“Here Comes the Judge"

photo of Somerset Maugham by Carl Van Vechten

In an Op-Ed piece entitled  “The Good Order,” (NYT, 9/25/14), David Brooks bridges the gap between international and individual order, in comparing the discipline of creation to that of a superpower’s obligation to keep chaos at bay. Brooks’s primary examples are writers like John Cheever, Maya Angelou, Anthony Trollope and Somerset Maugham who created rigid routines or schedules and he quotes W. H. Auden to the effect that “A modern stoic knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.” This idea of the artist is a far cry from the ethos many baby boomers grew up with, influenced as they were by the idea of creative people as drop outs and rebels against rigidity and routine. Their role models were the abstract expressionists of the 50’s or rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix whose lives were like supernovas which blazed forth a blinding light just as they courted oblivion. The kind of writers and artists that Brooks is writing about seem more like businessmen. Brooks remarks, “They think like artists, but work like accountants.” That statement recalls Flaubert’s famous quote that one should, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work." How are these two conflicting views translatable on the world stage? Brooks uses the occasion of his piece to praise President Obama’s speech at the U.N. which he says, “put tough minded realism at the service of a high calling.” But is discipline in the political sphere really translatable into inspiration? Artists are attempting to find something through the maintenance of a practice but what is a politician or leader trying to find? The answer is usually a series of intelligent decisions that lead his country out of a quagmire. “Uh-oh, Here Come the Judge, Here Come the Judge/Everybody know That he is the judge," Pigmeat Markham once intoned. A political leader has no choice but to work in a consistent and disciplined way, but it’s no guarantee that his or her actions will lead to the kind of vision that characterizes the work of the artistic geniuses who Brooks cites.

The Furies

photo of Paul Theroux by Rupal Agrawal

You’ve read and witnessed the putative subject of Paul Theroux’s recent New Yorker short story “The Furies” too many times. A dentist Ray Testa, who is 58, leaves his wife Angie, to run off with his 31year-old hygienist, Shelby. At the wedding he announces, “I now belong to an incredibly exclusive club. There are not many men who can say that they’re older than their father-n-law.” The story is blunt and almost graceless like the character it describes and it sports none of the lyrical sorties of the Cheever/Updike generation but the territory of suburban infidelity is naturally a subject that those writers addressed in the pages of The New Yorker generations before. However, the landscape seamlessly changes. Proud of his conquest, Ray insists that Shelby attend his high school reunion in the town of Medford where he’s grown up. The title of the story conjures Greek mythology, but what transpires is Scrooge’s nightmare of retribution set in a Strindbergian reality. Ray’s high school girlfriends exact a kind of poetic justice that hounds him out of the smug satisfaction of his pleasure principle. The brilliance of the writing lies in the way it insouciantly negotiates a territory that could have been a dream were it not reality--with nary a touch of narrative or verbal pyrotechnics. “The Furies" ends as predictably as it began, with Ray losing everything and learning nothing. He hears about his first wife’s death from a patient. Then Shelby goes. “She did not divorce him at once. She demanded a house, and he provided it. She asked for severance pay from her job, and got it. They spoke through lawyers, until it was final, and he was alone.” The beauty and simplicity are surgical, purgative and well nigh mythical. It takes your breath away.

