as an abstraction, very different things begin to happen.”

Like Orwell, who did so much to rinse the English liberal-left of its cant and self-righteousness, Judt began after 9/11 to chip away at the mendacities and delusions of his own side. His timing couldn’t have been better. The ostentatious moralism of many of his peers stemmed from a growing crisis within liberalism. Deprived of its foil in the “east,” after 1989, liberalism had become complacent and directionless, passively endorsing neoconservative and neo-liberal fantasies of remaking the world. Liberals had come to depend on simple ideological oppositions and the satisfaction of standing with the victors of history. Judt was, as he tells Snyder, “not interested in winners”—an un-American moral and disposition that allied him with those possessed of a tragic vision of history.

He was not going to follow the example of Isaiah Berlin, who, he tells Snyder in one of the sharp asides that pepper this book, largely owed his success in Anglo-American circles to “his reluctance to take a stand, his unwillingness to be ‘awkward’ about certain “controversial matters.” Judt’s own god of Zionism had died in 1967. Performing some delayed obsequies in an article in the New York Review of Books in 2003, Judt not only assailed the deceptions of the two-state solution, which, even as it recedes from sight, is invoked piously in liberal intellectual circles. Denouncing ethno-nationalism, he called for a single state that accommodated Palestinians as well as Israelis as full citizens.

Judt probably knew the costs of this: exclusion from at least some Anglo-American circles of influence. Many liberal intellectuals had consistently failed to publicly express any disquiet about reflexive American support for a country where, as Judt pointed out, long before this belief became a commonplace, political power had “shifted toward religious zealots and territorial fundamentalists.”

After his article on Israel appeared, Judt faced, in addition to brusquely curtailed friendships, organised boycotts and even some threats. Most members of homo academicus, a generally timid species, would have capitulated at this point. To his credit, Judt only grew bolder, using every available platform to amplify his ideas: the New York Review of Books, one of the few American periodicals to survive the intellectual fiasco of the last decade, as well as the Nation, where he praised such reviled figures as Edward Said and argued for the existence of the then taboo entity, the “Israel lobby.”

His prose, shorn of academic orotundity, acquired a sardonic vigour without congealing, like the late Christopher Hitchens’s style, into a bullying agglomeration of such adjectives as “sinister,” “creepy” and “totalitarian.” Judt’s review of a book on the cold war by John Lewis Gaddis is typical of his output during this period, criticising it as “perfectly adapted for contemporary America: an anxious country curiously detached from its own past as well as from the rest of the world and hungry for ‘a fireside fairytale with a happy ending.’”

As the global recession deepened, Judt also recognised that the liberals promoting democracy abroad had missed the big ideological shifts at home. The obsession with GDP and the fetishisation of individual wealth had shifted public debate from the moral realm of redistribution and justice to the narrowly utilitarian one of productivity and growth. “I think,” he tells Snyder, “we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970s, towards economics. Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient.” Judt hoped that the young, forced now to deal with the mess left behind by his generation, would rediscover “the politics of social cohesion based around collective purposes.”

This reinvention of social democracy was, as Judt himself probably recognised, too optimistic (and, in America, positively utopian). Proposing it, he seemed to be nostalgic about the immediate postwar era in which a nanny state nurtured middle-class intellectuals like himself. “The great victors of the twentieth century,” he tells Snyder, “were the nineteenth-century liberals whose successors created the welfare state in all its protean forms.”

His foray into intellectual antiquarianism not only simplified the history of capitalism; it also ignored the extent to which welfare-state liberalism depended on its existential rivalry with communism and the continuing economic somnolence of the “east” beyond the Aegean Sea. Not surprisingly, liberals nowadays offer no real solution, apart from a warmed-over Keynesianism, to the severest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s.

Judt, too, failed to see how liberalism, quietly complicit in the long history of unregulated capitalism outside the west, could not but fail to respond to the inequities of liberal capitalist democracy in the west itself, let alone the new threats of environmental degradation. Still, one cannot point out the limitations of Judt’s thought without admiring how intrepidly he, in his last years, pushed its limits—an intellectual journey that promised many more surprises when it was cruelly curtailed.

2012-02-11T11:20:00.002-06:00

The skin we live in

SEBASTIAN SMEE

Lucian Freud dismantled the established conventions of portrait painting

“Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995)

Lucian Freud Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, 9th February-27th May, Tel: 0844 248 5033

A parent on bedside watch might have had the notion. A certain kind of photographer, too—the kind obsessed, for instance, by isolated fragments and strange magnifications. But among established portrait painters, the idea that the soles of a woman’s feet might testify to her person as eloquently and forcefully as her face feels unique to Lucian Freud.

The picture I’m thinking of is “Annabel Sleeping,” a portrait Freud made of one of his grown daughters in the late 1980s. It shows a woman, lying asleep on a bed, wearing a sky-blue dressing gown.

What makes it unusual, as a portrait, (and Freud thought of almost all of his pictures of people—and animals, too—as portraits) is that the subject is completely turned away from us. Not only are we not shown her face, we can’t even see the shape of her head. The closest we get is a spray of unkempt dark brown hair emerging from behind foetally hunched shoulders. The only parts of her body that are actually exposed are her ankles, her toes, and soles of her feet.

These last, however, convey everything. Intimacy above all, but also a kind of brute physicality. Freud’s handling of paint—an accretion of ridged and dimpled pigments, with sparing use of oil—is such that his subjects could scarcely be more palpable, more awkwardly or inelegantly there. The soft yellow centre of one arch is wrinkled, as if the foot were pleasurably flexed. The other foot is all bony, bulbous forms and thick impasto—not an appendage you could squeeze into high heels; more like a lumpy sausage, held together by elastic and somewhat capricious forces.

We are not in the realm of metaphor here. These feet have sculptural heft. They are not so much representations as new objects in the world. You can feel the press of one on the other, sense the humid stickiness between them. They have a consciousness all their own, a level of nervous awareness from which Annabel’s eyes and face, were they open and in play, could only distract us.

Freud, whose work is the subject of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (the first big show since his death last year) revolutionised our idea of portraiture from within. Ostensibly traditional (he used oil paints, worked from live models, constructed recognisable images of recognisable people), his work quietly dismantled almost every premise of portraiture as it has been traditionally understood.

Depicting people at their most vulnerable and exposed, Freud severed the connection between portraiture and social status—a connection upon which the National Portrait Gallery itself was founded. Painting them repeatedly dead-eyed or asleep, he broke with the idea that the success of a portrait should somehow be a function of psychological insight. He disdained symbols, attributes, and storytelling. And he rejected sentimental expectations that the eyes be “a window to the soul,” and so forth. “I used to leave the face to the last,” as he once explained. “I wanted the expression to be in the body. The head must be just another limb.”

Given all this, one might have expected his art to peddle ideas instead—or at least to have something grand to say about the human condition. And yes, certainly, Freud’s portraits do insist on our animal nature, and on our mortal condition. But this side of his work is often exaggerated by those who want to see him as a kind of expressionist, heightening our awareness of death and futility by accentuating the ugly, weary, and otherwise strained aspects of our earthly existence.

Freud was not an expressionist. And he was not—at least not after his work reached its maturity in the 1950s and 1960s—given to morbidity or romanticised melancholy. Rather, he was interested in the life in our bodies: the surging and pulsing of fluids beneath skin; the mobile intersections of bone, muscle, tendon, and fat; the indefatigable beating of hearts; the rhythmic expansion of the ribcage. “One of the most exciting things is seeing through the skin, to the blood and veins and markings,” he said.

Against the idea that he was obsessed with ageing and death is the reality that he painted children and young adults with special sensitivity and palpable pleasure, and that these works—the portraits, for instance, of the baby “Fred,” the 1952 painting of his impossibly young-looking second wife, Caroline Blackwood, the cast of five youths playing dress-up in the masterpiece, “Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau),” or the brilliant 2002 head portrait of his granddaughter Frances Costelloe—are easily as persuasive as the images of craggy old men and women approaching the end of their life.

But Freud was also deeply aware of the fade-out of the lifespan. He was moved by that same sense you get in painters as diverse as Titian, Turner, and Twombly of the body, and life itself, involved in a viscerally charged leave-taking—a drifting off, accompanied by bodily twitches and random dreams, into unconsciousness or death. It’s an interest that comes across in so many of his pictures, but especially in “Double Portrait,” a mid-1980s picture which shows Freud’s lover asleep beside his whippet, Pluto, and the massive 1995 painting called “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping.”

Apart from a relatively small number of fascinating and freewheeling interviews, Freud’s only published statement about his art was “Some Thoughts on Painting,” first published in the magazine Encounter, in 1954. In it, he wrote about his wish to “intensify reality,” about aesthetic taste as an outgrowth of obsession, about the importance of intuition, of instinct, and of the painter’s own personal avidity: “Self-indulgence,” he wrote, with his characteristic blend of insight and perversity, is “the discipline through which he [the painter] discards what is inessential to him.”

“A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure,” he continued. “The artist who tries to serve nature is only an executive artist. And, since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model. Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen.”

All this chimes with his later claim that the more he knew about his sitters, the more he felt free to invent for himself. It’s the painting, in other words, that matters—not whether it successfully reminds us of the person who sat for it.

I once asked Freud what he thought makes a great portrait. It was no different, he affirmed, to what makes any great painting: “It’s to do with the feeling of individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific. Painting things as symbols and rhetoric and so on doesn’t interest me. I think the most boring thing you can say about a work of art is that it’s timeless. That induces a kind of panic in me. It’s almost like political speech—it doesn’t apply to anyone.”

***

Near the end of his life, Freud looked back on “Some Thoughts on Painting.” “Re-reading it,” he said, “I find that I left out the vital element without which painting can’t exist: PAINT. Paint in relation to a painter’s nature. One thing more important than the person in the painting is the picture.”

Freud’s use of paint was always changing. It changed in the mid-1950s—around the same time as he formulated “Some Thoughts on Painting”—as he shifted away from a painstakingly detailed, thinly painted, linear style into a slightly looser, but still smooth idiom, wherein faces were constructed by extracting separate shapes then welding them back together (“When you look at the forms,” he once said, “it is clear that some of them want to be liberated.”)

After abruptly ceasing to draw, feeling that the hard-won linear habits he had developed since childhood were holding back his painting, he began using broader brushstrokes and thicker paint in the 1960s. In works like “Naked Child Laughing,” “John Deakin,” and a small self-portrait you can feel his developing interest in the correlations between flesh and juicier, freer, more viscous applications of paint. (Francis Bacon was a major influence at the time).

Again in the 1980s, the paint thickens, jutting out from the surfaces of his pictures, and taking on almost sculptural volumes (though not nearly as much as in the work of his closest friend and confidant, Frank Auerbach). More and more, Freud leaves grainy, scumbled deposits of paint on the surface of his pictures. They silt up passages of smoothly swishing paint, adding texture and surface incident to the creamy expanse of a woman’s thigh or a velvety patch of dog fur.

In the 1990s and 2000s, he takes this still further, introducing layers of painted reinforcement. A spiky quality that goes beyond mere representation appears in many of his best pictures. As with late Rembrandt, the paint is applied in ways that disrupt or interfere with the viewer’s easy access to the image. Something extra is conveyed—an awkwardness, but also a sense of deepening interest, thickening emotion, urgency.

You see this in Freud’s extraordinary series of paintings of Sue Tilley, a benefits supervisor, and of Leigh Bowery, a performance artist, both of them physically huge, with acres of deliquescing flesh. And you see it, too, in Freud’s electrifying, full-body, naked self-portrait, “Painter Working, Reflection” of 1992-93. Here the part of the artist’s neck that should really be lost in shadow beneath his chin is built up so thickly that it stands out further from the picture’s surface than any other part of his body. None of this comes across, of course, in photographs.

In all Freud’s work from the 1960s onwards, qualities that we usually sense through touch—weight, pressure, humidity, texture, temperature—are increasingly made available to us through sight. All this churns up settled habits of seeing, engages our own bodies, and helps account for the incredible sense of involvement one feels in front of his greatest paintings.

Freud was a gambler, and this sense of involvement is the product not just of skill but of risk. This is worth insisting on, if only because intimacy itself is a function of risk—of how much both parties in any given relationship are willing to reveal of themselves in any given moment, without falling back on safe habits or self-deceiving stories.

Freud gambled everything on every painting, which partly explains his fairly high rate of failures (that, and what the critic John Russell, a close friend and author of some of the most perceptive pieces on Freud, called his “almost total lack of natural talent”). He painted brushstroke by brushstroke, without a programme, and he detested the idea of “freewheeling.”

“Painting is such an immediate concern that all else fails, seems remote, compared with the actual difficulties of paint, making it do what you want it to do,” he said. He wanted every mark to be connected to a feeling. And it is this sense of passionate improvisation, encompassing insights obtained not only by months of intense scrutiny but by the briefest glance, that gives his work such visceral impact.

In so many of his paintings, it is the details, all the idiosyncrasies, that stay in your mind. The man’s splayed fingers that resemble the ridged and blasted landscapes of Afghanistan. The polka-dotted handkerchief that pops up out from the pocket of the diminutive, grey-suited man as he sinks into a vast sofa. The paisley pattern that arbitrarily cuts out on the shroud-like dress of the painter’s mother, who rests her dead-eyed head on a pillow. And always the foreheads—bulging, pressurized, pulsing with blood and thoughts behind hard-pressed bone and taut skin.

“I don’t think there’s any kind of feeling you have to leave out,” Freud said. There is in his work a quality of truth-telling that is somehow at odds with its veneer of fidelity to appearances. What made Freud so great as a portraitist was that, even as he scrutinised his sitters so intently over such long periods of time, he powerfully registered what was, finally, unknowable about them. “When you find things very moving,” he once said, “the desire to find out more lessens rather. Rather like when in love with someone you don’t want to meet the parents.”

2012-02-10T16:47:00.002-06:00

Charles Murray, Author of 'The Bell Curve,' Steps Back Into the Ring

Michael Temchine for World Magazine

Charles Murray's new book argues that the economic problems of America's working class stem largely from their own character flaws, and that wealthier people should be less shy about teaching them how to live responsibly.

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By Peter Schmidt

Washington

Publishers, forget about carefully reasoned, nuanced discussions of the issues of the day—that stuff is for college professors, or yuppies off yammering away in their salons. If you print politically oriented books and you want to make the big bucks, you need to think like a boxing promoter and stage fights that will get attention. And nothing, but nothing, draws hype like a match-up between liberal pundits and the man they love to hate, the belligerentbehind the The Bell Curve, the warrior against welfare, the proudly politically incorrect Charles Murray.

Mr. Murray's newest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum), makes a pretense of making nice. It bills itself as an attempt to alleviate divisiveness in American society by calling attention to a growing cultural gap between the wealthy and the working class.

Focused on white people in order to set aside considerations of race and ethnicity, it discusses trends, like the growing geographic concentration of the rich and steadily declining churchgoing rates among the poor, that social scientists of all ideological leanings have documented for decades. It espouses the virtues of apple-pie values like commitment to work and family.

