The poor son of a bitch

“The poor son of a bitch,” said Dorothy Parker, quoting The Great Gatsby, on seeing F. Scott Fitzgerald lying in state in 1940. He was 44 years old.

Another film adaptation is at the Cineplex. Baz Luhrmann’s movie with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role is the sixth version of the Fitzgerald novel. Baz brings grandiosity to the party book in American letters. The first version of The Great Gatsby was a silent film (1926) and the other two film versions appeared in 1949, 1974, and one made-for-television version in 2000. What would F. Scott Fitzgerald thought of film adaptations of his novel?

Few books have achieved iconic status as The Great Gatsby has. It consistently ranks as the great American novel. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye are its only rivals, so many find it hard to believe that it had sold poorly, less 25,000 copies, after its initial print-run in 1925. Fitzgerald fell into depression and into drink. Today, it is Scribner’s most lucrative title and the numbers would make Scott spin in his grave in Maryland: 500,000 copies sell annually; 185,000 digital versions alone sold in 2012; and 415,000 movie tie-in editions have sold as of April of 2013. The numbers would make Meyer Wolfsheim grin with envy. That Meyer has human molars for cufflinks years before the horrors of the Holocaust is chilling.

Fitzgerald died on the cusp renewal, believing that his next work, The Last Tycoon, would propel him back into the ranks, especially against his old rival, the ultra-competitive Ernest Hemingway. Alas, it would not happen. The Last Tycoon went unfinished, and Fitzgerald collapsed and died, finished off by a third heart attack. He had been sober and in love before the end. 1945 would mark the beginning of his enshrinement in the literary pantheon. Arthur Mizener’s 1960 essay on The Great Gatsby helped rehabilitate Fitzgerald’s tarnished star. Gatsby has enthralled and excited generations of readers.

I’ll play the contrarian and argue that F. Scott Fitzgerald, while he had great turns of phrase and lush language, was a limited writer, but not for the reasons that you or I might imagine, or he, for that matter, might have imagined himself. I think that there is a reason why Gatsby is taught in high schools and not often at universities. First, let’s be clear: Fitzgerald thought of himself as a great writer; and it is no coincidence that his first submission to Scribner was an unfinished novel entitled The Romantic Egotist. Fitzgerald had a tremendous ego. Written while at Princeton, The Romantic Egotist showed enough promise that Maxwell Perkins sought out Fitzgerald. The partnership became literary history, but even then Perkins had to restrain Fitzgerald. His Egotist was not that worthy of publication. Fitzgerald had hoped for bragging rights to impress a certain girl: Zelda Sayre. ‘Incomplete’ and ‘unfinished’ are adjectives that would plague Fitzgerald’s editorial process because his work ethic was less than stellar. He was also incredibly sensitive to criticism and Perkins had the dual role of cautious editor and psychoanalyst. The truth is simple: F. Scott Fitzgerald was a party boy, and, in a poignant last letter to his daughter, he admitted that he wished that he had worked harder at the writer’s desk.

Early success had damned Fitzgerald. That is the problem. This Side of Paradise (1920) put Fitzgerald on the map at the age of 24. Fitzgerald had already been hard at work since his teens at getting some of his stories published. At twenty-four he had arrived, but not before dropping out of Princeton, enlisting in the Army, and falling in love with Zelda Sayre, daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, only to experience her rejection in 1919, because he did not make enough money. He sulked and went on a holy bender. He wrote The Romantic Egotist and Perkins sent him back to the desk and what emerged was his first novel. She married him one week after the book sold and the cash had started rolling in. I think that is a telling fact about the character of both.

Fitzgerald’s novels would mirror the rise and decline of his career and marriage. He was also acutely aware of social class, from his childhood in Middle America Minnesota to prep school New Jersey to the ivy halls of Princeton University. Fitzgerald was related to Francis Scott Key, the composer, and Mary Surratt, the alleged and executed Lincoln conspirator.  The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) chronicles a troubled relationship of the boy who does not measure up to the woman’s financial expectations. The real-life Scott and Zelda endured alcoholic binges, infidelity on the part of both, and numerous personal humiliations. Zelda mocked Fitzgerald’s endowment and she had thought that her husband and Hemingway were lovers. She would claim that this precipitated her mental decline; but I suspect that her mental instability was already incipient. Some say schizophrenia and others diagnose her as bipolar. Zelda disliked the “bogus” Hemingway. Tennessee Williams would recall her as an extremely unpleasant woman, vain and a virulent anti-Semite, which he said was typical for Southern women, but he saw Fitzgerald as an opportunistic parasite. Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) was his play about the Scott and Zelda relationship (this link contains rare footage).

Zelda was not with her own healthy ego. She believed herself the more talented of the two of them. Controversy and discussions, particularly among feminist scholars, still continue around her own literary gifts, her contribution to his literary work, but she would write only one novel, “Save Me The Waltz” (1932), and a handful of short stories. Fitzgerald, upset that Zelda displayed their relationship in Waltz, apparently did not see his own hypocrisy when he rendered their relationship in several of his novels. By the time he wrote Tender is the Night (1934), Zelda was ensconced in a mental institution, where she would find herself in and out of over the years, until she died horribly in a fire in 1948, at the age of 47, trying to rescue her paintings. Like T.S Eliot, Fitzgerald was simultaneously relieved and tormented at institutionalizing his wife. He started The Last Tycoon in 1939, but it remained unfinished.

Fitzgerald saw himself primarily as a novelist and looked down at short stories, seeing them as a form of slumming. In his journal entries and letters he resented having to resort to writing short fiction for fast money. He begged, borrowed, and whined. Fitzgerald’s short stories would appear in Collier’s Weekly, Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post until he finished Tender is the Night. Among the stories to appear in the Post were: “The Camel’s Back,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and “The Last of the Belles.” He would write 170 short stories. A belated story, “A Full Life,” was discovered in 1988. The story that I think that points the most to Jimmy Gatz is “The Sensible Thing.” The short story appeared in Liberty on July 5, 1924.

The premise to “The Sensible Thing” is a simple echo of The Romantic Egotist. A young man falls in love with a girl. She rebuffs his proposal because he is a man of limited means. He does make good, returns, but it is too late. Her love for him has faded and the tale ends with his lingering hope of recapturing the past. For Jimmy Gatz the path to winning Daisy begins with a self-improvement plan ripped straight out of Benjamin Franklin’s advice to the self-made man, but for George O’Kelly, the engineer, it is not enough. The girl is gone. In Gatsby the girl gets Jay Gatsby killed.

The traditional interpretation of The Great Gatsby is that F. Scott Fitzgerald glamorizes and pillories the boozy, glamorous Twenties, as Nick Carraway narrates, with nostalgia, the tragic love story of what one man did for the love of one woman. The American Dream is on display, or is it? The Great Gatsby has seductive language, but that is it. The book is about appearances and seduction, the superficial. There is no plot. The famous shirt scene serves no narrative purpose. It’s an indulgence. As for love story: is Daisy worth it? She is married to Tom, a millionaire, a former footballer, and a proud philistine.

