“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.

Appointment in Samarra

photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

“Lisa Robin Kelly, 43, Actress on 'That ’70’s Show’ Sitcom’" read the Times obit (NYT, 8/15/13). The accompanying picture displayed a blond haired actress, remarkable enough to have according to the Times description, “played Laurie, the promiscuous older sister” on the sitcom and remarkable enough to have had a career whose provenance went back to shows like Married with Children, Murphy Brown and The X-Files, but unremarkable in a way. The picture looks like a number of comely actresses who were head turners in the beginning of their career and whose talent didn’t extend far enough beyond their pretty faces to sustain them. But Kelly also had other problems. “I had lost a baby,” the obit quoted her as saying. “As a result of that, I lost it—I lost everything, and I was abusing alcohol.” According to the Times, she'd been “arrested at least three times since 2010, once for driving while intoxicated and twice for domestic abuse.” John O’Hara’s first novel novel, Appointment in Samarra, concerns a self-destructive character named Julian English who embarks on a three day tear after which he finally kills himself. But here is the Somerset Maugham epigraph from which the book derives its title: “There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said ‘Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.’ The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw Death standing in the crowd and he went to Death and said, ‘Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?' ‘That was not a threatening gesture,’ Death said, ‘It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’”

Erewhon

There is something beautiful about the city when it is deserted on a hot mid-summer afternoon. There is something oppressive about it too. In Camus’s The Stranger, Meursault’s senseless murder occurs on a similarly hot, quiet day on a deserted beach. On a recent Sunday, crowds wait to board a ferry to Governor’s Island, where art is exhibited in an antiseptic government structure with linoleum tiled floors and fluorescent lighting. Some of the art concerns what is occurring right outside the gallery space—the tides and the future of the island itself. Some of it concerns bird songs and soundscapes that render visual representations. Some of the art is political and deals with the ultimate subjectivity of the observer, as with one piece that plots the degradation of a trauma victim’s testimony. The ferry ride back is equally packed and you marvel at the Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women who stubbornly cover themselves in the heat. The restaurants of Chinatown are scarcely populated, except for an ice cream parlor, which is packed. An old man sits on his stoop, smoking. Utopia is by definition that which cannot be, like Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. For a moment one thinks of the sylvan sands of Eastern Long Island, but the fantasy is broken by the realization that beauty has become a commodity like everything else, and pristine settings like East Hampton, Cap d’Antibes and Venice (California and Italy) are purchased for a price. You make bargains in your head. What would you sacrifice? Is it worth it? Is anything worth it? A refined sensibility doesn’t generate the resources to acquire a front row seat to beauty. But rugged individualism, resourcefulness and luck do. Maugham had a bit of  them all, and lived in a villa called Mauresque in the fairytale locale of St. Jean Cap Ferrat.