But Mr. Murray, a Harvard and MIT-educated political scientist, seems wired like a South Boston bar brawler in his inability to resist the urge to provoke. In the midst of all of his talk about togetherness, he puts out there his belief that the economic problems of America's working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men and morally loose women who have kids out of wedlock. Moreover, he argues, because of Americans' growing tendency to pair up with the similarly educated, working-class children are increasingly genetically predisposed to be on the dim side.

(This is the point where heads turn, fists clench, and a hush is broken by the sound of liberal commenters muttering, "Oh no he didn't.")

Speaking here last week at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a free-market-oriented think tank where he is a resident scholar, Mr. Murray, 69, argued that the nation's greatness arose from its founders' belief in industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity. In today's working-class communities, however, religious people are seen as "oddballs," he said, and men deride each other for getting off the couch and taking perfectly adequate jobs commensurate with their training. Divorce and crime rates are exceptionally high, and the "collapse of social trust" has left people unable to count on others to be fair, trustworthy, or helpful.

Assuring the crowd that his book is not politically partisan, Mr. Murray took shots at the wealthy as well. He waved his arms toward the neighborhoods of northwest Washington and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs that he calls "SuperZips" because of their residents' exceptionally high incomes and education levels, and he argued that people clustered in such communities are losing touch with mainstream America and much of what it has to offer. He protested that the upper class "has lost self-confidence in the rightness" of the value system that brought it wealth, and, rather than proclaiming the importance of hard work, religious faith, and family commitment, instead abides by "a set of mushy injunctions to be nice."

His audience—a standing-room-only crowd consisting heavily of white, male SuperZippers in button-down business attire—seemed unoffended. It applauded enthusiastically as C-SPAN's Book TV broadcast the event nationwide. His book has hovered near the top in Amazon's sales rankings since its release in January.

Bursting Bubbles

Mr. Murray's willingness to poke hornets' nests often earns his books buzz. He first made a name for himself by calling for the abolition of welfare in his 1984 book Losing Ground, which profoundly influenced the subsequent overhaul of federal welfare policy authored by Republicans in Congress and signed into law by President Clinton in 1996.

His 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, written with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, a Harvard University psychologist, spent weeks at the top of best-seller lists. Arguing that IQ is mainly inherited and suggesting that genes might help account for racial and ethnic differences in academic achievement, it sparked intense controversy in the news media and outrage among scholars who argued that it was based on false assumptions about human intelligence.

"I am sure there are still sociology departments where people would cross themselves if I came into the room," he said in an interview last week.

Last month's official release of Coming Apart came on the heels of an impressive publicity campaign. It included a Wall Street Journal essay by Mr. Murray previewing his book's findings, and the American Enterprise Institute's online distribution of a quiz from the book's fourth chapter, titled "How Thick is Your Bubble?" Billed as a gauge of how out of touch the quiz taker is with mainstream America, it asks questions such as whether you have ever purchased a pickup truck, watched an entire episode of Judge Judy, eaten at a chain restaurant like Waffle House, or participated in a parade not involving global warming, a war protest, or gay rights.

Just before the book's formal release, David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times,published an op-ed that said "I'll be shocked if there's another book this year as important," which "so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society." (His article did not mention that Coming Apart repeatedly cites and excerpts his own 2001 book on the upper class, Bobos in Paradise.) In a review in The Wall Street Journal, W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, said Mr. Murray painted a "sobering portrait ... of a nation where millions of people are losing touch with the founding virtues that have long lent American lives purpose, direction, and happiness."

Hard to Ignore

The attacks on the book have been equally passionate. Joan Walsh, editor at large of Salon,wrote, "There are so many problems with Murray's cause-and-effect arguments it's hard to know where to begin." David Frum, a contributing editor to The Daily Beast Web site who admits to having had a personal falling-out with Mr. Murray, called the book's arguments "Palinism with a bar chart" and accused its author of ignoring evidence that contradicted his own politics, such as data from 1910 to 1960 showing that working-class families had grown more stable and law-abiding during a time when the federal government became less economically libertarian.

New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, who admitted he hadn't read the book, protested that Mr. Murray's arguments represent "an attempt to change the subject" in the national debate over the inequality gap and "safely steer the debate back onto comfortable conservative terrain."

In an interview, Claude S. Fischer, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley who co-authored Inequality by Design, a 1996 book refuting The Bell Curve, predictedComing Apart would generally be ignored by academics. "Charles Murray," he said, "seems to be read much more by journalists and policy folks than by the social scientists who specialize in the topics he covers."

But Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology and dean for the social sciences at New York University, cautioned against dismissing the work of Mr. Murray, whom he described as "probably the most influential social-policy thinker in America" thanks to his engaging writing style and his ability to make complex ideas accessible to wide audiences. "He is like the Carl Sagan of social policy," Mr. Conley said, "but with an ideological slant."

The Gutting of Fishtown

Mr. Murray characterizes his latest book as a response to his fear that a growing cultural divide between the classes threatens "the American project"—a vision of life, conceived by the nation's founders, holding that government should restrain people from hurting one another but otherwise leave them alone to pursue the happiness that comes from having a family and being a self-reliant, solid member of their communities.

He does not predict ruin if the trends he observes go unchecked, but, he says, the nation risks morphing into something like a Western European welfare state, with citizens who rely heavily on the government, view work "as a necessary evil," see marriage as unnecessary and children as a burden, and lead secular lives, content "to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible."

To help explain how the classes are pulling apart, Mr. Murray describes two fictional communities, both named after real places but representing statistical composites. Fishtown, named after a Philadelphia neighborhood, is a working-class community whose residents have not advanced beyond high school and work blue-collar or low-skill jobs. Belmont, named after a Boston suburb, is an upper-middle-class community whose residents have at least a bachelor's degree and work in management or as professionals. To keep his findings from being muddied by life changes such as retirement, he confined his analysis to data on people from 30 to 49 years old.

Since 1960, his analysis found, the lives of residents of Fishtown and Belmont have sharply diverged, greatly expanding whatever gaps had existed between them. The share of Fishtown adults who are married has steadily declined from 84 percent to less than 50 percent. The share of Fishtown babies born to unwed mothers rose from less than 6 percent to more than 44 percent. The share of men with no more than a high-school diploma who were out of the labor force has risen from less than 5 percent to about 12 percent.

On all such measures, and in terms of the share of its residents who profess a religion and attend church more than once a year, Belmont started out better and has experienced much less social deterioration. Its divorce rate leveled out in the 1980s, and its violent-crime rate remained somewhat flat, in contrast with a Fishtown crime rate that stands at nearly five times what it was five decades ago.

Mr. Murray rejects the idea that Fishtown's problems stem from cyclical unemployment or long-term trends such as the decline of America's manufacturing sector, because its decline, in work-force participation and other measures, continued in good times as well as bad. The way he sees it, life in both Belmont and Fishtown began to change drastically after about 1964, as a result of forces such as the sexual revolution, the women's movement, the counterculture, and the social-welfare programs that came about as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and left women less fearful of the economic consequences of having children on their own.

The Virtue of Shame

Belmont has acquired a distinct set of problems, Mr. Murray says. While he rejects suspicions that the Great Recession was triggered largely by white-collar crimes committed by members of the financial elite, he does fault the upper class for "unseemliness" displayed through acts such as the acceptance of exorbitant pay packages and the construction of massive homes.

He worries that the upper class has lost its moral bearings, citing its embrace of fashions once found solely on the other side of the tracks, such as tattoos and what he calls "the hooker look." He believes Belmont parents are far too preoccupied with getting their children into elite colleges, which, he said in an interview, socialize students into a worldview "dismissive of people who aren't as smart as they are" and which, truth be told, really are not worth the price. "I am among those who have a very hard time pointing to any time in my life where I got a deal, or I got a chance, because I went to Harvard," he said.

Mr. Murray's libertarian leanings lead him to emphatically reject the idea that the government has any role to play in stopping or reversing the trends he describes. The solution, he argues, is for the upper class to rethink its priorities, to choose to live outside wealthy enclaves and stop obsessing about offering its children an exclusive education.

In addition, he says, the upper class needs to abandon its nonjudgmentalism, start "preaching what it practices," and stop being afraid to send the rest of America messages such as: People should not be having children out of wedlock. Hard work and religious faith matter. Contrary to the image of the rich conveyed by celebrity news, they are committed to their families and live fairly tame lives, and that's a big reason why they raise high-achieving children and have money. He suggests newspapers could do society good by including, in every article about a celebrity single mother, a line suggesting that giving birth out of wedlock was a mistake.

Although his descriptions of societal problems echo a lot of research performed by other scholars, he takes leaps in naming the causes or proposing solutions. Mr. Conley of New York University said the idea that certain values, such as religiosity, lead to financial success "is a big, big assumption that outpaces the evidence," because social scientists cannot conclusively prove such causal relationships without conducting randomized experiments on humans.

It is entirely possible, he said, that religiosity and financial success go hand in hand not because the former causes the latter, but because the latter causes the former, or both are the product of some other force not being considered.

Most social scientists continue to argue that it is economic hardship that leads to deterioration of working-class social conditions, not the other way around. "I don't think there is any question that Americans in the working class, and those below the poverty line, have been hammered by the economic transformations that have robbed them of stable employment, and privileged those who are really well educated, giving them access to the only good jobs we have," said Katherine S. Newman, a professor of sociology and dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University.

As for those unemployed working-class men who don't take available jobs, Mr. Fischer at Berkeley said it is unfair to think a lack of values is at work. Experiences such as prolonged periods without work are ones from which "you don't just spring back."

At the end of the day, the cultural and economic divide most illuminated by Coming Apart might be one found in scholarly publishing. On one side are authors and publishers who produce nuanced books that offer only conclusions stemming from research, and tend to be too esoteric for wide readership. On the other side are authors and publishers who cash in by producing best-selling polemics, in which research is used to buttress foregone conclusions.

2012-02-10T16:20:00.002-06:00

The Reactionary

THE CHARMING, SINISTER G. K. CHESTERTON

By Christopher Hitchens

Image credit: Keystone/Getty Images

PROFESSOR KER’S SPIRITED and double-barreled attempt at a rehabilitation of his cherished subject is enjoyable in its own right, and takes in such matters as Chesterton’s dialectical genius for paradox, the authority of the Father Brown stories in the detective genre, and the salience of Charles Dickens in the English canonical one. But for him to show that his hero was the protagonist of a superior form of English democratic virtue, Ker would have to meet me where we are at agreement: on the high quality of Chesterton’s poems. It’s at exactly this sublime point, though, that he comes undone.

In his obituary, T. S. Eliot alluded to GKC’s capacity for “first-rate journalistic balladry,” and this high praise I think almost insufficient, because it understates his magic faculty of being unforgettable. Selecting from “one of his handful of good serious poems,” Ker makes important use of “Lepanto,” the verses of which Chesterton employed to mark off a certain English Protestant memory from a Roman Catholic one. Inspired by GKC’s friend Father John O’Connor, the poem shows how the great 1571 battle of the papacy against the Ottoman Porte was, and is, a minor Rorschach blot for a discrepant national memory.

Aiming off an early line (“The cold queen of England is looking in the glass”) as a kind of establishing shot, Chesterton presses on to conscript all the images of sullen northern Protestant indifference in the face of the sultan’s mobilization:

St. Michael’s on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north

(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)

Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift

And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.

He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;

The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;

The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,

And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,

And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,

And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,

And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,—

But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.

In one rather gallant stave, then, the finer aspects of Christendom detach themselves from the frigid dogmas of the Reformation, and reproclaim the magnificence of the Crusades. In a separate but intimately related poem, “The Secret People” (the historic refrain of which is “Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget / For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet”), Chesterton summarizes the woes and dispossessions of his fellow-countrymen in this way:

Our patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again.

But the squire seemed stuck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain.

He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,

He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.

Or perhaps the shades of the shaven men, whose spoil is in his house,

Come back in shining shapes at last to spoil his last carouse:

We only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,

And a new people takes the land and still it is not we.

Also see:

The Hitch
A tribute by Atlantic literary and national editor Benjamin Schwarz

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic
A collection of writings by and about the late writer

Thus, and in a few small phrases, Chesterton hopelessly undermines his own project of defending England against the secular pallor of Protestantist greed. Instead, by making it seem as if they were to be condemned for their neutrality and abstention at Lepanto, he confines his chosen people inside the enclave that had been fashioned for them by some rather strict Catholic intellectuals: intellectuals who were later to get themselves on the wrong side of Europe’s most important quarrel by being shady on the question of Fascism. (Professor Ker somewhat confidingly, if not devastatingly from his own viewpoint, adds that this poem “could hardly have been more Catholic in its view of English history.”) One might also note that Chesterton wrote his jaw-dropping line about the “cringing Jew” at a time when England was becoming preoccupied by the so-called Marconi case, involving the “scandal” of Jewish commerce in politics, and thus helped to cement the idea that there was a connection between the two. At any rate, I don’t think even the best of the poetic quotations can redeem Chestertonianism from the reactionary implications of the prosaic ones: they put one too much in mind of another critique of his work by T. S. Eliot. Reviewing him on Robert Louis Stevenson in 1927, Eliot found him suffering “under a misunderstanding that we are not likely to labor under,” “attacking misconceptions which we had not heard of and in which we are not interested,” and putting forth “a style exasperating to the last point of endurance.”

Chesterton’s overbuilt reputation for paradox was founded on his Paradox of Conservatism, which was to the effect that if you want to be a conservative, you had better not be too much of one. He gave us this, which he deemed to be a distillation of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s “theory of development”:

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.

But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.

(One wishes, as on other occasions, that he had not reserved his recommendation of brevity until the last. The old buzzard could be a master of prolixity.)

So there was GKC’s enduring problem. Instead of occupying massive portions of the landscape (“there came a sound like that of Mr G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin”) for his meditative verses and polemics, he was compelled to be active so that his fellow reactionaries could be involved in something worth calling a movement. For an instance of the operations of paradox in practice, incidentally, we may examine the founding of the only movement that ever bore the name he gave it: that of “Distributism.” This scheme for a more equitable sharing of existing property took form in late 1926, the year of class convulsion that saw the defeat of the General Strike and the mobilization and demobilization of millions of British workers. The initial founders of the Distributist League could fit into one hall in the Strand, and could not at once decide upon a unifying name. An early suggestion was “The Cow and Acres,” which sounded to GKC rather too much like a pub. Another was “The League of the Little People,” which with its air of plaintive populism also retained the aura of a fairy glen. It was later generally agreed that the only genuine disagreement concerned the question of whether a true Distributist should also be a Roman Catholic.

