Writers Invite Increased Surveillance of Their Work

“Surveillance Leaves Writers Wary,” read the headline (NYT, 11/11/13) It’s an innocent enough statement and one that almost precludes further examination. This is precisely the kind of article that begs the equivalent of prolepsis in conversation. One can easily anticipate the follow up which would have to do with sincere sounding authors worrying about whether the NSA is intruding into their poems, their essays, their short stories and their novels. And sure enough the article had to do with an on line survey of 528 PEN members. The Times piece went on to state “The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression under threat in the United States with 73 per cent of respondents saying they have ‘never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today.’” The problem is that when a writer is given too much privacy he runs the danger of having his works fade into oblivion. What the survey doesn’t deal with is all the writers who aren’t in PEN and who might take NSA surveillance as the less of the evils. Sure it’s bad having the government snooping down your neck, but what’s worse for the writer who hasn’t been able to publish enough to get accepted into PEN, is getting no attention at all. This also ties into the famed public relations koan that “no publicity is bad publicity.” But let’s play out a worst possible scenario. Let’s say you’re a writer and you’re doing a latter day Our Man in Havana—the famed Carol Reed movie based upon the Graham Greene novel, where a would be spy uses drawings of vacuum cleaners as the model for enemy encampments. And let’s say the NSA calls you in for an interview. Well, by George you’ve got it made in the shade. It’s a PR bonanza. Not only are you a victim whose freedoms being jeopardized, but your narrative obviously has enough plausibility to give Homeland Security pause. Before you know it you’re on CNN with publishers banging on your door. No for the average writer the headline should more aptly read, “Writers Invite Increased Surveillance of Their Work.”

All We Need of Hell

Harry Crews

Harry Crews’ Karate is a Thing of the Spirit was the literary man’s version of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. All We Need of Hell is another war novel by Crews, who died in 2012. It's no longer in print, but deserves to be reissued. When we say war in relation to Crews we are talking primarily about inner turmoil (though there is occasional sniper fire). Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a another version of this kind of interiorized banter. Duffy Deeter is Crews’s anti-hero and one might suppose alter ego. We meet him fantasizing about Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz in order to prolong his orgasms with his coke tooting mistress Marvella Sweat. “Nothing centered a man like pain, “ is one of Duffy’s mantras (he’s a practitioner of Zen) who has a gym in his Winnebago where he also stashes a copy of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. During a particularly violent handball game, he delivers a Okinawan roundhouse reverse to a football star named Tump Walker, an acquaintance of his law partner, Jert McPhester. Jert’s a former University of Florida, All American who suffers from a severe case of coitus interruptus when Duffy finds him in bed with his wife, Tish. Duffy’s son, Felix, is a momma’s boy who favors Baby Ruths. Tish, a former gymnast, files for divorce when Felix hurls after an exhausting workout in which Duffy tries to shape the boy up. Crews pulls no punches. He’s the Ur-intellectual shock jock (not that there really have been any since him) and yet underneath all the fascination with pain and the courting of it, is another kind of pain that his character hardens himself against. And that’s the disappointment in love. “Could you love someone who constantly revolted you,” Duffy muses about his son. It’s a question that could be asked about any of the people Duffy encounters, including himself. In his search for redemption, Duffy Deeter does have something in common with Graham Greene “whiskey priest." Here however is Tump Walker, who turns out to be a great bon vivant and lover of life, on the subject of death: “The thing that pisses me off is that you got to die in the middle of something, you dig? Unfinished. You pick up a fine looking bitch in a bar and you’re on the way to her apartment to get in her pants and you get run over by a truck. That’s annoying. Yeah. Or you order the best steak in the place and while it’s on the way to your table, you pitch forward in  your salad, dead. That’s annoying.” The only annoying thing about this ribald and hilarious novel is that it too must come to an end.

                                      

Über Kunstler or Übermensch?