As for the American Dream on display or criticized? I think what is on display is Fitzgerald’s arrested adolescent development. I know that this is harsh, but the novel feels trapped in amber, the characters incapable of depth or growth. Simply put: can you imagine an older Gatsby, or a mature Daisy Buchanan, or a Jordan Baker with some depth? Is Gatsby social criticism? The argument would imply that Fitzgerald had the critical ability to see the wealthy as vacuous and vapid twits, but there is one problem with this position: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda wanted to be wealthy, too, live the careless lifestyle. There is no doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald was conscious of class distinction. His courtship and marriage to Zelda was a painful reminder of class consciousness. As for Scott’s capacity for critical analysis, I read the oft-quoted remark between Hemingway and Fitzgerald not as a funny remark but an honest exchange. The quote is derived from Fitzgerald’s short story “Rich Boy” (1925) and it goes like this:

Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.”

Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”

In short, Scott and Zelda wanted to belong to one of the beautiful people and for a very brief time they did. The Great Gatsby is a mood piece, a drifting veil of mystery: Who is Jay Gatsby? That is the only semblance of a plot. The plot is not whether he will get the girl or not.

So what if F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda were snobs like those presented in The Great Gatsby? Writers do not have to be likeable and there are some who have thought highly of themselves. John O’ Hara, for instance, believed that he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. What if this couple were not the serious artists or writers they claimed to be, dedicated to craft, but two poseurs wanting the high life, the money, and the rock star lifestyle? They lived fast and left behind beautiful corpses.

The creative result is a juvenile cast of characters with a limited range of emotions who are not very happy people, forever stuck in the past, like those who condemn themselves to ‘remember the good old days’ while the present passes them by. If and when Fitzgerald complained of failure in his letters or journal entries, he meant it in commercial terms. He never did recapture the monetary success or the critical praise (while he was alive) that he had had from his first novel. He perceived himself as a failure. He died believing that he had failed and wasted what talent he had. If The Great Gatsby was intended as a satire on nostalgia or a cautionary romantic rags-to-riches story, then why are all his characters the same? Why did he feel compelled to draw material from his own life? Was his imagination that limited? The difference between good musicians and great musicians is that good musicians play what they know while great musicians play what they don’t. The same applies to writers.

1945 marked renewed interest in Fitzgerald. The date is significant. World War Two ended. The Great Gatsby appeared as a distant and defiant answer to the sobriety (pun intended) of the Victorian age. It was light, festive, and fun. The Great Depression that followed the publication of the novel and Fitzgerald’s subsequent works — recasting the same story, with the same type of people, but mental disintegration replacing the car wreck that killed Myrtle Wilson – all seemed to be in poor taste. A nation in the depths of economic despair wanted happy endings, escapist fantasy, and found little to sympathize with in Dick and Nicole Diver and the troubled Rosemary Hoyt in the south of France.

The Irony of Ironies is that Fitzgerald and Hemingway repeated the same themes over and over again in their works, but it was Hemingway who grew the most, dared to change, although readers would not know it about Hemingway until the posthumous publication of The Garden.

The green light across the way is the color of money and the lure of the flapper’s siren call.

The Necessary Murder: Part III

The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open

On to Homer’s world, not ours.

I began with Auden and his “Spain” in Part I because he, like his fellow writers in the Thirties, advocated violence against the middle class. In the end, after numerous political experiments, Auden and his peers had become horrified by Nazi genocide, Stalinist purges, and later, the American Red Scare hysteria. They retracted their position, softened the aesthetic; they moved from Eliot’s stylistic density to Williams’s simplicity, created Art with the broadest appeal for the largest audience. The problem, however, is that the ideology machine was in overdrive in post-War America and Europe.

The carnage of World War Two may have ended in May of 1945, but, for many, the Second World War did not end until the tearing down of the Berlin War on November 9, 1989, its complete destruction in June of 1990. Not long after May 1945 the Allied powers formed a containment policy to stem the spread of Communism, from the formation of NATO to the installing embedded stay-behind groups throughout Europe to the far reaches of the Middle East to curb the Russian presence in Afghanistan. Cold War ideology motivated every major conflict and debacle: the Korean Conflict, Vietnam, and numerous South American coups.

The figure of Auden (although he died not long after the other 9-11, the overthrow of the democratically-elected Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973) is worth revisitng because his later poetry offers an assessment of literary modernism, postmodernism, and their consequences. In 1939 Auden would memorialize Yeats and pen the incipit to World War Two, “September 1, 1939,” which would reappear in our public conscience in the wake of 9-11, the War on Terrorism. As Auden had renounced “Spain” for his own political naïveté, he would also disown “September” because he had said that the poem was “infected with an incurable dishonesty.” The ‘dishonesty’ to which Auden referred to in “September” is this line: “We must love one another or die.” I do not believe that Auden thought we were capable of it. The evidence is in another poem and among later statements.

Where Eliot wandered like Dante through Europe’s sickly forest and peeked inside history’s “cunning passages, contrived corridors” and arrived at a point of utter resignation, unable to write poetry anymore, Auden would venture forward in his “Memorial for the City” (started in 1949, published 1955) and examine literary texts and historical incidents. Auden pronounces the harshest conclusion: Love triumphs only within books, in the minds of philosophers and fools. The Artist is Don Quixote. We, the consumer, are Evil. The twentieth-century, Auden concluded, was Evil; its symbols, which he says in the poem, are the camera, the crow on the crematorium chimney, and barbed wire. The twentieth-century ideology machine is the Apollonian drive unchecked. The rationalizing structure behind ideology justifies “the necessary murder.”

Auden returns to the charnel fields in the above-mentioned “Memorial for the City,” a poem in his National Book Award collection of poems, The Shield of Achilles (1955). The text is hermetic, as intertextual and as dense as Eliot’s “Wasteland.” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” though written in 1923, would become the model for post-War poetry, with its deceptive simplicity and accessibility. Auden rejects the new model. Auden’s “Memorial” poem is accessible for its idiom yet remains as distant and obscure as Eliot’s “Wasteland.”

One answer might be that Auden saw no public good coming from political poetry. He had been deceived in the Thirties, which he referred to as that “low dishonest decade.” Another possibility is Auden was ambivalent about mass culture, or saw the inherent evil in cultural amnesia. He said of consumerism:

We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten…

It is also no small coincidence that Auden and Eliot had turned to Christianity for answers to the century’s nihilism. Eliot would convert. Auden, just as with his penchant for collecting hats, would try out different viewpoints for size. He remained the skeptic. The only thing that he would change is his citizenship, British to American in 1946.

“Memorial for the City” starts with the image of two nonhuman witnesses to the inhuman. Recall Heidegger’s definition of the inhuman as the rise of rationalism and technology. The two witnesses, a crow and a camera, are outside a crematorium. We do not need to know what happened. The smoke from the chimney speaks for itself. “Memorial” will proceed as an itinerary through numerous imagined cities: the “Post-Virgilian City,” the “New City,” “the Sane City,” “the Sinful City,” and so on until there is, finally, the “Abolished City.” At each stop of this Dantesque journey, there is Auden’s assessment and the ever-present background image of barbed wire. As with any fence or wall, a boundary protects and excludes, except we know as witnesses of history that what it protects within is the barbaric and excludes any hope for rescue.