GKC himself took heart from the launch of this frail bark, despising the niceties of theory and nomenclature because in his own mind an essential point had already been established. Disputes about machinery and capital were to be put on one side. The English people had already been shorn of their property rights before the advent of industrial capital. This is a clear reference to the lines, in “The Secret People,” about the “men of the new religion, with their Bibles in their boots,” who had “eaten the abbey’s fruits.” The Protestant Revolution, in other words, had been an act of theft and not an action of redistribution. To Chesterton’s bucolic conservatism, and his view that a certain kind of revolution was necessary to keep the counterrevolution in action, was to be added a working alliance with Roman Catholic conservatism. In the late 1920s and early ’30s, this was actually an unpromising initiative, as Chesterton failed to note when he traveled to Rome and saw Mussolini and formed the verdict that while Fascism could be criticized as hypocritical to the point of flagrance, the same could surely be said of liberal democracy. This shows the moth-eaten fringe of absurdity that always hung around his political reflections, as it did his vastly draped and histrionic form.

Let us try some of his other paradoxes and see how they hold up. The first one states that those who affirm that they conduct themselves by “the spirit of Christianity” rather than its outward dogmas do in fact keep “some of the words and terminology, words like Peace and Righteousness and Love; but they make these words stand for an atmosphere utterly alien to Christendom; they keep the letter and lose the spirit.” It would be just about as useful to say that GKC could re-infuse the higher concepts of faith by restoring them to upper and lower case: we are all fully familiar with the religious practitioner who can’t or doesn’t live up to the merits of his creed. There’s nothing innately paradoxical in that. Any solution, however, is a bit like the Golden Rule: the creed is only as morally strong as the person who happens to be uttering it. If Chesterton ever managed the feat of preserving the letter and the spirit, or knew anyone who had, or anyone who could temporarily separate letter and spirit, he would have done well to inform us. (Professor Ker, sadly, describes the above effort as “one of [Chesterton’s] most brilliant paradoxes.”)

Had he been tempted down to cases, GKC might have extracted more profit from his mischievous idea that the book of Job portrayed God as “paradoxically” atheist, but this, when compared with other and mightier speculations on that text, was a trifle thin. His American tour yielded a small handful of what one might call minor ironies or contradictions (he began ostentatiously to call himself “a democrat” and “an equal”), while on the larger point, he missed a critical chance. It was unfortunate, Chesterton asserted, that although America had “a great political idea … it had a small religious idea.” This came out as follows:

This ‘individualism in religion’ explained why Americans were not proper republicans in the sense of every man having ‘a direct relation to the realm or commonweal, more direct than he has to any masters or patrons in private life’: in America the individual made ‘good in trade, because it was originally the individual making good in goodness; that is, in salvation of the soul’.

One has immediately the sense of a big chance being forfeited, with the elements of paradox being discarded along the way. The opposition is not between a small and a large concept in any case, Mr. Chesterton, sir: the United States is its own guarantee of some kind of noble scale in the business. How annoying it is that a certain kind of English voice seems so determined to condescend to Americans. No, it is the simple ingenuity (if I might be allowed a paradoxical locution) of the Jefferson/Madison religious signpost, with its clearly made pointer to Danbury, Connecticut, that is so graspable by the minds of the simplest as well as the most superior persons. Given time, the symbol of a simple wall of separation has fashioned and established itself inside our own crania, so that almost every American has an approximate idea that they are entitled to a great degree of “freedom of,” as well as a marked amount of “freedom from,” with a good deal of debatable latitude in between. This is not a small or inert legacy.

Some of GKC’s other half-developed insights have the unintended result, like the post-Falstaffian bulk problem, of straining and breaking the branch on which he leaned for effect. (An irresistible digression: In 1908, GKC rented a house in Rye, East Sussex, adjacent to that of Henry James. James was aghast that such a mind was “imprisoned in such a body,” and the regular viewing of “the unspeakable Chesterton” with his awful pachydermatous silhouette horrified James, who otherwise admired GKC. To picture The Master in such a predicament …) He could not understand why anti-Catholics accused their foes of forming secret societies while forming them—like the KKK—in their own right. But this in turn meant that he never “got” the appeal of camp and sinister formations like Opus Dei.

Chesterton hoped to show that the English had seen through the Protestant Reformation, and would survive it because they liked those who laughed. Yet the life of the great Samuel Johnson, we learn, was constrained because of “the absence of the pleasures of religion” in it. There’s something weirdly self-regarding about that formulation, especially coming as it does from a man who believed that the great English strength—deployed all along a rampart of joviality and confidence that extends from Chaucer’s Tabard Inn to Charles Dickens’s own prospect of Kent and the Medway—is founded on mirth. The sort of mirth that puffs away fanaticism and narrowness need have no connection to “the pleasures of religion.” Behind this crude camouflage, we can see being wheeled into position a large block of stone or paper, incised or authored by Cardinal John Henry Newman but helped along by Chesterton’s own main force, on which all the needs and promptings and moral suasions of the English people will need to be sternly written down. And yes, Messrs. Johnson and Dickens may well be casting around themselves for the exits. It may be true that the Protestant Reformation delivered the poor and the squires into the bondage of the “new, unhappy lords” who raised their grievous rent, but this does not mean any general English nostalgia for the old regime of throne and altar and the incineration of martyrs. And Chesterton did end up by wrestling his own block of moral admonition into shape, and publishing it as a sort of summa. Here’s Ker’s version of GKC’s account:

The previous year Chesterton had contributed a brief chapter to Twelve Modern Apostles and their Creeds, entitled ‘Why I am a Catholic’, which began with the assertion that there were ten thousand reasons, ‘all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true’. The Catholic Church simply was ‘catholic’—‘not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world … indeed larger than the world’. It was the only ‘corporate mind in the world’ that was ‘on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong.’ The Church, ‘looking out in all directions at once’, was ‘not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present’. She carried ‘a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze’. Uniquely, she constituted ‘one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years’. The resulting map marked clearly ‘all the blind alleys and bad roads’.

Chesterton rested this on the relatively small paradox that few young people by then regarded the old wars and divisions of Christianity as important: one could be a Roman Catholic or Protestant almost as according to taste. (A brief pause for a moment to reflect on what it took to attain to that compromise after centuries of war and torment …) The idea of a body that actually did all the official thinking was probably not unrelated to the Mussolini concept of the corporate state. This would be repulsive to the English and American tradition. If there was a collectivity that “did” all the thinking, in England it was expressed in the definite skepticism concerning such matters as the Inquisition, the Spanish Armada, and the question of papal infallibility. In America it was still the durable sign system pointing to Danbury, Connecticut. In neither case was there any requirement for that minatory block of text or stone, forever guarding the outer doors of orthodoxy and unsleepingly seeking to entrap or expel the heretic and the dissident. The more that attempts were made to codify truth, the more elusive truth became. Chesterton became part of a forgettable rear-guard operation against the age of uncertainty, which has now definitively become our age. It seems that there are no rules, golden or otherwise, even natural or otherwise, by which we can define our place in the universe or the cosmos. Those who claim to know the most are convicted of claiming to know the unknowable. There is a paradox, if you like.

As to the durability or importance of GKC as a fictionist: the late Sir Kingsley Amis once told me that he reread The Man Who Was Thursday every year, and on one of his annual visitations wrote a tribute. That novel, with its evocation of eeriness and solitude, and its fascination with anonymity, has been credited by some with a share of influence on Franz Kafka. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is not in the same class, and may even be drawn to a meaner scale in order to attenuate the frame of “rights.” Father Brown I give up and return to you. The character is deliberately vacant and the scheme of plot little more than a clanking trolley. A figure named Father Bond makes a brief reappearance—the only one I think he merits—on what must be intended as the shelf of a good Catholic schoolboy in Amis père’s well-wrought anti-Vatican and anti-castration fantasy The Alteration. The debt is overwhelmingly to Conan Doyle, with no indebtedness to any of the great formulas of detective fiction. As a consequence, the little priest’s summings-up are usually arid and often iffy. When told of a minor crisis in his financial affairs, we are informed by Ker, the proprietor of G.K.’s Weekly would reply: “‘Oh, well. We must write another Father Brown story,’ and this would be done at lightning speed a day or two later from a few notes on the back of an envelope.” It showed, I fear. Evelyn Waugh may have been able to squeeze part of a Brideshead evening out of a phrase of Brown’s—about “a twitch upon the thread”—but my conjury is not equal to his.

THEN AT LAST we come to the sordid but inescapable question: Why did GKC feel the imperative to drape that drooping English squire in that cringing Jew? I could have done it in one blow, and simply said that Chesterton wrote and believed that Englishmen, if they wished to be “chosen” as public servants like Sir Rufus Isaacs, should agree to wear a different national dress and thus to signify their apartness. This was the direct ancestor of the Yellow Star, even if applied more selectively, and it made the same point: Jews were a foreign nation and should have a state of their own. GKC was more of a Christian Zionist than an anti-Semite, let alone an exterminationist or eliminationist one. Thus, one cannot quite place him in the Yellow Star camp as we have come to think of it.

But he and his fellow Distributists and other stray reactionaries did get themselves on the wrong side of the debate about Nazism. And they did so, furthermore, because of self-imposed blinders in their own view of matters ethnic and ideological and confessional. For instance, in search of a good taunt, Chesterton decided that the Protestant Reformation was originally Jewish! And that the concept of a “Chosen Race” came to us as a Jewish one; and, not content with this, that it also descended through Protestantism. Thus, through an obsession with the Covenant with Israel had come “the great Prussian illusion of pride, for which thousands of Jews have recently been rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes.” So that the laugh, here, comes at the expense of the Jews.

An even more extensive, not to say wild, rewriting of history involved GKC’s view that Hitlerism was a last attempt to Protestantize the old Bismarckian empire. Professor Ker has the integrity to step in at this stage, if only to adumbrate the fact that the führer who grabbed Austria as a limb of a future “Greater Germany” was himself an Austrian Catholic. But Chesterton would not be persuaded:

The racial pride of Hitlerism is of the Reformation by twenty tests; because it divides Christendom and makes all such divisions deeper; because it is fatalistic, like Calvinism, and makes superiority depend not upon choice but only on being of the chosen; because it is Caesaro-Papist, putting the State above the Church, as in the claim of Henry VIII; because it is immoral, being an innovator of morals touching things like Eugenics and Sterility; because it is subjective, in suiting the primal fact to the personal fancy, as in asking for a German God, or saying that the Catholic revelation does not suit the German temper; as if I were to say that the Solar System does not suit the Chestertonian taste. I do not apologise, therefore, for saying that this catastrophe in history has been due to heresy.

In that closing, Chesterton missed one or two opportunities for wit and ducked a couple of openings for a tu quoque (especially on the matter of Henry VIII and church-state compromises). But he most of all sacrificed his duty to moral courage and historical truth, blaming Nazism on the wrong culprits. And this was because he put his theocratic allegiance higher than those claims, and at a time when civilization was in danger from the men of the Hitler-Vatican Concordat. Another way of phrasing it might be to say that, when the hour really struck, Chesterton could not detect a paradox when it truly reared up to confront him and his prejudices. Harsher but correct would be the verdict that his Catholicism made him morally frivolous about Hitlerism; a judgment that Professor Ker strives to avoid but is, I think, in part compelled to admit. Confrontation with GKC has been enjoyable, even if the main elements of the debate have come to seem extraordinarily archaic.

The verdict one must pass on GKC, then, is that when he was charming, he was also deeply unserious and frivolous (as with the pub revolution to set off the Distributist revolution); when he was apparently serious, he was really quite sinister (as in calling Nazism a form of Protestant heresy and Jews a species of conspicuous foreigner in England); and when he was posing as a theologian, he was doing little more than ventriloquizing John Henry Newman at his most “dogmatic.” For the time and hour in which he lived, “Chestertonianism” came to represent a minor but still important failure to meet a distinct moral challenge.

China

2012-02-10T12:19:00.002-06:00

Beijing is concerned by Washington's more assertive regional policy in Asia. But here as elsewhere its inability to talk to the rest of the world in a natural way blunts its capacity to respond, says Kerry Brown.

About the author

Kerry Brown is an associate fellow on theAsia programme^↑, Chatham House. His books include The Purge of the Inner Mongolian People's Party in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1967-69: A Function of Language, Power and Violence^↑(Brill, 2004); Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century^↑(Anthem Press, 2007); Friends and Enemies: The Past, Present and Future of the Communist Party of China^↑(Anthem Press, 2009); and Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State^↑(Zed Books, 2011). His website is here^↑

It was a bleak moment for the foreign-policy specialists in the central government in Beijing when Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in Rangoon in early December 2011. For several years, China had been the one steadfast friend of Burma's ever more isolated military regime. It was thus able to enjoy something approaching an economic monopoly there, even if India sought to press its interests in the resource-rich but isolated south Asian country.

Beijing had advance warning of an autumn chill when Barack Obama declared during his visit to Asia in late November that the United States was, after its post-9/11 diversions in the middle east and Afghanistan, now back and fully focused on its Pacific interests. For China, such sentiments evoke the fear that the US is becoming more involved than it would like in the affairs of its neighbours.

But the pattern is longer still. For in mid-2010, the US secretary of state said - in the context of flare-ups between Japan and China over disputed maritime borders - that both the South and East China Seas were legitimate areas of American’s strategic interest. Such consistency in the US’s pronouncements and behaviour over the last eighteen months suggests that it is indeed "back", strategically and psychologically, in east Asia. Many in Beijing see this refocus as an effort to thwart, frustrate and challenge a China that itself now has more ability to assert its key interests.

The ingredients of China's calculations are familiar. They concern contests over borders and territory, access to economic and energy resources, and its capacity to influence the international system in ways the authorities in Beijing deem benign.

Many high-level Chinese regard the US's sheer ubiquity as almost a never-ending nightmare they hope one day to wake from. The US has a significant presence in South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. But more distressingly now, it is in places such as Vietnam (which could now obtain weapons from the US, something unthinkable even a few years ago), Pakistan, and Mongolia. All around China’s edges, it can seem from Beijing, the US seems to be cropping up - even intent on a creeping mission of containment.

Only with regards to North Korea (the DPRK) can China feel any certainty that the US is absent - and even there, the leadership in Pyongyang harbours a deep-seated objctive one day to negotiate directly with Washington. To put it another way: once the endless rhetoric of friendship fades, the shallowness of Chinese strategic alliances can appear both surprising and shocking.

A new language

This predicament is a clue to China's recent diplomatic behaviour, which has been a classic mixture of reassuring "peace-and-harmony speak" and permission to various agents of the central state to act with a sort of bolshie unilateralism. China's much-vaunted "peaceful rise" now includes sea-captains having brawls with South Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese vessels, and shrill denunciations of India for hosting the Dalai Lama to a religious conference (during the aborted first day of scheduled border talks, at the end of November 2011).

Such more combative behaviour in recent months can be seen as reflecting Beijing's frustration that its economic clout has outrun its political impact - and that its foreign-policy apparatus has simply been unprepared for the range and depth of questions that would confront it as it became an economic behemoth. In this perspective, China's fundamental policy stances - not seeking leadership, non-interference in the affairs of others - recall a time when it was an isolated and politically introspective country recovering from a devastating international and civil war, and obsessed with its endless domestic political campaigns. Today, in a world where China's footprint appears across the world, they are increasingly incongruous and ineffective. Yet no one in Beijing seems willing to challenge them, far less propose others adequate to the realities of 21st-century global politics.