How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age

The Times' Dwight Garner recently reviewed the latest edition of Dale Carnegie's classic tome (“Classic Advice: Please, Leave Well Enough Alone,” NYT, 10/5/11) The review of the updated version of the long-time bestseller, which has sold over 30 million copies according to Garner—and will soon reach its 75th anniversary—appeared on the front page of the paper. The new book, which lists the authorship of Dale Carnegie and Associates and Brent Cole, is called How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age. A self-help book in the age of the Internet is almost an oxymoron, but we should remember that it was William Gibson who coined the word “cyberspace” in his science fiction classic Neuromancer. It’s fun to imagine what it will take to cut an imposing figure on the Internet, where sites like tiava.com and kink.com insert viral imagery into the unsuspecting browser. Can you imagine entering a site or chat room the way someone might have attended one of the suburban gatherings that John Updike describes in Couples or that John Cheever depicts in Bullet Park? Hi I’m Bill Witherspoon and this is my avatar Bill Witherspoon. Garner constructed a helpful little table in his review, comparing the language between the old and new Carnegies and between the old and updated edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, which was also under review. So the corresponding update on Dale Carnegie’s original “We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and employees, but how seldom do we nourish their self-esteem?” becomes “While self-help and self-promotion are not inherently deficient pursuits, problems always arise when the stream of self-actualization is dammed within us.” Wow, how are we going to make friends and influence people with such atomic powered locutions?  Dale Carnegie was Dr. Feelgood, but if Garner’s table is any indicator, then it’s going to be hard to influence other people. With consciousness spinning like an electron, you’ll never get out of your own head.

The Men and Women Without Qualities

So who will embody the New Man or New Woman of our age? Parameters are generally established after the fact. Thus, the Victorian era was encapsulated by the Queen because of the monarch’s strength and the morality and counter-morality that it spawned. The fifties were the Eisenhower years, characterized as of the era of silent conformism, in which Americans basked in era of post-war prosperity. This smugness created its own counter-reformation, evidenced in the ennui and rebellion documented in the work of Saul Bellow, John Updike and John Cheever. Here are the opening lines of Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953): “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Cheever’s famous story, “The Swimmer,” in which the protagonist’s escape takes the form of a journey through his neighbor’s swimming pools, creates myth out of the trivial details of suburban life. When and how will our present age be defined? Hints may come the work of yet another writer, David Foster Wallace, who died by his own hand in 2008, just as the economy was teetering on collapse. Tennis and AA were two of the themes of his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, while his unfinished final novel, The Pale King, is partially set in the world of the IRS bureaucracy. Don Delillo’s Falling Man, an obvious reference to an iconic photograph, dealt with the aftermath of 9/11. But perhaps we should look to another continent and age for clues. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz capture civilizations on the verge of collapse. A suburbanite, a recovering alcoholic, a thinker, an IRS agent, a thief—which of these sensibilities will be emblematic of our times, which of these characters are we likely to encounter in art as well as in life?

Cul-de-sac

It’s refreshing to know there are still people who smoke and drink too much and look with a jaundiced eye on therapy. Many of those who exhibit these behavioral traits—which include some degree of philandering—are inhabitants of France. However, there are varying regions of the United States which undoubtedly fit the bill when it comes to at least one, if not all, of these tendencies. There is no doubt that it is healthier to refrain from smoking and drinking too much, and that their combination often fuels the kind of extemporaneous promiscuity that leads to unprotected sex. However, living healthily can become a disease in and of itself, with the demands for perfection creating a level of stress that can lead to heart failure, bipolar disorders and even psychiatric conditions characterized by a break with reality. For years, American writers like John Updike and John Cheever charted the existences of hard drinking, smoking and cheating characters whose duplicitous and destructive existences created beautiful stories and, for the writers, reputations that outlived the eras they wrote about. Updike’s autobiographical treatment of the dissolution of his marriage in the story collection Too Far to Go is so perfect that it almost seems like a painter’s setup. He luxuriates in the breakup of the failed relationship, which he describes so incisively that it begins to have the quality of a nature morte, with Updike and his disgruntled wife like the apples that Cezanne set out to express. And to what extent was John O’Hara tempting his own fate in order to create the model of Julian English in Appointment in Samara? Is it really correct to call Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road an autobiographical novel, when many of the incidents could be looked at as being enacted merely for the sake of the novel he had yet to write? Who is going to live out a conflict-free life, devoid of transgressions, to write a novel about a totally healthy, well-adjusted existence, in which the main characters watch television each night as they eat dinner, and then die peacefully in their sleep?