Auden found no refuge in religion. The poem’s epigram is not from the Sibyl, but from Julian of Norwich, a female medieval mystic. Auden does not complete the quote, though; in this fragment Julian speaks of the Augustinian City of God within man. St. Augustine, still caught up in the destructive light of Christ’s Apollonian gaze, had seen two tensions: Cupiditas, or excess of any particular appetite, and Caritas, love of God. Julian of Norwich, through the culturally prevalent image of Christ available to her centuries later, interprets Christ as the Man of Sorrows. She speaks of a theology in which violence is not with God, but within humanity; suffering is the path to beatitude, because God is Love, God is Good. With Norwich’s quote as a preface to the poem’s narrative descent through the various hells through the centuries, Auden’s tone is flippant and wry about the City of God within. In the first line of the last section of the poem, Auden puts the red line through several key literary texts. First on his list is Norwich’s idea of violence and original sin from St. Augustine’s O felix culpa!

While Auden may have agreed with Norwich’s distaste for dogma, he takes exception to her position (and Augustine’s and Ambrose’s) that God could not allow Evil to exist without Good: “Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere, quam mala nulla esse permittere.” For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.

Auden, from the outset of the poem, acknowledges the pagan world. The violence of the Homeric world still exists. We are not redeemed either in historical time, through Christ, or through magical thinking, whether it is Art or some aesthetic theory, including modernism and postmodernism. In each and every instance of his imagined cities, Auden sees violence. He accepts it as part of human nature. He reads the idealized worlds of theologians as fictional, apocalyptic, and destructive.

In “Memorial,” Auden tells us, the camera provides photographs wherever the barbed wire is to be found; the bird blinks, whether it is near the death camps of the Holocaust, the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the killing fields of Southeast Asia, or other districts of death. In 1955, Auden had realized the full extent of his culpability, which is why he disallowed publication of any of his poems from the Thirties; but think back to his comment on mass consumerism, to “gluttony” and forgetfulness and you’ll see our complicity. Auden, who did know the controversial Hannah Arendt, would reverse her famous phrase from the Eichmann trial, “the banality of evil” and say instead, “the evil of banality.”

I had mentioned in Part II that the Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist’s creation, the dwarf Piccoline, is the literal instrument of the modern political state. He is the necessary evil for the necessary murder. The Twentieth Century offers a veritable footrace for the claim of most murderous tyrant. Mao’s initiative to restructure Chinese society, The Great Leap Forward, starved thirty million people to death. Mao is credited with forty million deaths. In terms of pure homicidal rampage, Hitler and Stalin share fifty million dead between them. The century would wind down with a rogue’s gallery of despots: Idi Amin of Uganda, Yakubu Gowon of Nigeria, Radovan Karadžić of Serbian Bosnia, Mussolini of Italy, Ante Pavelić of Croatia, Pol Pot of Cambodia, Antonio de Salazar of Portugal, and numerous other examples. None of them could have succeeded without a Piccoline near them.

Literary modernism before the Second World War identified the middle class as the hopeless problem because it was sentimental and without any redeemable qualities. They valued kitsch art. The upper class, however, had refinement and taste. The lower class had potential. The post-modernists after the War targeted the middle class as their audience. In Part II of this essay, I take the position that a change in aesthetics championed evil as exotic and erotic, entertaining. In an earlier time, a Bram Stoker or a Sheridan La Fanu may have written about vampires, but they saw them as creatures to fear because they were beyond the pale. Glamorizing vampires, werewolves, and zombies would seem to anyone of Auden’s or Eliot’s generation as a perversion of aesthetics; and more so, as a frightening decline in ‘sensibility’ if market forces told artists that this is the Art that sells. Samuel Johnson may have said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” but he did not condone the notion that death was beautiful.

The idea that a citizen of a society, a culture and, ideally, a civilization, is reduced to nothing more than an omnivorous creature of rampant desires is what Auden saw as the danger of mass consumerism. There is nothing wrong with movies, television, or radio but if they offer nothing more than empty calories or become the venue for ideological manipulation, whether it is to buy something or hate someone, then it becomes evil, for precious mortal time is wasted, social injustice perpetuated, and trust betrayed. In The Dyer’s Hand, Auden wrote: “What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.” Note that Auden is not distinguishing high art from popular art or denigrating entertainment; it is the reduction of the human to the bestial and the inhuman that he is indicting.

Auden’s “Memorial for the City,” especially its final section, is an academic version of “Sympathy for the Devil.” In an interview, Mick Jagger stated that the inspiration for the song came from reading Baudelaire and from a gift from Marianne Faithfull, Mikhail Bulgakov‘s novel The Master and Margarita. The song came out in 1968; the book, in its first translation into English, had been published the previous year. It was you and me, as the song tells us, who committed the long litany of atrocities because we believed in what we were fed for ideas and images, without question, and in strict obedience. In the song, Mick Jagger’s Satan desires elements of individual culture and refinement: “courtesy,” “sympathy,” and “taste.”

Auden seems to understand that we are what we eat. We allow “necessary murder” when we do not think, when we do not question the images, ideas, and words before us, whether it is from the artist, the statesman, or the latter’s henchman.

***

I am grateful to my journalist friend in Milan, Claudio Ferrara, for his comments and guidance in matters of classical studies, Heidegger, and Nietzsche.

The Necessary Murder: Part II

“I am twenty-six inches tall, shapely and well proportioned, my head perhaps a trifle too large.”

In 1944, with World War II in the background, the Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist composed The Dwarf (Dvärgen), which Alexandra Dick translated for the English-speaking world in 1945. Known for slim, allegorical novels, and simple, direct language, often reading like a fairy tale, Lagerkvist created one of the most evil and compelling characters in world literature: Piccoline the dwarf. Lagerkvist’s Dwarf is his warning about any -ism, any ideology.

A Swede commenting on political power should give pause. Sweden, though it has maintained neutrality since 1815, exhibited what could only be called schizophrenic behavior, for and against both sides of the conflict in World War II. For instance, Sweden allowed the Wehrmacht to use the country’s railways to invade Norway and Finland, yet provided refuge to nearly all of Denmark’s expelled Jews, some Norwegian Jews, and collaborated with Allied air forces by granting then airbase space. Sweden harbored a teeming Nazi movement (remember the first book of the Millennium trilogy?) and yet had heroes like Raoul Wallenberg. Lagerkvist may have been writing The Dwarf with a sense of guilt.

Piccoline states at the start of the novel that he is not human; he is a dwarf, an older tribe of life in our world, born misshapen and old at birth. He is a physical aberration, outside of Nature. For an additional touch, Lagerkvist’s dwarf is a redhead. Redheads, more often than not, have had a bad reputation in history and literature, associated with Judaism, with Barbarossa, Elizabeth I, Judas, Lenin, Malcolm X, Mordred, and Napoleon. Piccoline is not a Diane Arbus oddity. He is a terrifying figure.

Lagerkvist situates the story at an Italian court, in the Renaissance period. The author turned to that period in history because it had created the nascent modern political state and offered a model for political leadership: the Prince. The Church was still active but declining in prestige and influence. Both Eliot and D.H. Lawrence would agree on this point. Secularism was on the rise. The Machiavellian prince had become the model of a good leader because he inspired fear and because he was respected for his gifts of deception and manipulation. Piccoline is the prince’s right-hand man.

Piccoline lives to serve his prince. The head of State must maintain power. Piccoline is, in essence, a capable bureaucrat, a predecessor of the efficient bureaucrats of the Holocaust. The prince denies culpability and the few times that Piccoline is thought excessive he is punished, but never executed: the prince knows better. Piccoline is too good at what he does, serving the prince’s purposes. He’ll go away, spend some time in chains, but then he’ll return, more poisonous and more spiteful than ever. If Piccoline is evil and the prince employs his service often, then isn’t the prince evil? Aren’t evil acts a political necessity? The Dwarf is a series of journal entries into which the reader is led and, as the Dwarf himself might be pleased to know, sadist that he is, entertained by unthinkable and unspeakable acts of terror and mayhem.