The route to addressing the problem begins by acknowledging the obvious, that China - like every power - has legitimate international interests, but that it needs a far more convincing voice with which to express these. Its current leadership has been reluctant to, or simply incapable of, crafting a way of speaking to the world that ensures its words are believed and claims trusted. If China is worried about the prevalence of the US around its borders, then it needs to find a rhetoric - or perhaps better, a register - that enables it authentically to fight back. Sun Zi, after all - the Chinese themselves are fond of pointing out - stated over two millennium ago that the best victories are won before any physical conflict becomes necessary.

China’s greatest disadvantage in this new war for international hearts and minds is its political model. Most of the rest of the world finds it outmoded and/or hard to understand, yet it is linked to a specific ideology and a language which governs the Chinese elite's modes of expression. China's politicians are thus saddled with a stiff and inexpressive vocabulary with which to talk to the outside world and their own people. If they were able to escape from it, many of China’s demands as a country - its need for energy, concern over territory, fear of international containment - are easy enough to understand, even if disagreements over them continue (as is quite natural).

The new generation of Chinese leaders would do itself and the rest of the world a big favour if it revised and refreshed the stilted, highly unnatural way in which they talk about issues that matter to them. The world in 2012 awaits a Chinese leader with the ability to speak naturally and comfortably to the world. Perhaps only when he emerges will the United States and others start both to take Beijing's legitimate fears more seriously and to engage in a proper discussion about what the balance of power and interest in Asia should be. Now that so much of the world's economic, political and military power is located there, that cannot happen soon enough.

2012-02-10T10:36:00.002-06:00

Learning About Love

Isabel Ruane [3]

When I heard that Father Paul O’Brien ’86 was coming to speak at Harvard, I knew I had to meet him. Last month, I read the story of his remarkable ministry in Lawrence, Massachusetts [5], and was fascinated. Since becoming pastor of St. Patrick’s parish a decade ago, he’s tackled hunger, ethnic tension, educational shortfall, and family breakdown. I saw in his work proof that the Catholic Church is still relevant—his ministry of love effects real change in his community.

Arriving in the Lowell House junior common room on Monday, I expected to learn about O’Brien’s path from Harvard to priesthood. Instead, I acquired a new world view. I was moved intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually by the tale of his journey to becoming a parish priest—and particularly by his story of an experience that changed the way he looked at the world.

Seated at the center of a ring of students, O’Brien didn’t sermonize. Instead, he transfixed his audience through storytelling.

His first story was from Harvard. How better to win college students’ trust than to admit you were once one of them? O’Brien joked that his freshman-year self was the least likely candidate for Catholic priesthood, admitting that his main pursuits that year were staying up late, drinking beer, and dating girls. But underneath, a different persona was brewing: one day, while casually attending Mass his sophomore year, O’Brien said he felt a visceral, distinct, undeniable vocation to the priesthood. He tried to suppress the experience, but it wouldn’t go away, so he sought guidance. O’Brien gave the ministry some trial runs and liked it. Thanksgiving of his senior year, he shocked his friends and family with the news, and within a year of graduation, shipped off to seminary in Rome. He has never looked back.

O’Brien then talked about his time in India. He arrived there as a young priest to work in Calcutta with Mother Teresa. In particular, one transformational experience taught him about love as he’d never understood it before, about the distinction between love in the abstract and love in action. This love, he said, still drives him. When asked what that experience was, he told us the story was brutal, but he was happy to share it. And I’m so glad he did.

His work for Mother Teresa involved searching for people dying on the streets, bringing them to the order’s home for the dying, helping care for them in their final days, and disposing of their bodies after death. One man who arrived at the home told all who would listen, “I want to die.” Through translators, O’Brien replied, “You’re here. You’re alive. We love you. We’re going to care for you.” This dialogue went on for several days in the same fashion as the man’s condition worsened. One day, a tourist visiting the hospital heard a translation of what the man was saying and jokingly said in English, “Well, then, die!” An interpreter mistook the tourist’s insensitive comment as O’Brien’s words and translated it. When the sick man heard these words, he looked at the priest and closed his eyes. He never opened them again. O’Brien realized that the man, feeling a lack of love, had succumbed to death. That interaction taught him the power of cruelty to crush the human spirit and, conversely, the power of love to nurture and sustain us beyond all other help.

The day held further lessons. The dead man had been sick with hepatitis—highly contagious, untreatable, and fatal. Determined not to let anyone catch the disease from the corpse, O’Brien carefully placed the body and all its medical accoutrements in a metal barrel to take to the dump. But in a flurry of hot, crowded confusion at the dump entrance, the barrel spilled. In an instant, O’Brien spun around and saw a little girl with “big, big dark eyes,” in “a perfectly clean blue dress,” staring up at him. As little children do, she had picked up an object off the ground and inserted it into her mouth. O’Brien stared, aghast—clamped between the girl’s teeth was the dead man’s contaminated feeding tube.

In that moment, O’Brien said, “All that mattered in the entire world was that that feeding tube not be in that little girl’s mouth.” That single-minded focus, he said, exemplified love: Love is saying that the needs of this person in front of me right now are all that matters and I’m going to help, however I can.

He yanked the feeding tube from her mouth and, after disposing of the body, he carried the little girl back to the home for the dying. The caregivers tended to her lovingly and made her as comfortable as possible, but their efforts couldn’t stop the disease. She died three days later.

The crowd in Lowell JCR was stunned, silent, still as death. It was hard to contemplate such tragedy. But in the long seconds that followed, our horror faded enough to allow O’Brien’s message seep in: What can anyone do in the face of profound ugliness but love? These experiences of pure love encapsulate the essence of O’Brien’s faith: by surrendering to love, humans can transcend philosophical questions of why people suffer and instead focus on helping those suffering around us. Choosing love is the ultimate victory over cruelty, tragedy, and evil. I won’t forget Father O’Brien’s talk, and above all this message: “Life is love.” Love is all there is.

Mike Kelly

2012-02-09T11:05:00.000-06:00

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Future retrospectives honoring Mike Kelley, who died last week at the age of 57, reportedly a suicide, will be tricky to organize and assess. A Los Angeles artist who gave that city's art establishment a bursting sense of pride for having nurtured such an obstreperous talent, he earned his celebrity status in part by retaining the obsessions and wounds of a smart Catholic working-class kid from the suburbs of Detroit who had never entirely assimilated to his sun-splashed California home. It's hard to imagine any museum containing enough jagged parts of his legacy, and in the right proportions, to please the majority of his hard-core fans.

Should curators devote more space to his sprawling crypto-autobiographic video and sculpture installations of recent years? Or to his musical career, begun while a University of Michigan student and never abandoned, as a member of the Dada/glam-rock/free-jazz/heavy-metal/punk band Destroy All Monsters? (He seemed to give equal weight to both expressions of his personality.)

Enlarge Image

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN/Gagosian Gallery/Cameron Wittig

Kelley's was the classic avant-garde story.

His most identifiable body of work (late 1980s to early '90s) are the thrift-store stuffed animals that he placed on blankets in the middle of gallery floors. Their air of soiled hopes and cheerful failure became central to the critical movement of "pathetic" or "abject" art. But how should the icky pungency of these pieces be balanced against his later wish to distance himself from their popularity? "I was viewed as an infantilist, possibly a pedophile, or victim of abuse myself," he complained in a 1996 essay.

Furthermore, how should museums handle an artist whose stance was one of perpetual irreverence? (The tendency is to overcompensate and treat every piece of ephemera with undue reverence.) Kelley's standing as an anticorporate subversive was already open to doubt in 2005 when he left his longtime dealers for the Gagosian Gallery. How his art's authority as a disrupter of artistic norms survives the burnishment his works will now receive from the smoothest, most powerful art operation in the world will be something to watch.

What can't be questioned is Kelley's importance for scores of younger artists in the U.S. and Europe. His was often the name first mentioned in the early '90s if you asked young art-school graduates around Los Angeles about figures they looked up to. The outpouring of emotion over his death can be gauged by the spontaneous (and messily Kelleylike) memorial that sprang up in a driveway near his home. As Catherine Wagley wrote in the L.A. Weekly, it looked as if it were put up "for those who came to L.A.'s art scene because he was a part of it."

Kelley's emergence in the '90s helped change how the art world viewed Southern California art. With exceptions like the combative Edward Kienholz, its purveyors had tended to shun raw emotion in favor of light, clean, cool, easily readable images.

Kelley's art was different. Even his name sounded as if it belonged to a scrappy Irish club fighter. Energy and content (often sexual and scatological) trumped finish and form, and he didn't confine himself to any medium. He was cartoonist, performer, writer, sculptor, painter, video and film maker, and architect. Much of his work reeked of passive aggression. He dared you to hate it and pretended not to care.

“Much of his work reeked of passive aggression. He dared you to hate it and pretended not to care.”

Destroy All Monsters, the band he formed in the early 1970s with fellow artists Jim Shaw, Cary Loren and Niagra, was the seedbed for many of his ideas. Steeping themselves in surrealism, they reveled in Dadaist gestures and became connoisseurs of American weirdness. The collective functioned, in the words of one critic, as "a dorm-room version of Warhol's Factory." To call them musicians was a stretch. "We played one song: two lines from Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man' repeated over and over against a wall of feedback," Kelley said of an early concert at a comic-book convention. "We were thrown out."

Kelley's is in some ways a classic avant-garde story: Make art with and for like-minded friends, and the world will finally take note. His acceptance by the art world was relatively smooth. After moving to California and attending the California Institute of the Arts, where he had another band (the Poetics, with artists John Miller and Tony Oursler), he was having regular shows in prestigious New York and Los Angeles galleries before he was 30.

Kelley never lacked for honors. He was championed early on by the critic Ralph Rugoff, who helped carry his reputation to Europe and England. This month Kelley's work will be featured at the Whitney Biennial for the eighth time. "Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites," a mixed-media installation with stuffed animals from 1991-1999, sold in 2007 at Phillips in New York for $2.7 million.

But he may be an artist so identified with his own moment that his flame will gutter when individual pieces of larger enterprises are broken up and confined in permanent exhibitions. This is the context where deceased artists (without their own museums) have to compete to be noticed and live on, and it's one reason painters have an advantage in art-history books. Perhaps the single iconic image Kelley produced was the knitted puppet on the album cover of Sonic Youth's "Dirty."

His vast project "Educational Complex Onwards 1995-2008," which had him drawing and building scale models of every space where he was taught anything—from his boyhood home in Wayne, Mich., to Cal Arts in Valencia, Calif.—never made emotional sense or had narrative coherence, at least not the parts I have seen. A video-sculpture installation about Burning Man, the annual psychedelic art trip in the desert, which I saw in 2010 at his studio, was ambitious but not memorable.

Will Kelley's influence dissipate? Or is he like Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys, a protean figure who, for better or worse, will haunt the next half-century of artistic thought and practice?

YouTube has a charming 2010 video of Kelley from the series "What's in Your Bag?," which asks shoppers to describe their purchases. Unpacking the CDs, DVDs and books that he and his girlfriend bought on "a whore binge," he discourses with affection on a poverty-row Bela Lugosi movie and a late Sun Ra record called "Nuclear War." Kelley never lost his interest in the cut-rate products of American culture, work that for one reason or another ended up discounted and ignored. His art tried to make failure into the highest form of achievement. Capturing this paradox in art museums will be a difficult, and maybe impossible, challenge.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

Monsters

2012-02-09T10:41:00.000-06:00

Monsters, magic and miracles

Marina Warner

Wes Williams
MONSTERS AND THEIR MEANINGS IN EARLY MODERN CULTURE
Mighty magic
344pp. Oxford University Press. £65 (US $110).
978 0 19 957702 6

Published: 8 February 2012

“Mighty magic” is the phrase Othello uses to describe his gift of the gab, the power of marvellous tales he has told Desdemona about his life before he met her. Her father Brabantio suspects the Moor of bewitching her with dark pagan enchantments, as practised in his North African place of origin, but Othello counters his accusations: the only charm he has exercised on Desdemona is the charm of the storyteller.

In Othello’s case, his exploits are epic – misadventures overcome, monsters destroyed. Within the frame of the play, they aren’t empty boasts or tall tales, but have taken place for real in the hero’s past. They win Desdemona, who laps up the discourse of the “wheeling and extravagant stranger” with a kind of cannibalistic relish she makes no attempt to conceal. Wes Williams, displaying his own appealing hunger for stories (especially stories of prodigies and monsters), finds in this Shakespearean seduction a primal scene about literature and its pleasures. In the series of subtle and intense analyses that follow, he reads the canon of French sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French writers – from Rabelais to Racine, via Montaigne and Pascal and others – to unravel lines of kinship between talk of monsters, family strife, crisis in the body politic and the social fabric, and the perpetual struggle in literature where realism contends with fantasy, and tragedy and epic with their often disavowed shadow, romance.

Throughout Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture, “real” monsters – lambs with five legs, horned humans, leviathans, mermaids and conjoined twins – serve to unfold a fluctuating history of values and emotions as well as of changing aesthetics, philosophy, medical science, and the proper uses of curiosity. The accompanying narrative, more slippery and more rewarding, follows the monstrous as it spawns figurative meanings on every side. Williams’s favourites illuminate the history of childhood and children on the one hand, and on the other, the destiny of romance in the early modern period. Genealogies and genres struggle over the recognition – and the expulsion – of the monstrous. This is a book born of long and deep reflection on its subjects’ writings (especially Montaigne’s), and attends to both the tiny stitches of an essay, play or fiction, and to the larger design. As Williams maps the linkages and the meanings to which they lead, he can listen with a tuner’s sensitivity to the internal rhymes in a line of Racine and to their equivalents in Ted Hughes’s rendering, or, zooming out, can give a sweeping overview of the political context. His methods persuasively combine material historicity with some inspiration from “universal” deconstructionism and psychoanalysis; the results are rich and layered, and show how barren theoretical purism can be.

Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The physical prodigy becomes a test of ethics and, in the move between literal and figurative, displays the crucial role fictions play in the establishment of value and the common sense. Or, one might say in the era when the Humanities are under such stress, thinking with monsters shows how an understanding of Nature, and of medicine, law and custom is impossible without cultural expression.

The cast of monsters begins with Rabelais’s hero, the giant boy Pantagruel, son of Gargantua, who is reading a book on board ship as part of his princely education and grand tour: the volume in question is Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, a Greek romance that hardly anyone reads today, and Pantagruel has dozed off. The wildly improbable story of the Aethiopica turns on a case of maternal impression, the most fully embroidered instance in literature of this ancient and persistent belief that a mother, with the unconscious force of her imagination, may imprint the foetus in her womb – startled by a horse, she might give birth to a horse-headed child. Chariclea, a Princess of Ethiopia, has been cast out of her home at birth because she is born white to her royal parents, both black; later, in a cliffhanging denouement, it will turn out that her mother, Persinna, has above her bed a painting of Andromeda chained to a rock waiting for the monster, and that the picture hung there at Chariclea’s conception and all through her mother’s pregnancy; looking at the fair naked body of Andromeda, who was herself an ancestor of the royal Ethiopian house, has worked its magic on the child in the womb with fateful consequences. As Chariclea is about to lose her beloved to a ritual sacrifice, the painting is brought out and she is seen to be Andromeda’s double, the legitimate princess, once wronged, now refound. The mystery explained, a romance epiphany ensues: joyful reunion with her parents, reprieve of her beloved, and happiness all round.