Artists, writers, musicians are monsters. This is not to say that everyone isn’t a monster. Behind the veneer of civilized behavior, human beings are driven by self-interest. A whole branch of philosophy Utilitarianism—epitomized by the views of Hume, Bentham and Mill and its modern day off-shoot, Consequentialism, argued by Derek Parfit—grapples with this very question. So why signal out the artist, writer, actor or poet no matter how vain or self-serving he or she might be. The answer might lie in the question of consciousness. We admire the artist because he is a latter day seer. “Oh what fools we mortals” would be, if it were not for our modern Tiresias who help us to parse the shadows dancing along the wall of Plato’s cave. We defer to great creative minds the way we once did to priests, albeit substituting illumination for salvation. So it's difficult in reading the biographies of great writers-- whether it’s Norman Cherry on Graham Greene, Patrick French’s biography of the great but apparently disturbed V.S. Naipaul, John Richardson’s Picasso or Fred Kaplan on Dickens--not to marvel at what a dunderhead a great mind can be. How can artists who've had such great insight into the nature of the soul, have so little knowledge of themselves, particularly when it comes to understanding the path of destruction created by their particular brand of noblesse oblige. Perhaps the greatest essay on the nature of the duplicity of the artistic personality is Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, dealing as it does with a successful writer’s inability or deal with his disturbed daughter. If the film is any indicator, Bergman clearly understood this contrariety about himself, but did, at least from what we know about his life, little to challenge his own disposition. He didn’t sacrifice himself so much as his family for his art.

On Evil

Rae Langton’s review of Terry Eagleton’s On Evil in the TLS (“All About Death,” TLS, 9/23/11) begins at the crossroads of Christian theology and psychoanalytic pathology. “Eagleton’s project is to regard evil in terms of a Freudian morality play that doffs its cap, in all the right places, to its venerable Christian forebears,” Langton remarks. Later Langton says in commenting on Eagleton’s thesis, “The special character of evil is to be located in its attitude, its death-seeking desire to somehow make a nothingness of being.” Not surprisingly Eagleton, being a prominent literary critic, uses literary sources to make his point, amongst them, William Golding’s Pincher Martin, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Eagleton quotes Greene about Pinkie, the iconic criminal at the heart of the novel thusly, “God couldn’t escape the evil mouth which chose to eat its own damnation.” Leverkuhn, the protagonist of Doctor Faustus presents a unique twist on evil as he flirts with his own annihilation for the sake of art. Langton is critical of Eagleton to the extent that he finds limiting evil to being “an attitude to non-being he leaves out some of its more mundane features.” Finally Langton asks “Will readers be charmed by this Freudian rendition of original sin?” as the roots of the Holocaust are sought in what Langton describes as the weak reminding “the powerful of their own inner nothingness.” Langton admits that Eagleton pre-empts criticism by eschewing the very examples he supplies offering up Kant who “described ‘radical evil’ as a fundamental egoistic choice to place our own ends above those of others.” In the end Langton dismisses Eagleton’s “Freudian Calvinism,” saying “there is need for social change that will render evil less reasonable and readily learnable” urging Eagleton to write “another book on evil, giving voice to his Marxist Jekyll, instead of his Freudian Hyde.”

The Terra Cotta Warriors

If you’ve ever been in the company of friends who’ve been to China, you’ve heard them launch into the requisite, world-weary confirmation that they have indeed seen the Terra Cotta Warriors. The establishment of this fact has the quality of a salutation. It’s like the meaningless “How was your trip?” converted into Renminbis. Of course there is also the Great Wall. How could one go to China without “doing the Wall?” doing being the gerund that is generally used by affluent couples who joylessly check off the must-see sites in their progress from middle to late-middle age. Imagine going to China and not seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors. What would happen? Would one have to make an appearance before the International Criminal Court of Tourism, where travelers who have gone to Rome without journeying to either the Caracalla Baths or the Vatican are put on trial, along with those refuseniks who, when visiting London, play hooky on seeing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Many nice, intelligent people go to these sites. Many of them have advanced degrees from prestigious institutions, so it is hard to fathom what is going on. Did André Malraux visit the Great Wall, the Terra Cotta Warriors or the Forbidden City when he was collecting the impressions he reflected on in Man’s Fate? OK, yes, the Forbidden City was probably not as overrun by tourists as it is today, and the Terra Cotta Warrior had yet to be unearthed, but you get the idea. Great fiction writers like Malraux, Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul who travel and write about their travels more often than not tend to prefer red light districts to tourist sites, for what it’s worth.