The reader eats it all up, page after page of a sociopath’s adventures. We are bourgeois, consumers of mass culture, including its literature. Lagerkvist is illustrating Hermann Broch‘s idea of mass psychosis. We have become consumers of graven images and ideas.  Hatred consumes Piccoline and we consume him for entertainment. ‘Consumer’ is an awful word. It is a horrible concept. ‘Consumer’ equates the human being to a biblical plague, like grasshoppers in the Pharaoh’s fields. We accept “consumers” in business language and popular culture without so much as raising an eyebrow. ‘Consumption’ is seen as a positive value. Marketing is the pseudoscience of human desire.

We like Evil. Lagerkvist shows that the State and Individual are capable of evil. We condone and justify “necessary murder.” Evil fascinates us in literature and movies. We might say that we like to see Good triumph at the end, but the truth is, Evil is far more engaging and entertaining. ‘Beauté du Diable,’ as the French would say. Evil is erotic, fantasy, and wish fulfillment. Eliot and modernists would have diagnosed this aesthetic as corrupt and pathological. Vampires and werewolves, for instance, were frightening because they were undead, incapable of final rest. We have made vampires and werewolves dynastic; we’ve made them misunderstood creatures, full of wisdom, intriguing to us day-walkers. The bald and bat-eared Nosferatu of 1922 is the great-great grandfather of Joss Whedon’s Angel and Spike.

Good is banal and boring; Evil, dark and enticing. Dante’s Inferno is far more interesting than Paradiso; and that is what is wrong about ‘modern culture.’ Walt Whitman, the precursor to modernist poetry, is bold and bombastic, until he starts talking about death. Emily Dickinson, otherwise a cipher, has our ears and rivets us when she talks about Death. French literature is stuffy and tedious, until Baudelaire shows the reader that Paris is a necropolis, full of decay and decadence. We like Evil. We like serial killers and the pathology of a mind utterly unhinged. We want to hear what Hannibal Lechter says, as long as he is behind glass. Does Art reflect reality and culture? Is this our interior space?

Quite simply, the concept of the undead in popular culture is metaphorical. We are the undead. We are the automatons, the electronic sheep, the sleepwalkers whose sole purpose is to be brand-loyal consumers once we leave the multiplex. Art (often unconsciously) tells us that the king is naked. We laugh, find a momentary recognition of reality, but we end up dismissing it as entertainment, as fiction. The Matrix informs us that we have been sleeping inside a cocoon. We come out of the theater and return to the cocoon. No awakening. No enlightenment. There was a reason why George Romero ended Dawn of the Dead (1978) in a mall.

Literature has had numerous demons. Authors, for artistic purposes, have demonized feminine sexuality, skin color, ethnicity: Catholics as Papists, Jews, Italians, and Poles, but sexuality can be suppressed and ethnicity, hidden. Changing skin color is difficult, but not impossible. A dwarf is undeniable. Not all dwarfs are evil, though. Oskar Matzerath in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum is clinically insane, but not evil. Ursula Hegi’s Trudi Montag in Stones from the River is difficult, but heroic. George R. R. Martin’s Tyrion in the A Song of Ice and Fire series is cagey and wily, but he is by necessity. Lagerkvist’s Piccoline is evil. He knows it and takes delight in it. In The Dwarf, evil rests in chains; not vanquished, but waiting, like Milton’s Satan, or the Titans in classical mythology. Patient, seething Piccoline waits to serve again, knowing that his prince will need him.

Nietzsche, when he studied Greek drama, had seen two strains in western culture: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Classical authors emphasized Apollo’s power to enlighten and blind others. Apollo is a sadist. Hence, Eliot’s quote from the Cumaean Sibyl. Apollo had granted her wish for immortality, but because she had failed to ask for eternal youth he let her age. Her wish is to die. For Eliot, the Sibyl is Europe personified; she is the mind of Europe. She is western culture. For Lagerkvist, the dwarf is Europe, the allegorical darker half of its culture and reality.

The ancient Greeks associated Apollo’s name with the verb απόλλυμι, apóllymi, ‘to destroy.’ The mechanized, organized, and systematic violence of the twentieth century is Apollonian, not Dionysian or Chthonic. Dionysus is planned and organized destruction. When the statues of Apollo became Jesus — statues from antiquity were often recycled — the prototype image of Jesus is that of light conquering darkness. Paleochristian art imagery celebrated Christ triumphant and not the sorrowful and crucified Christ. Think of the Christ Pantocrator in the paleochristian churches. Dionysus would become the Devil. In the pagan view Good and Evil can switch and blend into each other like the Tao symbol, while Christianity has Good and Evil eternally fixed and antagonistic. For the pagan’s cyclical and fluid mind, day always comes after night; and in the Christian mind, linear and dogmatic, evil is absolute, rigid in its negativity.

The literary post-modernists, after the war, relaxed the aesthetics somewhat. They exchanged Eliot’s dense obscurity for simplicity, direct communication: William Carlos Williams’s poetry. They pitched Art to the middle-class. But the ideology is still there. Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” is challenging. So much depends on how it is read because of its syntax, its lack of implied ‘that’ and ‘ought.’ Samuel Beckett the postmodernist dramatist would, like Eliot, be accused of ‘elitism’ and ‘pessimism’ — his old lady in Rockaby says, ‘fuck life’ — yet Beckett insists upon conveying brief moments of helpless compassion in his plays. The early postmodernists did not have compassion. The later postmodernists would have seen the ideology machine grind away in the rhetoric of the Cold War, the conservative Reagan and Thatcher years, and subsequent neoconservatism of George Bush.

What is not often discussed is that many of the early modernists rescinded their earlier views. They repented. T.S. Eliot, later in life, would recant nearly all of his earlier positions. His last essays speak against deliberate evasiveness and obfuscation, against classicism. Eliot would turn, like the postmodernists, to writing for the bourgeoisie. No longer capable of composing poetry, he chose to write drama. Throughout World War II, T.S. Eliot would attend daily Mass at a church near Kensington, often at 6am. He did this every day for the rest of his life. Eliot, like his peers, had wanted violence in the Thirties, had lived through the First World War, but was incapable of comprehending the magnitude of the Holocaust. Robert Graves would dismiss the Thirties as the “long weekend.” Ezra Pound would be silent throughout the Sixties. Scholars refer to this period of Pound’s life as penance for his wartime behavior. When T.S. Eliot was prepared as a witness for the defense at D.H. Lawrence’s obscenity trial for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it was anticipated that Eliot’s earlier words about Lawrence would be used against him, for he [Eliot] had called Lawrence “a sick man” in his “modern heretics” essay. Eliot was prepared to state on behalf of Lawrence’s defense that he was also a sick man then. Eliot revisited his earlier self in the 1961 essay To Criticize the Critic.

Modernism had become the negation of Renaissance ideals; it had become another ideology, which in every manifestation requires, has required, “necessary murder.” The Dwarf, the incarnation of Ideology, is still alive, not because human nature needs him, but rather because Power and the Reality we have conspired to create find him necessary.