The sea monster threatening Andromeda and the necessary hero – Perseus – who flies down to dispatch it, provide Williams’s first focus for the early modern addiction to monstrosity. Discovering and possessing monsters – giant bones, elephant men, conjoined twins, human hatchlings from an egg – spurred medical inquiry, as in the work of Rabelais’s contemporary, Ambroise Paré, and excited princely collectors to fill their Wunderkammers; the endeavour cast the men and women of early modern science as epistemological heroes, winged Perseus-knights errant anatomizing and taxonomizing in order to distinguish what it means to be human, while at the same time mastering the copia – the abundance and variety – of Nature and divine creation. It is a “sad structure . . . one of the enduring grand narratives”, writes Williams; “the otherness . . . encountered is at first feared, and then either destroyed or sent home to be hung on the wall”. Interpretations that identify Rabelaisian monsters with religious reform don’t win Williams’s endorsement, as the comic fertility of the French writer’s imagination reaches beyond the natural prodigy to more baffling mysteries, and continues to ask questions of phenomena. When Pantagruel turns away, bored, from the beached “physeter” or whale, Williams casts the young giant as the ideal implied reader, a never-to-be-satisfied dreamer, whose wonder does not stop when a beast is captured and destroyed.

If the birth of conjoined twins no longer sparks excited speculation about private and public evils, an unruly brood does still teem in present-day media culture, and it is possible that the meanings this book draws out, for example when exploring Pierre de Ronsard’s political diatribes, can still be applied. The transitional beast-objects of children and adults, from Babar the Elephant and Winnie the Pooh to Grayson Perry’s teddy totem Alan Measles, are hugged close to reassure and keep company with their owners at times of threatening estrangement and loneliness. The bestiary of Harry Potter, the numerous hybrid creatures grafted from world myths and sci-fi horror who populate video games and blockbuster films, the ever more popular ghouls and vampires of Halloween masquerade, can also be allegorized along sixteenth-century lines. As Ronsard invokes the monsters raised by the wars of religion in France the better to manage them, in the wan hope that the word can act to slay them, so today many of the rituals conjure in mimicry the very terrors that are experienced daily: vampires are the perfect match for the crisis in capitalist consumerism, their excess of appetite a ghastly parody of the economic machine, while zombies, anonymous beings evacuated of self and volition, perfectly embody the figure of the economic serf, captive to workless degradation. (Last summer’s rioters in English cities were both vampiric and zombiefied.) Ronsard grieves for his country, crying out against the foul fiend Opinion who has sown dissension between friends and families, and embroiled the nation in monstrous horrors. The horrors must be set down as inoculation against their recurrence:

“O toy historien, qui d’ancre non menteuse
Escrits de nostre temps l’histoire monstrueuse,
Raconte à nos enfans tout ce malheur fatal,
Afin qu’en te lisant ils pleurent nostre mal,
Et qu’ils prennent exemple aux pechéz de leurs pères,
De peur de ne tomber en pareilles miseres.”

(O you, historian, who with ink that does not lie / Writes of these our times the monstrous history, / Tell our children all about this mortal misfortune, / So that in reading you they bewail our fate, / And learn from the sins of their fathers, / So as not to fall themselves into such misery and distress.)

Allegories of political chaos, still a little formulaic in spite of Ronsard’s lovely phrasing, are transformed in the work of the most compelling and engaging of Williams’s subjects, Michel de Montaigne who, when he read Ronsard, changed the flow of identification and found himself mirrored in the monster, his twin. With this switch of viewpoint, he opened the field of inquiry into the je, the modern “I”, who is singular, yet generically human and, under both aspects, unfathomably mysterious. As the Essais famously announced, “I have seen no more evident monster or miracle in the world than myself”. A “rare” and “most delicate” monster, Shakespeare says of Caliban, in the play that most reverberates with his immersion in Florio’s Montaigne.

Montaigne draws his readers into relationship with him, and in this chapter Williams closes in on the four essays about children with an intense and at times moving involvement, opposing their usual interpretation – that children and monsters are mere signs and figures for other things. Patiently tracking instead the writer’s childhood, his experience of having – and losing – children, and his personification of his own works as misbegotten offspring, he shows Montaigne embracing monsters as himself with rare humanity, and then entering another plea for childhood errancy and its counterpart, idle fancy, and for fancy’s zone of expression which is literature. This section of Monsters contains some of the most densely argued readings in this unusually concentrated book, and they add to the stature, the timeliness and the sheer likeability of Montaigne’s sceptical, inquiring voice, speaking from the page as if he were there at one’s side.

The mythic trio of Andromeda, Perseus and the sea monster resurface to take centre stage in Andromède, Corneille’s hit of l650. The virtuoso stage machinery conceived by the adored Italian master of effects, Giacomo Torelli, astonished an audience that included the young King Louis XIV, newly recovered from smallpox, his mother, and Cardinal Mazarin: a real (winged) horse rode down through the sky and the curly sea monster breasted the roiling deeps, while its prey stood chastely draped on a rock. A contemporary engraving depicts the scene, with pinnacles of rock like the gorges of the Yangtze. To support his analysis of Corneille, Williams brings in some little-known material, from other playwrights and other versions of the Aethiopica in word and image, and develops an original and forcefully expressed argument that Corneille himself found such spectacle and artifice (and such expense) monstrous: “He displays . . . the monster that is state-sponsored would-be imperialist fiction-making in all its gory glory, the better to provoke, in the first instance, the standard emotions: pity, terror, and wonder”. But Corneille turns on the genre: he makes the heroine find her voice, step out of the tradition and demand something more, something different, of this heroic tradition: “The figure in the paintings is surprised into speech by Corneille’s play”. If this seems anachronistically feminist, it does have the great merit of startling the reader into re-evaluating Corneille, so often overshadowed today by the younger, more brilliant Racine.

While Pascal develops a story of contaminated filiation, with original sin marking specific, terrible human monstrosity (satyrs and centaurs are spared, not having souls), Racine, the subject of the ardent closing chapter, plays the part of monsters’ last, frustrated celebrant. Nourished on romances, the young orphaned protégé of the community at Port-Royal had his love of the Aethiopica severely disciplined: twice the book was burned. The third time he managed to procure a copy, he learned it by heart and then offered it up himself to be immolated by his austere tutors. But Williams argues that the magic of the Greek tale that had been forbidden to the boy Racine kept bringing back monsters in different shapes in his imagination. They metamorphosed into his protagonists; his tragedies are impelled by their presence at the heart of the family, in the form of Nero, Theseus, Phèdre herself.

There is a lingering danger that Williams’s exegesis might become too assiduous and obscure, but this threat is held at bay: the readerly Andromeda isn’t sacrificed to contemporary abstruseness. His Andromeda is both a female child and a figment, each of them a favoured and beloved flower of human creativity and threatened by many monsters; these exemplary readings of sometimes elusive and little-known works movingly issue an apology for misshapenness and distraction and other deficiencies. They conjugate a vision of the timeless love of children with the investment of writers – and readers – in literature as devotion to another kind of offspring.

Marina Warner teaches literature at the University of Essex and is the author, most recently, of Stranger Magic: Charmed states and the “Arabian Nights”, which appeared last year.

Censorship

2012-02-08T15:36:00.001-06:00

Bound & Gagged

The grand posture of writers in liberal democracies is that they are the moral equivalents of dissidents in repressive regimes. Loud-mouthed newspaper columnists claim to 'speak truth to power'. Novelists, artists, playwrights and comedians announce their willingness to transgress boundaries. Their publishers look for controversy like boozers look for brawls because they know that few marketing strategies beat the claim that a courageous iconoclast is challenging establishments and shattering taboos.

To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them - and their fellow citizens.

Although it is impossible to count the books authors have abandoned, radical Islam is probably the greatest cause of self-censorship in the West today. When Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, censorship took the form of outright bans. Frightened publishers would not touch David Caute's novel satirising the Islamist reaction to The Satanic Verses, for instance. They ran away from histories and plays about the crisis as well because they did not want a repeat of the terror Rushdie and his publishers at Penguin had experienced.

Such overt censorship continues. In 2008, Random House in New York pulled The Jewel of Medina - a slightly syrupy and wholly inoffensive historical romance about Muhammad's child bride Aisha - after a neurotic professor claimed that it was 'explosive stuff ... a national security issue'. Most of the censorship religious violence inspires, however, is self-censorship. Writers put down their pens and turn to other subjects rather than risk a confrontation. So thoroughgoing is the evasion that when Grayson Perry, who produced what Catholics would consider to be blasphemous images of the Virgin Mary, said what everyone knew to be true in 2007, the media treated his candour as news. 'The reason I have not gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,' said Perry, 'is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.'

We flatter ourselves into believing that we are more liberated than our stuffy ancestors. A sobering corrective to modern self-satisfaction is to realise that an ex-Muslim novelist would never now dare do what Salman Rushdie did with The Satanic Verses and write a book that said the life of Muhammad was less than exemplary. Even if he or she did, no one would dare publish it.

Challenging writing about economic crises is as rare. Diligent readers have every right to ask why so few financial writers warned them that the greatest crash since 1929 was on the way. As no less a personage than Her Majesty the Queen said to the academics at the London School of Economics, 'Did nobody notice?'

In Britain's case, any writer who had tried to research a book on the rapacious and authoritarian managers at the Royal Bank of Scotland or HBOS, for instance, or on the insanely reckless derivative swap and insurance markets in the London-based subsidiaries of Wall Street banks, would have run into the libel law. It is some barrier to overcome. The cost of a libel action in England and Wales is 140 times the European average. Contrary to common law and natural justice, the burden of proof is on the defendant. Even the few remaining wealthy newspapers, which have business models that have not yet been destroyed by the Internet, find it hard to afford a court case. For the publisher of a serious book, which would do well if it sold 50,000 copies, the idea of risking £1 million or more in a legal fight to defend it is close to unthinkable.

In 2006, the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet investigated the links between the Icelandic bank Kaupthing and tax havens. Kaupthing's managers did not like what they read, but failed to persuade the Danish press council that the paper had done anything wrong. The bank sued for libel in London instead. The newspaper pulled the articles and apologised because English lawyers ran up costs that were beyond its editor's worst nightmares - £1 million, and that was before a case had gone to court.

Kaupthing went for the paper in England not just because it wanted to kill the original story, but because it also wanted to deter others from spreading the idea that Iceland was not a safe place for investors. The English legal profession obliged. Newspapers' lawyers thought once, twice, one hundred times before authorising critical stories. A few months later Kaupthing collapsed - along with the other entrepreneurial, go-ahead Icelandic banks - and British depositors lost £3.5 billion. By allowing libel tourists to fly to London and use our repressive laws, the English legal profession had also stopped the British investors from learning of the danger in investing in the country's banks.

You no more hear writers and broadcasters admit that they are frightened of investigating investment banks than you hear them admit that they are frightened of challenging the founding myths of Islam. We cannot puncture our own myth that we are fearless seekers after truth, even though, if we honestly owned up to our limitations, we might force society to confront the fact that modern censorship does not conform to old models. It is a mistake to think of repression as repression by the state alone. In much of the world it still is, but in Britain, America and most of continental Europe the age of globalisation has done its work, and it is privatised rather than state forces that threaten freedom of speech.

Editors are no longer frightened of politicians but of Islamist violence, oligarchs and CEOs. They worry about libel and the ability of the wealthy to bend the ear of their proprietors or withdraw advertising. But they are not frightened about leaking the secrets or criticising the actions of elected governments.

We need new ways of thinking about censorship. The first step is the most essential. Only when we have the courage to admit that we are afraid can we begin the task of extending our freedoms.

2012-02-08T15:01:00.002-06:00

A Peaceful, but Very Interesting Pursuit

LISA LEVY BIO ↓ · January 31st, 2012 · filed under BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL

Even after he published, Prufrock and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot continued to work his day job at a bank. The new volume of his letters reveals his financial anxieties and his unexpected attitude towards work and writing.

From 1917 until 1925, T.S. Eliot worked in a bank. A simple, declarative sentence, a biographical fact. Not the subject of dissertations or the reason two hefty volumes of The Letters of T.S. Eliot (Volume 1: 1898-1922;Volume 2: 1923-5) have just been published, but along with his disastrous and draining marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, Eliot’s employment at Lloyd’s Bank of London was the driving force of his life in the years of these letters, until he left Lloyd’s in October 1925 for a position as an editor at the publishing house Faber & Gwyer (later to be Faber & Faber).

There is a general antipathy about hearing too much about a writer’s day job once he has become successful, and Eliot’s successes piled up as he rose at Lloyd’s: Prufrock and Other Observations was published in 1915; his essays collected in The Sacred Wood in 1921; The Waste Land stormed both sides of the Atlantic in 1922, etc. Like Eliot at the bank, we know Wallace Stevens sold insurance, but nobody wants to think about the poet at the water cooler, or, even worse, pouring over actuarial tables. Same goes for William Carlos Williams being a doctor: Do we want a man so skilled with words to perform our annual physicals? It’s fine for a writer to have a quirky or strange day job, like nude model, “oyster pirate,” even garbage man. Yet the point of the writer’s life must remain to end up at the writer’s desk somewhere, with all that nonsense left behind.

Eliot subverts that plot by continuing to work at the bank even after his poems are successful and he’s made a substantial reputation as a critic. For Eliot to show up every day at a bank, and, as his letters confirm, find the work more conducive to writing poetry and criticism than taking a more literary job might be (and certainly better for his health than starving for his art), upends the way we want writers’ careers to progress. Eliot, the modernist upstart, was also a timid—and incorrigible—bourgeois.

Eliot considered himself lucky to have landed the job at Lloyd’s through a connection of his in-law’s. After an taxing and poorly paid stint as a school teacher the job at the bank was financially, at least, a godsend. He wrote to his mother in March 1917:

I am now earning £2 10s a week for sitting in an office from 9.15 to 5 with an hour for lunch, and tea served in the office. It’s not a princely salary, but there are good prospects of a rise [raise] as I become more useful. Perhaps it will surprise you to hear that I enjoy the work. It is not nearly so fatiguing as schoolteaching, and is more interesting, I have a desk and a filing cabinet in a small room with another man. The filing cabinet is my province, for it contains balance sheets of all the foreign banks with which Lloyd’s does business. These balances I file and tabulate in such a way as to show the progress or decline of every bank from year to year.

Not only was Eliot at the bank, but as the letter above demonstrates, he was happy to be there. A certain pride creeps in to his accounting of his accounting: the salary, the hours, the filing cabinet which is “my province.” To read Eliot’s letters is to get a full picture of the routine demands of this job, which he clung to despite rigorous efforts from his friends and supporters to free him from the shackles of international finance.