In Part I, I quickly showed that intellectuals are often as bad at dealing with reality as they are good at their Art. To provide an obvious example: look at Karl Marx. His insights on social structures were the work of true genius, but the praxis he derives from them was disastrous. Heidegger had had a short flirtation with Nazism and for a moment he had really thought that they were sent by the Gods to save the world from the scientific-technological despair into which he saw it falling, yet he would write an essay called Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten, “at this point only a God can save us.” Heidegger saw ‘despair’ in the glorified rise of rationalism and technology, which he saw as inhuman.

In Part II, I provide a literary creation that I thought had represented the logical outcome of the call for violence. In the final section, Part III, I will return to the politically incorrect idea that we live in a dual universe and no one thing can exist without its opposite. There is day because there is night. There is light because there is darkness. There is peace because there is war. There is love because there is hatred. The position I will take is heretical and pagan: modern consumerist culture, with all its imagery, is the new violence; it is the triumph of nihilism, and the artist must take a stand or remain complicit with a machinery of death.

The Necessary Murder: Part I

“The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.”

This line is emblematic of literary modernism and post-modernism. Literary modernism is T.S Eliot’s dense poem, The Wasteland; post-modernism is William Carlos Williams’s deceptively simplistic The Red Wheelbarrow, or in other words, before and after World War II. Modernism, although abstract, does matter. The quote is from “Spain,” a poem W.H. Auden had written in 1937 in support of Generalissimo Franco after the latter  instigated the Spanish Civil War in 1936. “Murder,” Auden says, “is an acceptable form of violence for a just war.”

Does this make Auden a terrorist? Guilty of hate speech?

Auden, like so many other writers in the Thirties – T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, George Orwell, Stephen Spender and others – would later disavow and retract their political statements and views; in fact, Auden banned any publication of his poetry from the Thirties and only recently has his work from this decade appeared in print. All these writers were modernists, fully aware and fully active in a literary movement that advocated rebellion and violence. Many of the early modernists supported a number of political ideologies: Communism, Fascism, and Socialism. Note that James Joyce is not mentioned in that list of writers. Joyce would retreat to Switzerland and, like the country itself, refuse to take a side on the Spanish Civil War or in the Second World War. Joyce died in 1941. W.B. Yeats, his fellow citizen, backed the Fascists in his last play, Purgatory. Yeats died in 1939, the same year as Sigmund Freud. Ezra Pound would seem the steadfast soldier to his youthful ideals: he gave the Fascist salute upon his release from Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in 1958.

To better understand “modernism” it is crucial to back up to the man who declared himself “the first modern,” Friedrich Nietzsche. A classical philologist at the University of Basel and a colleague of Jacob Burckhardt, Nietzsche saw special cultural relevance in Greek antiquity and, from Burckhardt’s immensely influential 1860 study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, an affirmation of Greek culture and thought. Burckhardt revealed the renaissance as a rebirth and return to classical ideals and models. Nietzsche summarized his view of the Renaissance in one statement: “No one shall wither our faith in the eminent rebirth of Greek antiquity.”

The Academy defines “modern” as literature staring from the seventeenth century and ending in the nineteenth century, with twentieth century onward designated as “contemporary.” Literary theory posits “modern” in the Baroque because there is no need to express a moral truth in art. In other words, art for art’s sake, for pleasure and aesthetics. I disagree because the writers that I have just identified did see a moral and corrective nature to Art. I have also ignored Italian and Russian Futurist writers who overtly glorified violence in their works.

Nietzsche had come to see European culture as a living entity, a very sick patient, very sick because of Christianity. Nietzsche championed a return to Greek culture – his “will to power” — because Greek ideals were nurturing and healthy, whereas Christian culture was unhealthy. A healthy culture creates good art. Nietzsche as a poet gave posterity the metaphor: “the mind of Europe.” Paul Valéry spoke of the European mind in crisis, but it was T.S. Eliot who put the “patient etherized upon a table.” Nietzsche, who placed himself among the “first-born of the twentieth century” in Beyond Good and Evil, died in 1900. Literary modernism called for a rebirth of the Renaissance, with Nietzsche’s emphasis on recovering the reality of ancient Greece, its intrinsic pessimism, and its perpetual rebellion against cyclical Nature.  The Renaissance accepted Nature as eternal and cyclical. Nietzsche also accepted the cyclical eternity of Nature. His idea of “eternal return” can be found in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he had modeled on Giamattista Vico‘s Corsi e Ricorsi. He believed in rebellion.

“Necessary murder” and acceptable violence are not contradictions. Burckhardt interpreted the Renaissance in Italy as possible only after a revision of the existing political order; and, while modernists’ debates on how to effect political change might have differed, what with their allying themselves to Communist, Fascist, or Socialist groups, where they were all in agreement was in the origin of the disease:  the middle class, which had spawned the disease that then metastasized throughout the culture. Take note that the war is with the mercantile consumerist class, the bourgeoisie, the very class that had made the Renaissance possible, unlike other revolutions, which had involved the overthrow of the aristocratic ruling class. Red October and the executions of the Romanovs proved that some aristocrats had to die in order for rebirth and social renewal to occur. All of the political ideologies of the early twentieth-century — Anarchism, Communism, Fascism, and Socialism — viewed violence as a necessary instrument for effecting social change.

The modernists indicted the middle class for making culture become lowbrow, with a penchant for melodrama and sentimentality. If this sounds extreme, then look at the plays of W.B. Yeats: in The Death of Cuchulain, the Old Man character spits three times on the dance figures in the Degas paintings because it is bourgeois art; or in his Words upon the Window-Pane, where middle-class characters speak in prose and not verse. Yeats, like the early modernists, had associated prose with realism, with the middle class, and poetry with the upper class. Yeats respected the aristocracy because they were educated, despised the bourgeois for their commercialization of the arts, and championed the peasants. T.S. Eliot, often attacked today for his elitism, had come from an influential Missouri family. Not all of Eliot’s modernist peers were middle-class. Even Eliot’s stylistic adversary, William Carlos Williams, was upper-class.

T.S. Eliot led the first charge, writing The Wasteland, with “the mind of Europe” undergoing psychoanalysis. In essence, Eliot, through his dense allusions, presented the artist as an analyst. None of these writers, however, could have imagined the carnage of the twentieth century. The modernists had seen Art as a return to a perfect Society and State that Burckhardt had discussed in 1860. Ezra Pound would take this to the extreme. When Mussolini had asked Pound why he had become a Fascist, Pound responded, “For my poem.” The poem he was alluding to was The Cantos, a sprawling text within which Pound provided his vision of Society. Joyce would retell the Homeric tale of Odysseus, but use the Roman name, Ulysses, while Pound would focus on Book XXIV, which Joyce had ignored, in The Cantos. Book XXIV is the reckoning episode in which Odysseus slays all of Penelope’s suitors. In other words, while Joyce had retold the Homeric story with Nietzsche, a Dublin Jew, Ezra Pound meditated on the violence depicted in Book XXIV as a metaphor for culture and rebirth. An American court would read The Cantos and declare Pound insane, unfit to stand trial for the capital charge of treason.