Eliot resists the characterization of a writer as willing to forgo the niceties of daily life in order to make art. What he wants are not luxuries—the early letters testify over and over to the Eliots’ impoverishment despite Tom’s bank wages, with thank-you letters to his American relatives for sending checks that fill in the financial gaps so he can have new underwear and pajamas, not brandy and cigars. Rather, Eliot craves security. He writes again and again of trying to free himself from worry, for his own but even more for the nervous and unhealthy Vivien’s sake. Has any writer (Stevens excepted) ever had so much anxious correspondence about life insurance? Eliot is prostrate over what will happen to Vivien if anything should happen to him.

The multiple breakdowns both Eliots suffer from stem from anxiety over finances as much as any other source.

“A Peaceful, But Very Interesting Pursuit”

Eliot started out as a clerk in Colonial and Foreign department of Lloyd’s “on the false pretense of being a linguist” (one supposes his Harvard Sanskrit probably did not get too much use, though he did know French and Italian, and picked up a little Norwegian, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish). He took the job because he thought it would leave him time to write both verse and criticism in the evenings. In 1914 he was already contributing to the New Statesman, and the promise of work in the American magazines like the Dial and the Century were on the horizon. Commissions from British magazines would soon follow.

Both Eliots’ health improved once he started working at the bank, a fact which is not to be underestimated. The letters are in large part a catalogue of ailments and unsuccessful cures, especially Vivien’s. But the bank, in the early years, exerts a stabilizing force on the couple: “Vivien was very anxious about my health while I was at home—it seemed to get worse and worse; and now I am better and more cheerful and find she is much happier. Then too I have felt more creative lately.” The bank has stirred Eliot to write poetry again along with his critical essays. Eliot is genuinely interested in his banking work as well, as he writes to his father: “I am absorbed during the daytime by the balance sheets of foreign banks. It is a peaceful, but very interesting pursuit, and involves some use of reasoning powers.” Vivien, perhaps over-enthusiastically, goes so far as to write to Eliot’s mother that Tom is considering banking asa “money-making career!” She continues, “We are all very much surprised at this development, but not one of his friends has failed to see, and to remark upon, the great chance in Tom’s health, appearance, spirits, and literary productiveness since he went in for Banking. So far, it has obviously suited him. He is extremely interested in finance, and I believe he has a good deal of hitherto unexpected ability in that direction.” Vivien prattles on that she feels in a couple of years Eliot might be able to continue at the bank both making money and producing poetry, as he has written five “most excellent poems in the course of one week” and oh, what a miracle that would be.

An Anti-Romantic Poet

Yet one letter after Vivien’s above, a snake creeps into the garden: Eliot decides to take a contributing editor job with the Egoist, a monthly magazine which has been publishing his poems. It is this extra task that leads to Eliot’s return to the condition of “overwork” in December 1917, one the letters find him in over and over again. The position with the Egoist marks the beginning of Eliot’s time as an editor, a job he will pursue and refuse over the next eight years. In March 1919 John Middleton Murry offers him the assistant editor post at the Athenaeum. Eliot writes to his mother that Murry “is very anxious to get me as assistant, and says he would rather have me than anyone in England.” Eliot goes on to list the advantages and disadvantages of the offer. He passes over the advantages—more money, social prestige—quite quickly. But he is clear on the disadvantages: “4. The work might be more exhausting than the bank work; and would have no more relation to my own serious work than the bank work has. 5. I have lately been shifted into new and much more interesting work at the bank which is not routine but research – practically economics and am in fact a kind of bureau by myself.” Plus there is the stability of the bank, as Murry cannot guarantee more than two years, and no raises in pay. Eliot is a an anti-Romantic poet: not only does he believe that “English literature ends well before 1800,” he has no tolerance for risk. No Byron off to Greece to fight or Shelley thwarting sexual convention is he. In his criticism and his life, he remains a conservative man.

So Eliot stays at the bank. As he tells his mother, there are two main reasons, one practical and one ego-based: “I should be worrying all the time about whether it would succeed. The bank work offers prospects of a very good salary. I know the people and like them, and they like me very much. I know where I am with them.” Then Eliot writes of being above the scurries of journalism, retaining a social position by working at a bank. “I can influence London opinion and English literature in a better way. I am known to be disinterested…There is a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England.” He continued to publish criticism and poetry and get raises at the bank, and at the beginning of 1923 Eliot became the head of the Intelligence Department, making it harder for him to leave just as his friends were pressuring him to do just that.

The Failure of Bel Esprit

Bel Esprit was a scheme hatched by Ezra Pound and others to enable Eliot to leave the bank in 1922. The plan was to find thirty guarantors of £10 per year, giving Eliot a “salary” of £300. A circular Pound wrote in March 1922 stated: “[TSE] certainly is not asking favours, our plan was concocted without his knowledge. The facts are that his bank work has diminished his output of poetry, and that his prose has grown tired. Last winter he broke down and was sent off for three months’ rest. During that time he wrote Waste Land, a series of poems, probably the finest that the modern movement in English has produced, at any rate as good as anything that has been done since 1900, and which certainly loses nothing by comparison with the best work of Keats, Browning or Shelley.” Yet Eliot is opposed to Bel Esprit on the grounds that it will not provide the stability that the bank does. “I see no advantage for myself in an indefinite income for five or ten years only,” he writes his friend Richard Aldington in June 1922, and the scheme falls apart when it is made public. What embarrasses Eliot most about the revelation of Bel Esprit in the media is that it might be inferred that he left the bank, though privately he writes to Pound in November 1922, “Of course I want to leave the Bank, and of course the prospect of staying there for the rest of my life is abominable to me. It ought not be necessary to say this.” The rest of his letter, however, reiterates the reasons he cannot abide Bel Esprit: no long-term security for himself or for Vivien.

It is in part the business skills he learned at the bank which enable Eliot to free himself from it. He starts a quarterly periodical called The Criterion in 1922, and his correspondence becomes a window into his vision for this venture. All the while he tries to get his patron, Lady Rothmere, to give him a salary for the enormous amount of work it takes to run The Criterion (and enlists others to persuade her as well). But it is interest in him as an shrewd editor—and writer, of course, as he is a regular contributor to The Criterion—which piques the interest of Geoffrey Faber in Eliot as a potential member of his publishing firm. After they agree on terms, Eliot finally has his way out of the bank, with a job that has security and future prospects.

In his letter of resignation, Eliot writes that he “must seek some employment which would give me the time to attend to my domestic anxieties,” meaning Vivien’s deteriorating health. Curiously, he does not mention writing as a reason for his exit. The tone of the letter is remarkable, though, for its humility, and sincere (or sincere-sounding) regret on having to leave a place which has been kind to him. It is not throwing off shackles but begging forgiveness. He writes of regretting not seeing the Intelligence Division to its fruition, and of letting down his colleagues there. He names particular coworkers whose “abundant generosity and sympathy I shall never forget.” And he sums up by saying, “At this time, all of my feelings are numb; but I know that it is, and I fear always will be, very painful for me to have severed my connection with Lloyd’s Bank in this way—a way which could justly be qualified as desertion rather than resignation.” Eliot leaves Lloyd’s Bank the same way he came: gratefully.

Dickens

2012-02-08T07:14:00.002-06:00

Gillian Anderson shows a Dickens first edition to the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall during a tour of the Dickens Museum to mark the 200th anniversary of the author's birth. Photograph: Andrew Winning/PA

A 24-hour global "readathon", celebrations in two British cities and a special Google Doodle were among the highlights of the bicentenary ofCharles Dickens's birth on Tuesday.

For the readathon, organised by the British Council, 24 countries hosted consecutive readings of Dickens novels. Starting in Australia with an extract from Dombey and Son, it was due to hit the UK at 9pm, where the author David Nicholls was planning to read from Great Expectations at the British Film Institute.

In Portsmouth, where Dickens was born, a day that actor Simon Callow warned would be "a dangerously moving occasion" started with the laying of a wreath outside the author's birthplace by Ian Dickens, his great great grandson, then continued with a service at St Mary's church which included readings by Callow and Sheila Hancock from David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.

In London, festivities began at his old house in Doughty Street, now the Dickens Museum, where Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall were treated to a private reading of his work by Gillian Anderson, who played Miss Havisham in a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations.

The house, where Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby were written, recently raised eyebrows by announcing that it would close for a £3.1m refurbishment from April, despite the potential boost in visitors that Dickens's bicentenary and the Olympics would be expected to bring.

The royals then moved on to Westminster Abbey for a wreath-laying ceremony on Dickens's grave in Poet's Corner, attended by Dickens fellows, society members and almost 200 of his descendents – as well as famous enthusiasts of his work including Nicholls, Armando Iannucci and Mike Newell.

Ralph Fiennes, who is to star as Magwitch in a new film adaptation ofGreat Expectations, proved Dickens's ability to stir the emotions with a heart-rending extract from Bleak House describing the death of homeless boy Jo.

In a statement, read out simultaneously in Portsmouth, Prince Charles said: "Despite the many years that have passed, Charles Dickens remains one of the greatest writers of the English language, who used his creative genius to campaign passionately for social justice. The word Dickensian instantly conjures up a vivid picture of Victorian life with all its contrasts and intrigue, and his characterisation is as fresh today as it was on the day it was written."

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, said Dickens loved the poor through "a sense of outrage that lives are being made flat and dark". He said he regarded Bleak House as Dickens's "most profoundly theological work, though he would not thank me for that".

"I didn't realise the service would be so religious," said academic and Dickens fan Berry Mayall afterwards. "Dickens had faith in God but he was a Unitarian – he didn't have much truck with the Church of England. He liked his religion plain. But I thought they chose the readings very well indeed."

Jane Whinney, the wife of Dickens's great great great great grandson Harry Whinney, said she planned to continued the celebrations at adinner in Dickens's honour at Mansion House, with entertainment by Patrick Stewart.

The novelist Carol Lee said the service had reaffirmed the potency of Dickens's work. She said she sat next to a man from New York at the service who said Dickens had changed his life. "In 1993 he was reading A Tale of Two Cities and came to the chapter where the man is sitting drunk: 'Here is a man who has sensibilities but cannot be sensible.' It was as if Dickens was speaking to him directly and he stopped then and there."

2012-02-08T07:11:00.002-06:00

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

PARUL SEHGAL

Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—and that thing is herself. Narcissism has nothing to do with it. This is a specialty that usually signals deprivation: In the absence of other people, the self was all there was to study.

Such is the lot and genius of Jeanette Winterson. Her novels—mongrels of autobiography, myth, fantasy, and formal experimentation—evince a colossal stamina for self-scrutiny. In her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, she returns to the source, her grim girlhood in a sooty English industrial town in the 1960s, to tell her story more forthrightly than she has before. But because this is Winterson, naturally she begins by taking a truncheon to the standard memoir form.

From the first page, it’s clear that this isn’t mere memoir. It’s too stylish and stylized. Horror and camp commingle. Here’s our introduction to Winterson’s Gorgon of an adoptive mother: “She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father.”

Winterson is as concerned with aesthetics as authenticity. Style is king when you’re trying to wrest control of the narrative. And narrative, in the Winterson household, was contested territory. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t setting my story against [my mother’s],” she writes. “Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives.”

And the artist abhors a vacuum. Winterson aligns her stories with those of Oedipus, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Harry Potter. She, too, is a member of that most magical fraternity: orphans cruelly used but marked for greatness. Hers is a classic quest story—the kind deep in her storyteller’s DNA that she has riffed on her entire career. In this memoir, she seeks her biological mother and, above all, love. “How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss.”

Winterson is the best kind of hero, deeply flawed, all swagger and pluck, and matched against an excellent villain. Mrs. Winterson (as the author refers to her parent) can confidently take her place among the demon mothers of life and literature, the Medeas and Mommie Dearests. She had adopted Jeanette “because she wanted a friend”—an enthusiasm that curdled quickly on the actual baby’s arrival. She stuffed the child in the coalhole, locked her out overnight in bitter winters. When she discovered Jeanette was having a love affair with a female friend, Mrs. Winterson arranged for an exorcism.

“Unhappy families are conspiracies of silence,” Winterson writes, and the thrill she feels in breaking the contract gives these scenes a terrific energy. The pride of the survivor pumps into each sentence as Winterson hauls her old ogre of a mother into the light and ticks off every offense.

“The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole,” she writes, “is that it prompts reflection.” The bleak house became the crucible in which she brewed her own brawling instinct for self-preservation. She found sanctuary in the public library, reading through the collection alphabetically (“Thank God her last name was Austen . . .”), and her affection and attention to her surroundings pungently evoke life in Accrington, its squalor and dignity. The hungry children idling outside the dog-biscuit factory, hoping for scraps. The furry and mustachioed women—it simply didn’t occur to them to shave anything. The laborers who would end their days with a class on Shakespeare for self-improvement. It’s as proud and vivid a portrait of working-class life as any.

If Winterson disappoints, it’s in her curious insistence on ascribing the development of her style to actual incidents in her life. To wit: She traces her preference for the fragment to when her mother found and burned Jeanette’s secret stash of paperbacks. The next morning Winterson was left to sift through the “burnt jigsaws” from her books. She writes, “It is probably why I write as I do—collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative.” Aiming for narrative tidiness tends to dilute this memoir’s delightfully unorthodox quality.

But for the most part, this bullet of a book is charged with risk, dark mirth, hard-won self-knowledge. When Winterson writes, “I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked,” she’s right. You’re in the hands of a master builder who has remixed the memoir into a work of terror and beauty.

2012-02-07T16:27:00.001-06:00

A Lightning Rod in the Storm Over America’s Class Divide

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

WASHINGTON — When Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s book “The Bell Curve” appeared in 1994, it was denounced by social scientists, liberal pundits and a little-known Chicago civil-rights lawyer named Barack Obama, who in a commentary on NPR accused the authors of calculating that “white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism as long as it’s artfully packaged.”

Anyone who remembers the firestorm over that 845-page doorstop’s dense arguments about race, class, genetics and I.Q. might be tempted to look at the cover of Mr. Murray’s latest book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” and think, “Here we go again.”

But “Coming Apart,” which depicts members of white elites as hypocrites living in a bubble and the white working class as succumbing to moral decay, is hardly a flattering portrait of white people, let alone, Mr. Murray insists, a partisan barnburner.

“It’s not a brief for the right,” Mr. Murray said in a recent interview at the American Enterprise Institute here, where he has been a scholar since 1990. “The problem I describe isn’t a conservative-versus-liberal problem. It’s a cultural problem the whole country has.”

“Coming Apart,” which shot to No. 5 at Amazon.com immediately upon publication last week, has certainly prompted much conversation, if little in the way of consensus. David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, pre-emptively declared it the most important book of the year, saying, “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.”

But to critics on the left Mr. Murray’s arguments are just an effort to change the subject. Defining the problem as one of cultural inequality instead of economic inequality, as the New York Magazine blogger Jonathan Chait put it, allows one to start talking about marriage and industriousness and “steer the debate back onto comfortable conservative terrain.”