In 1927, when T.S. Eliot had converted to Anglo-Catholicism, every modernist writer from Auden on down to Virginia Woolf rejected him. Eliot, once prophet, poet as therapist, the herald of literary modernism, had become a pariah. In turn Eliot would, in his After Strange Gods lecture at the University of Virginia in 1933, denounce the modernists as “modern heretics.” The final irony is that Eliot’s essays on Christian society would have more in common with D.H. Lawrence, who celebrated Nietzschean paganism.

The contradiction for the modernists was that the Renaissance, the rebirth of classical thought, had to rely on the past. The Judeo-Christian tradition had introduced a vertical division in the human realm: there are things to the Right, which are right and natural, while those to the Left are wrong, perverse, and sinful. In antiquity, the divide was horizontal. The divine, proper to God or gods, existed above, while below the horizontal plain, animals, what is in between, the middle ground, is the human realm. Tension exists in the human realm, between up and down and below. This is called “hybris” (Greek: Ὑβρις). Theologians would render “hybris” as one of the major sins, “hubris,” or Pride. In a line from Four Quartets, Eliot fuses Greek thought (up/down) with Freudian psychoanalysis (forward/back):

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back

Eliot’s use of the phrase “modern heretics” was deliberate. A “heretic” leads the follower off of Dante’s path to Paradise. Nonetheless, it is easy to see how dichotomies – the very Christian thinking, the twisting of Greek philosophy, a twisting that Nietzsche detested — developed: right-handed versus left-handed, Good versus Evil. Everything outside of the natural is a pagan view. Think of Terence‘s statement: “I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” (“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”). In Christian thought that which is wrong is sinful, thought it can be natural. Sex is the foremost example.

I said that Auden’s line is emblematic of modernism. It is very theoretical and abstract, like all -isms. There is, however, one literary creation that I think is symbolic of literary modernism and the Renaissance.

A borrow and a lender be

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

The concept of a public library is relatively modern. The first library as we know it in America was the result of an accident. The town of Peterborough, New Hampshire had intended to start a college, initiated taxes to do so, but the effort had failed, and the town’s citizens decided to allocate the money to the purchase of books, which resulted in a town library. Not until 1854, with the premier of the Boston Public Library, did Americans – or at least, Bostonians – have a library intentionally dedicated to furthering education, providing popular and scholarly books, free of charge. Prior to the BPL, a library was actually a combination of three things: a society library in which members paid a handsome annual subscription to belong to a society, for which we can thank Benjamin Franklin; a circulating library, which was, more or less, like a video store in which a person rents out a book for a period of time; and last but not least, a school district library, which, thanks to Horace Mann, also of Massachusetts at the time, was designed to provide reading adults and children with books. Taxes funded this last variant, the school district library. Church parishes and universities would also have private collections, but those libraries had obvious requirements for membership and privileges. In the 1880s, 1890s, and early years of the twentieth century, public libraries sprouted up across America thanks to taxes, but access was a major issue since books were limited to scholars, hours were limited to when most people worked, and there were even age restrictions on using a library. Andrew Carnegie single-handedly demolished all of that when he founded over 3,000 libraries around the world, more than half of them in the United States. Yes, Carnegie the industrialist founded the modern U.S. Public Library System; and a sweet irony to it all is that his insistence that everyone should be allowed to use a library got him denounced as a Communist. The Library Services Act in 1956 inaugurated federal funding for libraries.

Enough history.

On Saturday mornings as a child I would venture down to the town public library with my library card, which, I still remember, was made of hard white plastic with my name and address in black on top, the town library’s name and address in blue on the bottom. When I borrowed a book, the librarian would insert my card into this rather huge black contraption, which I swear made me think of the mysterious black boxes retrieved from plane crashes, except this one held the reading habits of my entire town. In went the card and the librarian would do something magical on her side of the desk and this gargantuan machine would spit out a postage stamp-sized sticker that she would then adhere to the pocket sleeve in the back of the book. That sticker was my due date in mimeograph blue. The more books I borrowed the more sounds that black box would make. Ca-chunk. Ca-chunk.

My friends dreaded receiving the thin envelope, a late notice from the library. It’s rather silly now to recall the fear since none of us had any way of getting to the library on our own. Our parents drove us, and our parents paid the paltry fines; but the terror was the same as going to the principal’s office, because an overdue book was a mark of irresponsibility, personal failure; the egregious act of selfishness in depriving someone else in town of a book. Somebody had the urgent need to read about the dinosaurs I kept in my room for a few days or someone wanted to spend a few hours wrapped up in a mystery with Agatha Christie.

Borrowing a book was often like going to confession. The librarian knew what you read. Her eyes glanced down at the title, her eyes met yours, and you swallowed hard, as she went to the back page in approval after she took your card and held you in Purgatory. She knew everything that you read. She knew what journeys your mind was taking, or where the hormonal rages simmered. It could be Salinger one week and Tolkien the next. Stephen King called one week and the week after was nostalgia with Fenimore Cooper or Dumas’s musketeers. Or perhaps there is ache for the introspective and placid calm of C.S. Lewis, the sure hand of lucid intelligence in Austen, or the venturing out into the darker realm of Bronte’s moors. The librarian knew the polygraph of your developing soul and intellect.

I recall once searching for a book. Yes, this was in the archaic days of the Dewey Decimal System, which required a lender to pull open wooden drawers and search for a book alphabetically either by title or author. There were no computers. Gasp. I searched for a book and saw that the card said “Adult Fiction.” I was shocked because I had thought this meant I could not borrow the book. I walked over to the librarian, who was not grandmotherly in any way. In fact, she was fresh out of college with her library science degree, so I found out later. I handed her the piece of paper with my writing. She read the title. Her eyes lifted up. She had that curious look. I felt examined, like John Proctor,and she had reversed gender and become Roger Chillingworth. She told me to wait. Unbeknownst to me she went over to one of my parents and had asked whether it was okay for me to borrow from the adult section. She returned with the book and her wry smile. She said that my card had unrestricted access and borrowing privileges. I felt I had sinned and been liberated simultaneously.  The book? Judith Rosssner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

As I got older and more adventuresome I saw librarians not as guardians of what excluded me, but as Virgilian guides through the vast darkness and my own ignorance. I’d asked them what they would recommend. All those years of knowing and observing my literary tastes informed them what I was capable of and where I could stretch myself. I had these incredible women – yes, librarians of my youth were all women – suggesting books. I would learn how Les Misérables influenced Before the Storm and War and Peace, much like Madame Bovary had inspired Anna Karenina and the novels of Clarín and de Queirós. A modest town building with its captivating and frightening silence, its row after row of books, from floor to ceiling, nurtured my curiosity and obeyed my voracious appetite. A plastic card invested me with an awesome power to disappear into stories that other men and women throughout history, from my culture and others, had created in my language or in others that I would enjoy though translation. I grew to appreciate the gift of sight and literacy.

For me the library was magical and remains a place of escape, of infinite possibilities, not unlike Borges’s short story, the “Library of Babel,” full of inter-textual references, or Eco’s medieval library in The Name of the Rose, and every book was a friend with a whispering narrative, a unique voice, a time and place that required no physical travel, only the plea to be borrowed, taken home, and appreciated, and maybe that tiniest of hopes from the author that I would return another day and rekindle the bond and reignite the wonder of the word.

I have read others so that I may live today, prepared myself for those whom I have yet to read tomorrow and in so reading through the course of my unknown number of mortal days understand what it is to be human.