Looking at America Mr. Murray sees a country increasingly polarized into two culturally and geographically isolated demographics. In Belmont, the fictional name Mr. Murray gives to the part of America where the top 20 percent live, divorce is low, the work ethic is strong, religious observance is high, and out-of-wedlock births are all but unheard of. Meanwhile in Fishtown, where the bottom 30 percent live, what Mr. Murray calls America’s four “founding virtues” — marriage, industriousness, community and faith — have all but collapsed.

The book says little about the roots of Fishtown’s problems, but in conversation Mr. Murray doesn’t hesitate to name the villain. “The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy,” he said. “The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.”

It’s an argument familiar from Mr. Murray’s 1984 book, “Losing Ground,” which established him overnight as a major policy intellectual and helped lay the groundwork for the 1996 law overhauling welfare. But in “Coming Apart” Mr. Murray’s recommendations are both more vague and far more ambitious. The first step, he writes, is for the people of Belmont to drop their “nonjudgmentalism” and lecture Fishtown on the importance of marriage and nondependence: to “preach what they practice,” as Mr. Murray puts it.

Next they need to leave their upper-middle-class enclaves and move closer to Fishtown.

That’s exactly what Mr. Murray said he did two decades ago, when he and his second wife, Catherine Cox, a retired English professor, moved from Washington to Burkittsville, Md., a historic rural town of about 170 people about 50 miles to the northwest.

“I did not want my children to grow up only knowing other upper-middle-class kids like themselves,” said Mr. Murray, who has two children with Ms. Cox and two from his first marriage. “That was a very conscious worry shared by my work.”

Life in Burkittsville, as he described it, approximates the small-town virtues he enjoyed growing up in Newton, Iowa, where, as the son of a manager at Maytag, he could mingle easily with the children of assembly-line workers.

In Burkittsville, he said, he and his wife attend Quaker meetings and enjoy friendships with both other professionals and blue-collar tradespeople, whose travails he cited to counter the suggestion that the problems described in “Coming Apart” might have something to do with the disappearance of working-class jobs.

Until the recession hit, Mr. Murray insisted, his blue-collar friends were eager to hire apprentices at good wages but struggled to find anyone willing to do the work. “They are looking at a marked deterioration in industriousness that is real and palpable,” he said.

Mr. Murray’s critics jump on such moralizing arguments, saying they blithely ignore a large body of research on the causes of family breakdown among the working class.

“He wants to go back and blame the counterculture for everything,” Claude S. Fischer, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a telephone interview. “But the huge majority of social scientists would say it’s the economic downturn suffered by the less educated in the last generation.”

Mr. Murray, who has a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T., is well aware of his fraught standing among his fellow social scientists, noting in the acknowledgments of his latest book that being thanked by him “can cause trouble for people in academia.” But he described himself as “almost completely rehabilitated” since the fracas surrounding “The Bell Curve,” saying, “I am no longer a complete pariah in some academic quarters.” Still, he receives few invitations to speak on campuses, and an appearance last spring at Earlham College in Indiana was interrupted twice by a pulled fire alarm.

His real audience, though, is not academia but policy makers and ordinary people.

Both groups could find “Coming Apart” challenging. It seems unlikely that any politician will take up Mr. Murray’s call to replace all federal income-transfer programs with a modest guaranteed income for all Americans age 21 and over. He’s “completely unwired” in partisan political circles these days, Mr. Murray insisted, adding, “Neither party wants to say, you know, we’ve got a real problem with the working class being less and less able to participate in American life.”

Mr. Murray may have just as hard a time persuading his comfortably upper-middle-class readers — liberal or conservative — to leave behind the nice houses (not to mention the top public schools) of Belmont and find their own Burkittsville.

But whatever happens, Mr. Murray, who turned 69 recently, vowed that “Coming Apart” would be his last major statement about the relationship among virtue, happiness and public policy.

“If I can’t persuade people at this point, I’m not going to persuade them with another book,” he said.

Not that Mr. Murray has had his own mind changed about much. He said he saw no real contradiction between his staunch libertarian faith in freedom of choice and his old-fashioned moralist’s dismay at where choice often leads.

Asked if he had ever reversed himself intellectually, he thought for a few minutes before coming back to “The Bell Curve,” whose arguments about a genetically advantaged “cognitive elite” he reprises in “Coming Apart.”

Working on “The Bell Curve,” he said, “brought home to me the extent to which in an age when cognitive ability is getting more and more important, and people are born into the world getting the short end of the stick in that regard, I think I’m more sympathetic than I used to be to taking that into account with public policy.”

“But that doesn’t make me very sympathetic,” he quickly added, with a laugh. “I still want to find a way that leaves people free to live their lives without telling them what to do.”

Mitt

2012-02-07T16:15:00.002-06:00

Willard Mitt Romney

FEBRUARY 23, 2012

Michael Tomasky

The Real Romney
by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman
Harper, 401 pp., $27.99

Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics
by R.B. Scott
Lyons, 245 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Mitt Romney; drawing by John Springs

George Wilcken Romney, the former automobile executive who became the centrist Republican governor of Michigan in 1963, was considered a presidential possibility leading up to the 1964 election. Moderate Republicans around the country were getting awfully nervous about this Goldwater fellow and seeking out plausible alternatives. But Romney, a tall and square-jawed man with impressive hair, had made a commitment to the voters of his state that he would serve four years, and Romney was a man who meant what he said, so a 1964 run was out of the question. The task of opposing Barry Goldwater fell to other moderates—Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania’s William Scranton. Romney did, however, leave his mark on the campaign: having deemed Goldwater an enemy of civil rights, which he backed ardently, he walked out of the party’s convention at San Francisco’s Cow Palace. He had his seventeen-year-old youngest son, Mitt, in tow, and thus Mitt, too, occasionally gets credit (at www .aboutmittromney.com, for starters) for stalking away from his party on a matter of the highest principle.¹

Today, as the younger Romney struggles to secure the GOP nomination that seemed his for the taking until his crushing loss to Newt Gingrich in South Carolina, to think about that anecdote and his father’s towering influence on him, to read these two balanced but essentially unflattering books, and to watch Willard Mitt Romney run a campaign in which he has charged as hard and fast to the right as he could on almost every issue you can think of lead inevitably to comparisons between the two Romneys, comparisons in which the younger Romney comes up dramatically short.

Mitt Romney, as the Massachusetts governor who passed health care legislation, had been a leader, just a few years ago, of the GOP‘s now much-diminished moderate wing. At the 2008 GOP convention in St. Paul, Romney’s party took a number of positions completely at odds with those he had taken as governor, on abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, and other matters, and adopted other extremist rallying cries, like the infamous “Drill, Baby, Drill!” chant, which thundered maniacally (I was there) through the hall when Sarah Palin spoke, as if the assembled were packing decades’ worth of rage at the liberal establishment into those three words.

But does anyone think for a second that Romney fils would have walked out on his party, or even worked to moderate certain platform planks? It’s beyond comprehension. We’ve seen plenty enough now to know that that isn’t who Mitt Romney is. Instead, this self-selected member of the East Coast elite opened his convention speech this way:

For decades now, the Washington sun has been rising in the east. You see, Washington has been looking to the eastern elites, to the editorial pages of the Times and thePost, and to the broadcasters from the coast.

If America really wants to change, it’s time to look for the sun in the west, ‘cause it’s about to rise and shine from Arizona and Alaska!

On the evidence offered in these books, Romney seems in certain ways a fine and even rare person. He is diligent, industrious, and appears to be honest; he applies himself to problems, earnestly studying and following the lead of the data. He is a man of apparently deep personal virtue, generous with his money and time. He is very intelligent and has typically succeeded, wildly so, at nearly everything he’s done (except, interestingly, politics—he’s lost two races and won just one). Bill Bain, who in 1977 hired Romney into the venture capital and private equity firm we’ve been hearing so much about lately, had “seen something special” in Romney in their first meeting, write Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, veteran and well-regarded reporters for The Boston Globe, in The Real Romney: “All of the partners were impressed, and some were jealous. More than one partner told Bain, ‘This guy is going to be president of the United States someday.’”

But with all that, there still seems something missing in the man. Even R.B. Scott, a longtime magazine and newspaper journalist who is a fellow Mormon and former occasional Romney adviser who tried to enlist Romney’s cooperation in his book, Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics, cannot escape (and to his credit does not shy away from) pursuing certain dark corners of Romney’s character and identifying his weaker points:

His inability to empathize with common folk had long been his hoary hoodoo. His father had warned him about it. As a Mormon stake [roughly, a diocese] president, he was kind if often impatient and patronizing with members who didn’t measure up or were beneath him in rank and in intellectual and spiritual prowess. And on and on it went.

“His father had warned him…” For men like Romney, everything comes back in one way or another to father. Mitt was the “miracle baby,” the fourth child born nearly six years after the last of the other three, and named in part after J. Willard Marriott—like George, a nationally prominent and respected Mormon. He “grew up idolizing” his father, write Kranish and Helman. He walked the factory floor with him at the American Motors Corporation, which the elder Romney made profitable; he listened closely to his father’s religious and civic lectures; he wanted to become his father. His pursuit of the presidency surely has much to do with the fact that his father didn’t make it there, torpedoed by his famous comment about having been “brainwashed” about American progress in the war by generals on a visit to Vietnam.

George Romney didn’t back down from that remark, made to a Detroit television interviewer in 1967. He never backed down, not even to Nixon, with whom, as HUD secretary, he had numerous skirmishes. The son—unable even to view the “brainwashed” clip, Kranish and Helman write, until thirty-nine years later—seems to have decided that backing down is often a pretty good idea. Commentators have spent countless hours speculating whether Romney is “really” moderate or conservative. The answer is that he is neither, and both. The lessons he learned from watching his father fail to make it to the White House are: don’t stick to your guns; be flexible; suit the needs of the moment. And so, in order to complete his father’s unfulfilled destiny, he has decided to become his father’s opposite.

The Romney family’s history is, because of the religious question, pretty far from being a typical American success story. They were a prominent Mormon family going way back who got caught up in the intense ill will between Abraham Lincoln and Brigham Young. Lincoln signed an anti-bigamy law in 1862, aimed specifically at Young and his tribe, and Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather had been pursued by armed US marshals on bigamy charges. Miles Romney ended up in Mexico, as did many Mormons of the period, fleeing what the Church of Latter-Day Saints still thinks of as a great persecution of its people.

Miles’s son and Mitt’s grandfather, Gaskell, flourished there, at least until 1912, when during the civil war Mexican revolutionaries suspected (probably incorrectly) that these Yanqui interlopers would take up arms against them. Gaskell’s land was seized, and he became nearly penniless. He returned to the United States and, his grandson might do well to remember, got back on his feet partly because of assistance from the federal government, which had established a $100,000 relief fund for Mormons fleeing Mexico. The Romneys ended up in Salt Lake City, where Gaskell made a handsome living in home construction. George was five.

George moved to Washington, D.C., in the early 1930s. His betrothed, Lenore LaFount, whom he had met in Utah, had her eye on a Hollywood career, and even landed a few parts and seemed on her way. But the unstoppable George persuaded her to marry him. Even though he never managed to finish college, he became a lobbyist—there weren’t many in those days—for the aluminum industry. They moved later to Detroit, where he became head of the Detroit office of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, eventually overseeing the industry’s war effort. The war ended, and in March 1947, after Lenore had been told by doctors that she could not possibly get pregnant again, the miracle baby arrived.

A beautiful house in exclusive Bloomfield Hills; the Cranbrook School, a private school with a lush campus; unimagined success, as George developed the AMC Rambler, a small car that he intended as competition to the hulking beasts Detroit was producing at the time (“compact car” and “gas guzzler” are among the elder Romney’s contributions to our automotive lexicon)—this was the milieu in which Mitt Romney was raised, apparently never getting into a whit of mischief. When he was seventeen, he met Ann Davies—fifteen, beautiful, but not a Mormon—at a party. He announced straightaway his intention to marry her, and she agreed that they would do so at the right time. But first, college beckoned, and Mitt’s obligatory missionary service.

He started at Stanford in the fall of 1965. It was a comparatively conservative campus in that age when Mario Savio was rabble-rousing across the bay up in Berkeley, but even Palo Alto provided Romney with a measure of culture shock. One of the resident assistants in his dorm was David Harris, the radical activist who would later marry Joan Baez. Romney attended one antiwar rally, Scott reports, wearing “his signature blazer and tie.” But by and large, he stuck to the company of his fellow young conservatives, challenged students on the issues of the day at parties (where he did not smoke or drink), and spent many weekends secretly (even from his parents) flying back to Michigan on weekends to see Ann.

Next came the missionary period, and here we begin to reach the part of the biography that the newspapers have already filled in. Romney went to France, finally ending up in Paris (in 1968, no less). He was driving a car one night in the French countryside, with passengers including the Mormon mission leader in France and his wife, and it was hit headlong by an apparently drunk French priest. The mission leader’s wife was killed; Romney was pronounced dead at the scene by one jumpy gendarme, although it turned out that his injuries were comparatively minor. He was—as was his custom—the most energetic young man in the mission, although he found that after knocking on French doors to expound the Mormon faith he ended up spending more time defending Richard Nixon than winning any converts.

He returned to America, and to school—although at the more convivial Brigham Young University now, not Stanford. Ann had already enrolled, and Mitt upon his return was surprised to find that he had to bat away one competing suitor. They married while still undergraduates, which is not unusual there, and began producing the progeny that the Book of Mormon commanded of them (they have five sons, all now grown and married, who have produced sixteen children of their own). He went to Harvard, gaining acceptance to a joint MBA and law program and graduating with honors. He found a job with the Boston Consulting Group, an early business consultancy, and he and Ann bought a home in the solid suburb of Belmont, just beyond Cambridge. He ascended the corporate ladder and the religious one, rising in the local Mormon hierarchy, becoming first a bishop and eventually the president of the Boston “stake.”

Restore Our Future

A still from a television ad attacking Newt Gingrich, paid for by the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future

It was at this point that two pivotal events occurred, one of which might be controversial for him this fall, the other of which is certain to be. The first involves his religious work. Carrel Hilton Sheldon, a local Mormon woman who already had five children, found herself pregnant again in 1983. A complication developed, and her doctor advised an abortion. This being a thorny matter religiously—the church generally disapproved, with rare exceptions—she sought the counsel of the man who was the local stake president at the time, Gordon Williams.

According to Sheldon—whom Scott interviewed exclusively for his book—Williams told her to do what the doctor advised. Romney, a local bishop at the time, got wind of this and inserted himself aggressively into her life. He badgered Sheldon and her family, accused her of lying about Williams approving an abortion, and struck Sheldon’s father as “an authoritative type of fellow who thinks he is in charge of the world.” Astonishingly, when The Boston Globe asked him about this in 1994, he gave the kind of slippery response for which he is increasingly becoming known: “I don’t have any memory of what [Sheldon] is referring to, although I certainly can’t say it could not have been me.”

The New York Times told this story, largely based on Scott’s reporting, back in October.² It caused considerable comment at the time. Whether it returns will depend on circumstances—whether, say, Barack Obama’s campaign feels the need to push the women’s vote. The other event from that period, Romney’s decision to become the head of Bain & Company’s private equity arm, Bain Capital, is with us now and will not go away.

Bain & Company specialized in venture capital, essentially straightforward investing. Private equity—leveraged buyouts; after the LBO scandals of the 1980s, they simply changed the name—is another matter. PE firms scour the landscape for struggling companies, bid to restructure them, load them with debt in the form of borrowed bonds or notes from banks or hedge funds, and acquire them. PE firms invest very little of their own money, and they take advantage of a key tax loophole that permits them to deduct from their taxes the interest they pay on the money they’ve borrowed to finance the purchase.³ The company might swim or it might sink. It will almost certainly shed resources, which often means laying people off. The harsher the “restructuring,” in some cases, the better the PE firm stands to do. And since the profits come in the form of capital gains for the partners, they are taxed at much lower rates than income—just 15 percent as opposed to 35 percent.

Romney initially turned down Bill Bain’s offer to head the PE arm, until, Kranish and Helman report, Bain sweetened the offer with a promise that if the PE operation failed, he “would craft a cover story saying that Romney’s return to Bain & Company was needed because of his value as a consultant.” And so, in 1989, Romney started down the path that would eventually lead him to a net worth of at least (it could be more, the authors suggest) a quarter-billion dollars.

Kranish and Helman give a comprehensive reading of the Bain years—the greatest contribution of their book. They write that the “most thorough” analysis of Bain’s performance during Romney’s tenure (1989–2001) came from an analysis written by Deutsche Bank, which found that of sixty-eight major deals, nearly half—thirty-three—had lost money or merely broken even. On the others, though, profits soared, sometimes for everyone, and sometimes not. Certain success stories, like Domino’s Pizza, are widely known. On the other side of the ledger, there was a buyout of a department store chain called Sage Stores, for example. It made Bain $175 million in 1996–1997. But three years later, the company was in bankruptcy.

All these matters came starkly to the fore in mid-January with the release of the twenty-seven-minute film King of Bain, one of the most stunning and mysterious campaign artifacts of our time. It was made not by a liberal but by a conservative, Jason Killian Meath, who had produced ads for the Romney campaign in 2008. It was commissioned, according to Peter J. Boyer of The Daily Beast, by another conservative—Barry Bennett, who works at a firm whose principals include Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary.⁴ The rights were then purchased by a Super PAC affiliated with Newt Gingrich, apparently with money supplied by right-wing Las Vegas tycoon Sheldon Adelson. All this right-wing muscle has been invested in a project that makes Oliver Stone seem timid. A typical snippet of the voice-over goes:

This is a tale of greed, playing the system for a quick buck, a group of corporate raiders, led by Mitt Romney. More ruthless than Wall Street. For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.

The film was quickly and largely (though not wholly) discredited. Gingrich and Rick Perry, who led the attacks on Romney’s “vulture capitalism” (Perry’s phrase), were warned to cool it by Rush Limbaugh and others on the right. Romney has tried different defenses, first saying Bain created “more than 100,000” jobs, then revising that downward to “tens of thousands,” then to “thousands,” before it spiked back up in a January 16 debate to 120,000. The Obama people are presumably building their file of legitimate attacks on Bain. An argument about whether Bain created or eliminated more jobs will dissolve into the usual fog of unprovables, and it would be foolish of the Obama people to pursue that. (Still, is 120,000 jobs over twelve years really that impressive?) The point is that Bain Capital existed not to create jobs or destroy them, but to enrich the investor class—that now much-discussed “1 percent”—Romney himself very much included.

What is most interesting about the rest of Romney’s résumé—his governorship, his success at turning around the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and his failed political runs, against Ted Kennedy in 1994 and for president in 2008—is the way he consistently misrepresents both his triumphs and his setbacks. His one gubernatorial term was largely a success, but he now downplays for obvious reasons his most impressive achievement, the health care reform bill, and embellishes other accomplishments. On the subject of job creation, Kranish and Helman note that little of it occurred during his term: fewer than 40,000 new net jobs in his four years, or a 1 percent gain, the “fourth weakest rate of job growth of all states over the same period.” With regard to the Olympics, he did indeed straighten out some serious financial problems, put the games in the black, and oversee what is regarded as one of the most successful Olympiads of recent times. But Scott is near apoplexy over Romney’s urge to self-aggrandize and his need to exaggerate the failures of his predecessors, charging them with corruption (in his book on the subject, Turnaround) even after a judge had thrown out the charges against them.

What is striking in Scott’s account is not merely the fact of Romney’s numerous flip-flops on political issues familiar and less so (a less familiar one: the Massachusetts Romney refused to sign Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge in 2002, while the national Romney, in January 2007, became the first Republican presidential candidate to sign it). It’s his clumsy way of trying to assert that he has not in fact changed positions. On abortion rights, he took to saying in about 2007 that he had “always been personally pro-life” but had respected Roe v. Wade as law. But if he was always pro-life, why did he and Ann make donations for years to Planned Parenthood? And why, when asked about this, did he, in Scott’s words, “gracelessly roll his own wife under the bus” by saying, “Her contributions are for her and not for me”?

Romney appears to have a strong need to ingratiate, an urge to say much more than he really needs to say. When he wanted to prove he was a hunter and a regular guy, he made reference not to hunting animals or game but “varmints.” Twice. He boasted that his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr., but, admirable as his father was on civil rights, this was not true. His sons may have avoided military service, but they were “showing support for our nation” by…working on his campaign. The list goes on.

At other moments, a very different impulse reveals itself, and Romney’s deep and perhaps even unconscious sense of class superiority rises to the surface. He likes “being able to fire people,” he said to an audience recently, expecting a laugh that did not quite materialize. Complaints about his income are nothing more than “the bitter politics of envy.” Income inequality—this is the most incredible one to me—should be discussed only in “quiet rooms.” And his speaking fee income was “not very much” ($374,000 in the year ending in February 2011). Here again, he is his father’s opposite: George Romney was known for refusing bonuses, explaining that no executive needed to make more than his $225,000 a year ($1.4 million in today’s dollars).

Both urges, to pander awkwardly and to protect the prerogatives of his class, are at play in matters of policy. Romney’s proposed tax cut, writes The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein, is roughly three times the size of George W. Bush’s 2000 proposal. It’s far more regressive—it would actually raise taxes on many working-class people, which Bush did not do—and would add to the deficit a hefty $600 billion.⁵ Likewise, Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic found that Romney’s proposed budget would cut at least 14 percent and perhaps 25 percent from every domestic program—on top of the cuts already slated to go into effect as a result of the congressional deal on the debt ceiling.⁶

Romney has benefited from running against a weak, not to say mostly preposterous, field of competitors. Most experts felt, even after South Carolina, that he would still grind out a win in the nomination battle with Gingrich, who is unacceptable to his party’s establishment figures for so many reasons (another lucky break). And if he is the nominee, he may benefit this fall from a weak economy, in which case President Obama will have a hard time persuading many independent voters to stick with him.

Romney would certainly, if elected, prove competent to do the job. Competence isn’t the question. Competence toward what end, however, is. He seems particularly intense when he talks of the need to build up the armed forces and would be competent at that. Asked in the first of two South Carolina debates whether the US should negotiate with the Taliban to end the fighting in Afghanistan, he answered:

Of course not…. Of course you take out our enemies, wherever they are. These people declared war on us…. We go anywhere they are, and we kill them.

“There is no leader who can provide sound leadership on the basis of unsound principles.” Words spoken long ago by the father, and long since betrayed by the son.

—January 26, 2012

1
On the page on his website devoted to his father, a Daily News article is cited that pointedly says "both father and son walked out" of the convention. See www.aboutmittromney.com/georgeromney.htm. ↩
2
See Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "For Romney, a Role of Faith and Authority," The New York Times , October 15, 2011. ↩
3
For a clear, detailed, and concise explanation of this loophole, see Merrill Goozner, "Private Equity's Edge: Buy Now, Deduct Taxes Later," The Fiscal Times , January 9, 2012. ↩
4
See Peter J. Boyer, "New Anti-Romney Video Attacks Bain Capital Work," The Daily Beast , January 6, 2012. ↩
5
See Ezra Klein, "On Policy, Romney Is Far to Bush's Right," The Washington Post , January 17, 2012. ↩
6
See Jonathan Cohn, "Moderate Mitt? Have You Looked at His Budget?," The New Republic , January 15, 2012. ↩

Asians & Classical Music

2012-02-07T11:07:00.002-06:00

Can Asians Save Classical Music?

Orchestras (and audiences) get more Asian-American every year. Will it be enough?

By Michael Ahn Paarlberg|Posted Thursday, Feb. 2, 2012, at 7:00 AM ET

Alan Gilbert, son of Japanese and American violinists, conducts the New York Philharmonic.

Photograph by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for the Swatch Group

What do symphony orchestras and cigarette companies have in common? It’s the age problem. How do you stay in business when your customers keep dying?

For orchestras, at least it’s not their product that’s lethal, though it might as well be. With the median age of concertgoers rising, fewer than one in 10 adults reported attending a classical concert in 2008, according to a periodic survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, a 28 percent drop since 1982. The financial state of orchestras today is roughly comparable to that of Blockbuster Video post-Netflix. Ticket sales are dropping; layoffs and bankruptcies abound. In the past two years, the Honolulu, Syracuse, and New Mexico orchestras closed up shop entirely; the Philadelphia Orchestra, long revered as one of the five best in the country, filed for Chapter 11 protection in April.

But there is one group that still likes classical music and, what’s more, pays to hear it performed: Asians. Of Asian-Americans ages 18-24 responding to the same survey, 14 percent reported attending a classical concert in the past year, more than any other demographic in that age group. Despite classical’s deserved reputation as the whitest of genres, Asian attendance rates match or surpass the national average up through the 45- 54 age range. To put it one way, the younger the classical audience gets, the more Asian it becomes. To put it another, the only population that is disproportionately filling seats being vacated by old people dying off is Asians.

This reflects what can be observed at most American concert halls today: a sea of white hair, broken only by the black, unflattering bowl cut given to all Asian kids by their parents, who have dragged them to the symphony for their cultural enrichment. I know because I was one of those kids. I’m ahapa (mixed-race) Korean-American, with an American father and Korean mother. At age 5, I was given a quarter-size violin. Private lessons followed, with regular trips to the Kennedy Center to see the National Symphony Orchestra. By 12, I was concertmaster of my school orchestra and performing solo recitals. For a time, it was fun. At no point did I feel I had much of a choice in the matter.

“Music is a huge part of life for most Asian families,” says violinist Sarah Chang. “Most Asian children I know start taking violin, piano, or cello lessons from an early age.” If this sets them apart socially from their non-Asian classmates, Asian parents largely do not care. Their determination to raise musical kids can be single-minded and severe. One memorable passage in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has Amy Chua threatening her daughter during piano practice: “If the next time’s not perfect, I’m going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them!” In Musicians From a Different Shore, University of Hawaii professor and pianist Mari Yoshihara describes her upbringing in postwar Japan. At the time, a confluence of mass production, rising incomes, and shrinking apartment sizes brought millions of upright pianos into urban households, where they became an emblem of middle-class status. Through her years of practice, she writes, “I never asked myself why I was learning music or whether I even liked playing the piano. Such questions never even occurred to me. Music was not something I had the option of liking or not liking; it was just there for me to do.”

“There was a time when practically every major soloist was Jewish,” says violinist Joshua Bell. “Every Jewish kid grew up wanting to play the violin. Now it’s true among Asians.” (Or at least among Asian parents.) This shift became apparent within conservatories and orchestras in the 1970s, when the ranks of Eastern European and Jewish musicians, who had long dominated the field, began to decline, while those of Asians started to swell. Asians make up just over 4 percent of the U.S. population, but 7 percent of U.S. orchestra musicians are Asian, and the figure rises to 20 percent for top orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic. At the elite Julliard School for music, one in five undergraduates—and one in three Ph.D. students—is Asian.

A word of caution: “Asian” in the American context encompasses a broad geography spanning Pakistan to Indonesia and including everyone ranging from fresh-off-the-boat immigrants to third-generation Asian-Americans and adoptees. In reality, the Asian classical phenomenon does not extend much beyond China, Japan, and Korea. Yet for East Asians at least, classical music is a genuine common thread, albeit a relatively young one. Its presence in the region goes back little more than a century, to the military bands brought to Japan by Commodore Perry’s opening. The early association of Western music with military discipline and modernization set a precedent. Classical music became an aspirational totem for both newly industrializing Asian countries, whose governments subsidized music schools and orchestras, and parents, for whom having a musician in the family was marker of success.

But not just any musician. Asian and Asian-American performers gravitate almost exclusively to strings and piano: Those instruments which, within a genre that symbolizes class mobility in Asia, are at the top of the heap. Rarely does one encounter an Asian conservatory student playing the bassoon or trombone, or any instrument that does not afford the possibility of soloist superstardom.

The prestige Asians ascribe to classical music is, it should be noted, completely disproportionate to the actual salaries earned by professional musicians. And the Asian juggernaut has yet to move much beyond the orchestra pit. One area in which Asians do not dominate, Yoshihara notes, is orchestra management, which remains overwhelmingly white. The boards of most performing arts organizations are made up of wealthy corporate donors, who tend to recruit managers and other board members from within their own social circles. And in contrast to celebrity musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang, Asians haven’t made much headway into conducting or composing. Asian music education is not famous for its music theory. The Suzuki method, Asia’s most successful classical music export, is a highly mechanical training regimen based on drills and rote memorization, with no emphasis on “feeling” the music. It lends itself best to the equally mechanical works of the Baroque period, less to the Romantic era and not at all to contemporary classical.

However circumscribed the music may be, Asia is one place where classical artists can be genuine pop stars in ways long forgotten in Europe and North America. “Whenever I play in Korea, I feel like I’m at a rock concert,” says Bell. If there’s any irony to the most quintessentially Western music tradition being kept alive by the East, by now it’s a moot point. Classical music is as Asian as tempura and Spam. Even if it eventually dies in the West, it will have an Asian afterlife, much in the way washed-up American rock bands can still pack stadiums in Manila.

Classical music probably won’t ever disappear completely from our shores. If it survives, it will be thanks in large part to continued Asian immigration and an audience that is increasingly imported. Faced with the unenviable task of trying to make the most hidebound of music traditions hip and relevant to kids, the survival strategy of orchestras has mostly been to throw up their hands and pray that their remaining season ticket-holders cling to life another year. Instead, they might prepare for a future in which their subscribers look a lot different than they do today, and cultivate leadership, outreach and programming which reflect that.

As for me, I eventually grew tired of the violin and stopped playing. But I never lost my love for Mozart and Mahler. It's said that playing an instrument as a child is the greatest predictor of concert attendance as an adult. So I still go to those same concert halls I went to as a kid. Only now, I no longer have the bowl cut, and I attend by choice.

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