Mistah Vonnegut was an *

So it goes I used to walk down the long road from my school to the smallish pond and wooden bench when I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. That day, I discovered after sitting down with my book that I was not to be alone with my thoughts, for there came a man of impressive, imposing size, about six-foot three with shaggy brown hair, who looked more like John Holmes than he did a writer, but none of that mattered for he came along and wouldn’t leave me to my thoughts. He asked if he could sit down on the bench and I said that he could and he sat down next to my book. I had wanted to be alone with my thoughts but I guess he didn’t want to be alone with his. He asked if he could smoke and I said that he could and he did, extracting with his long fingers one of his unfiltered Pall Malls, which were the kind my grandfather used to smoke when he had wanted to be alone. Canada geese walked up from the water, leaving their green pellets behind them in the brown grass, and the cars on Route 24 whizzed on by in the distance behind the curtain of trees. There were a few quiet minutes between us, when each of us was alone in his quiet thoughts, but people are people and one of us had to ruin the solitude with talk. The clouds were dead overhead as I read; the gray carcinogenic cloud between us as it shifted from right to left on that bench.

He saw the book and asked me whether I had read other books by the same author. I said that I had. He asked me what I had thought of them and I asked back, whether he was asking about the book next to me or about the other books the author had written. He answered, “The book there next to you.” I answered that I liked it because it was the author at his most honest. I didn’t know why I had told him that but that was what I had sensed. He had a long face and a smile that looked as if he hadn’t hung it up on the line for decades. He asked me if I thought the writer was a good writer and I said that I thought the book next to me was the one most people would remember most, unless the author continued writing, which I suspected he would because he could. He sucked in some more smoke and I asked him whether he thought the writer was a good writer and the question must have weighed on him because he didn’t answer right away. We sat there a few minutes more before he told me that there are nine rules to good writing. He explained eight of them to me and left me waiting for the last rule, which he gave to me just when I thought that I would be alone with my thoughts. He replied that he did think that the writer was a good writer, but only because of that ninth rule: “Be an asshole and care only about the story and not what people think.”

We sat there for a few minutes more. I think we both found ourselves alone in our thoughts. He finished another Pall Mall, picked up the book, and asked if he could sign it for me. I shrugged and said why not since he had written it. So it goes I used to have a copy of that famous book and on the inside flap where you should have been able to make out the author’s name but couldn’t, because all you saw was a large * .

Kurt Vonnegut: 11 November 1922 – 11 April 2007

Lean In to Lead Out

I read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead in one afternoon. It’s an uncomfortable feeling when you read a 175-page book in a few hours – uncomfortable because, as a writer, I know no book of any size is simply conjured up in a few hours; there is imaginative blood, editorial sweat, and the tears of killing your darlings – and then there is the subject, scale, and magnitude where any writer can sound like a self-absorbed ass. Nobody but an arrogant ass sits down and says they will write the great American novel or the book that will redefine reality.

Sandberg’s subject is critical, socially relevant, and for scale and magnitude, she discusses one half (in concept but not in number) of the American population. Her book is not a bitchfest, though she does point to attitudes and behaviors that have not gone away. The transcript from her TED talk will give you an idea about what this book is about.  She offers observations and some solutions to today’s women and to men willing to read the book. Sadly, the backlash against this book has begun. The critics have come out not with their red pens, but with their sharpened knives.

I suspect that men reading this book will still feel that they are the ‘enemy,’ the suspect; and right or wrong, I know that that is not the design or intent of feminism. I am certainly not the chain-smoking, afternoon-martini-swilling lecher and conquistador of nubile secretaries that Sterling Cooper of Mad Men is – I wasn’t even born yet. I grew up at a time when feminism had gone through one of its generational changes, when the drive for social equality adopted a fierce social rhetoric, a militancy in which rage was directed at men, and all men were seen as potential rapists; society was oppressive and patriarchal. Speaking for myself, I did not think that I was entitled or privileged to anything, other than finding my way in the world and earning my keep. I’m a second-generation American, having grown up in a bilingual household, so my perceptions have had their own unique flavor and coloring. I do, however, see many men in retreat mode. While I have seen feminism reach out to men, I have always sensed suspicion and a lack of complete acceptance. My bad if I am wrong. I know many men who are conflicted because much of what had once constituted and represented manhood does not speak to them, but the expectation from society and women remain the same.

As I read this book, I couldn’t help but think of my mother and my grandmother. I do not think that Sandberg’s book would have spoken to them. Neither my mother nor grandmother went to college. My mother had me at sixteen. I would often go to work with her. I witnessed the not-so politically correct workplace of the seventies. My mother began as a secretary and became her company’s first female executive. Daycare, as now, was not affordable, and my mother would not have survived without the cooperation of both sides of the family, my maternal and paternal grandparents. Nobody can afford daycare. Nobody — and feminism was right to address the disparity then and now. My point is this: everyone was trying to survive when I was a kid (and it was the heyday of seventies feminism). Everybody was trying to make the buck, and live Life. I don’t think that that has changed. In fact, I think it has escalated and widened with desperation, with women and men realizing that they did go to college, did take out the loans and dotted the i and crossed the t; and yet, they go up and down on the carousel horse, the brass ring out of reach, the student debt mounting, and the American Dream but a lie. My mother didn’t have time to listen to what Virginia Slims had to say. Nobody stopped to think about the f-word, feminism, because that would have been a luxury, a philosophical conundrum for middle-class women in the suburbs, because Life was more like Willy Loman’s. If Willy were a real person today he would still kill himself, but not before he went on a shooting rampage. His frustration would start in muted depression and then manifest itself in homicidal rage because his life began with idealism, sustained itself with optimism, but in the end, the face of the Nihilist is reflected back in the mirror. The essence of the problem is cultural and not social.

I thought of my grandmother as I read this book. In two more years, in 2015, she would have been a hundred years old. My grandmother was not a feminist. She was from a different era, plain and simple, and that meant she probably would have a conniption seeing a woman go bra-less or wear a thong, but she didn’t take sh*t from anyone. She wore slacks and did many things that feminists believed in. She came from an era where ‘boy’ either meant a male child, or a black male, no matter his age. She would never ever have used the n-word, or call a grown black man ‘boy,’ but I also know she could never get her head around calling someone ‘African-American.’ Her way was gentle and wise. If, for example, I came home and I mentioned a ‘girl,’ she would say, ‘Does she have a name?’ I would say the name, but the lesson was that no person is an ‘it,’ an object; and I think this is what Leaning In is suggesting remains wrong with the American workplace: everyone is an ‘it.’ Nothing revelatory about that since feminism does address the objectification of women. When you name it, you give it dignity and decency. She also taught me that it was rude to ask someone what he or she did for a living when you first met. People are not their jobs, she would say and, when she asked how you were, she expected an answer and not some superficial response. She was about caring and about integrity.

I said earlier that ‘the problem’ is cultural. We are our jobs, and some of us are rebelling against it, or trying to find a balance between work and living life. American business or ‘corporate culture’ – an artificial construct if I ever heard of one – reduces everyone, including women, to a quantifiable something, devoid of humanity because turning a profit is a virtue. There are 2,081 working hours in a year and somebody somewhere is calculating worker productivity that factors in all the obstacles, like maternity leave. Women succeed in business, get those promotions often after 40, not because it took them that long, but rather they are at an age where biological potential does not affect the bottom line.

One last anecdote about my grandmother, which I think is relative to Leaning In. My grandmother owned an ancient refrigerator, which needed replacing, and she informed my grandfather when he had called home on his lunch break one day. Grandpa simply said, “Helen, if you need one then go and pick one out and write out the check for it.” After listening to her overwhelm my grandfather with the make and model, pros and cons, and features of every known refrigerator at the store – she was already of age during the Depression and the dollar was not to be wasted – I imagine my grandfather sighed and said, “Helen, pick any damn one. The money is there. It’s your refrigerator. I have to go back to work.” And so my grandmother selected her fridge, took out the checkbook, and was told by the sales agent, “Let me call your husband to see if it is okay with him.” My grandmother closed up the checkbook, put the fridge on an installment plan, walked across town, got herself a job, and paid for the fridge herself. I know because I went to work with her one summer and sat on a stool and watched her fill plastic bottles with vegetable oil and crate them for the afternoon deliveries. My grandfather, confused as all hell, watched the old fridge die a slow death, but he had a new fridge in no time because my grandmother paid off the fridge ahead of schedule. His wife would have been damned if someone had had to get her husband’s permission for her to make a purchase. My grandmother may not have had the technical skills that some women today, but even back then, when opportunities were limited for women, she had found a way to get what she wanted.

Come full circle, decades later to my own life and reading Sheryl Sandberg’s book. I read the book. I read some of the backlash articles – and I couldn’t help but think back to Susan Faludi’s book Backlash. Over the decades I have watched leadership in feminism celebrate and disown their own as if it were a political party undergoing a purge. Remember the feud between Steinhem and Friedan? I have watched the ‘mission statement’ morph from social equality and justice, telling women that they can have it all, to bizarre arcane and academic forays in anthropology, linguistics, and other areas, which fed and sated American anti-intellectualism and skepticism. Sandberg does say that women can have it all, personal and private, but much of that success is dependent on personal attitude and choice. Surprised? Choice and lack of choice is the bedrock of feminism. But, Sandberg says explicitly that a woman’s most important decision in life is whom she chooses for a mate. I use the biological word ‘mate’ rather than the societal moniker ‘partner,’ and not because the latter is gender neutral. Biology and Society are not one and the same.

I believe that many women will see themselves reflected and refracted as they turn Sheryl Sandberg’s pages. She writes about life, albeit her life and observations from her various jaunts in corporate America, her rare position of privilege, and yet there is an Everywoman tone throughout the book because the same refrain resonates: life for women, work for women, and recognition remains elusive, separate and unequal. Her detractors argue that the collegial tone is misleading and seductive. Her detractors will say that she did not create anything other than repackage her TED presentation, which is ironic because corporate America seems to think money is an endless resource. Yes, Sheryl Sandberg was born to wealth and into a social circle that few of us will ever know, but she does something with her life. She does not claim to have all the answers. I do not have any answers or solutions. I do have but one observation and it is this: corporate America and all those other working bastions are dedicated to one thing: making money, and it does not care about Affirmative Action, compliance, or male or female. Feminism is not at war with patriarchal society, but with a global ideology: Capitalism.

Some corporations have become like terrorists, moving and regrouping where they can on the planet to maximize their monetary success. Money is IT and you, whether you are John or Jane, the reality is that you are not empowered because you are there in the cubicle to serve one purpose only: make money. Is this too harsh? I direct you to the downward economic trend for working Americans. While the American lower and middle class live far above a standard of living than most people in this world, the gap has widened at an unprecedented rate in the last thirty years. That is the issue at hand and not some ‘false flag,’  like gun control in which the first defense is that tyrants seized the guns, when in reality history shows that the Nazis and Fascists armed the citizenry and sought out to destroy the middle-class. The paramilitary Italian youth group, the Balilla, had a motto: ‘libro e moschetto fascista perfetto.’ ‘A book and a rifle make the perfect Fascist.

I know those sentences are a bunch of cynical bon mots, and might seem out of scope, but the pensions are gone, the one job for life is gone, and the Social Contract is gone, and American individualism is back stronger than ever and self-reliance is too, but the prevailing cynicism has it that all failure resides in one place: in the person. It is all about the money. Feminism celebrates the individuality of the female, tries to redress social injustices that affect everyone, especially families, but the paradox is that it runs counter to the American cultural definition of success. Feminism calls for cooperation, for sisterhood, in a society predicated on individuality. Historically, the nation’s past shows examples of cooperation only in times of extreme duress.

America is a worker’s society, often out of balance, confusing ‘values’ with ‘rights,’ ‘working to live’ with ‘living to work.’ Health care, for example, is a citizen’s right and not a luxury. The root of evil is not money, but in hoarding and in the desire for it. True, not all workplaces are created equal. Workers are fired for trying to form a union, middle-management types hide behind closed doors to avoid making decisions, and managers hammer their staff for numbers and quotas at the expense of safety and sanity, because it is all about ‘productivity,’ which means doing more with less, and reducing margins. Are not all of these ills a variation on themes that early feminists fought for in the Progressive Era for better working conditions? Is Upton Sinclair still relevant? I’m afraid that it is all about Money and pleasing the shareholders.

I wish Sandberg had talked about horizontal violence, the vengeance and viciousness of women terrorizing women in the workplace. Women do it differently. It seems like the white elephant in the room and it is a global phenomenon. Suzanne Gordon discusses it in her books about nursing, the ‘pink ghetto’ of the American workforce. My grandmother’s voice drifts through my head. Hell starts when you are nothing more than an ‘it.’ Then again, Grandma would have thought it foolish for any one person, male or female, to think that they could have it all. Is it really a generational thing? I don’t think so. Reducing anyone to “it” makes many things easier. The Nazis proved that. All that energy spent, Grandma would say, for what? Nobody cares about your titles, how much money you earned, or how big your house was because you die just the same. For her, Life was her family, and I suspect that is the same for many women; but the economic reality is different these days. Can a family exist on one income? Or thought of another way: expend all that energy to ‘survive’ is not Life. Sure, Life is cruel and unfair. I know that sounds harsh and reductionist, but I think what my grandmother was trying to say was that Life has not changed: you live and you die regardless of gender and race, and, while reforming society are noteworthy and valiant, the problem lies in not making distinctions rather than comprehending the fundamental fact that you are human. Society and the office space are not a stagnant Utopia where everyone will have perfect communication and everyone is an actualized human being. That is not to say sexual harassment should be tolerated or lynching is an acceptable form of justice. But unfortunately, survival is what motivates human behavior; society compels anxious agreement on parameters, but culture is what illustrates that we are more than animals, that we have a spiritual element at the core of our existence. Art has no overt social function but it is crucial to the human spirit.

Does Sandberg speak to all women? Does feminism? Do both alter the daily reality of a Muslim woman or a Chinese laborer, or a woman somewhere in Latin America? No. Third-wave feminism, which started in the 80s and 90s, is an attempt to reach out to non-white, lesbian, gay and bisexual women, and all other women who did not fit middle-class American feminism as it was defined decades ago. Culture distorts and divides. Since we live in a particular society where the image speaks loudest, Sandberg has made herself an icon, a spokesperson, and a role model for some women. She has written a much-needed book and reiterated a much-needed affirmation that women can and should be leaders in the workplace. The question is whether everyone wants to be that kind of woman, a high-powered business success. Many are opting out because Life is not a business meeting.