The cowardice of the great: Proust and Sainte-Beuve

 An older post that has to do with the new post I'm going to be putting up.

So here it is. 

Behind Proust’s essay on Sainte Beuve and Baudelaire, one feels the whole experience of the Dreyfus affair, which taught Proust an unforgettable lesson: how much depends upon the cowardice of the great. It is this insight that drove the alienated liberals towards socialism at the end of the nineteenth century. In Sainte Beuve’s treatment of Baudelaire, Proust saw an emblem of the system of relations that put the imagination at the service of the platitude, and the platitude at the service of maintaining, at any price, one’s place in the artificial paradise.

Of course, the essay has capacities, pockets, unexplored frontiers that can’t be reduced to the above thesis. But to understand the peculiar immersion of the artificial paradise – the swallowed commodity that swallows the user (as we restlessly toss and turn in the golden egg) – I want to use Proust’s essay as the torch that lights my way into the vault.

Proust’s problem in the essay is not just to untangle Sainte Beuve’s relationship to Baudelaire – his maddening assumption of superiority, his strategy of deferring the moment of writing about the poet until it is too late, the Cheshire cat language he uses that at one point makes Proust cry out: “quelle vieille bête ou quelle vieille canaille…” like Charlus in the final stages of exasperation – his problem, the deeper problem, is to untangle Baudelaire’s relationship to Sainte Beuve: the unfailing politeness, the sincere delight he took in any scraps thrown him by “l'oncle Beuve.”

These are tangled ties, knots within Gordian knots. The screw turns. Proust’s solution is extremely beautiful.

Comme le ciel de la théologie catholique qui se compose de plusieurs ciels superposés, notre personne, dont l'apparence que lui donne notre corps avec sa tête qui circonscrit à une petite boule notre pensée, notre personne morale se compose de plusieurs personnes superposées. Cela est peut-être plus sensible encore pour les poètes qui ont un ciel de plus, un ciel intermédiaire entre le ciel de leur génie, et celui de leur intelligence, de leur bonté, de leur finesse journalières, c'est leur prose. Quand Musset écrit ses Contes, on sent encore à ce je ne sais quoi par moments le frémissement, le soyeux, le prêt à s'envoler des ailes qui ne se soulèveront pas. C'est ce qu'on a du reste dit beaucoup mieux :

Même quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes.

(Like the heaven of Catholic theology, which is composed of many superposed heavens, our person, with the appearance given it by our body with its head, which confines our thought to a small bowl, our moral person is composed of many superposed persons. This is perhaps more felt in the case of poets, who have an extra heaven, an intermediary heaven between that of their genius and that of their intelligence, that of their generosity, of their daily canniness, which is their prose. When Musset writes his Stories, one senses again this unknown momentary quality in the quavering, the sleekness, the unfolding of wings that do not extend in flight. Which, besides, is said much better: Même quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes.) (my translation)

This is as central an idea to Proust, I think, as the idea of the eternal return was to Nietzsche – and was evoked by the same long experience of the cowardice of the great. Saint Beuve for Baudelaire, Wagner for Nietzsche, and, in Proust’s case, the collective cowardice of the establishment, including the literary establishment – the Daudets, for instance – in the Dreyfus case.

The Letter from Lord Chandos

 

Hugo Hofmannsthal published The Letter (which is almost always translated into English as The Letter from Lord Chandos) in 1903. In turn of the century Vienna, Hofmannsthal, as a young lyric poet, had become the object of a more numerous and public cult than the one (more famous now) surrounding Stefan Georg. And, unlike Georg or Rilke, he was politically and religiously orthodox – a good Catholic, a supporter of the Habsburg order. Herman Broch, in his essay on Hofmannsthal, says that “on the triad of life, dream and death rests the symphonic structure of Hofmannsthal’s complete opus” – which should remind us of Klimt, and the whole Jugendstyl aesthetic of fin de siecle Vienna. It is a mistake to assume that these aesthetes, with their intense interest in hedonism, were somehow opposed to the sexual ‘repression’ of bourgeois Habsburg society, since, in fact, the latter never operated as a machine for repression, but rather as a machine for the distribution of places for sex within class and gender hierarchies. And so it was with Hofmannsthal – as his enemy Kraus liked to observe, he was certainly a man of the status quo.

However, he was also certainly a language man. Hofmannsthal seemed preternaturally gifted with phrases in his early poetry.

This is why the Letter created quite a shock.

The Letter is presented as a reply to a letter written by Francis Bacon to Philip Lord Chandos. Bacon is concerned that Philip Lord Chandos, a promising young maker of poems and masques, had fallen silent. Lord Chandos writes that such have been the changes he has undergone that “he hardly knows if I am the same person to whom you have directed your precious letter”. He goes on to ask if he was the same person as the twenty three year old who, in Venice, under the stony walls of the grand piazza, lived half in a dream of the books to come – for instance, sketches of the realm of Henry the Eighth, or a mythography of the ancient myths, or a collection of apothegmata as Julius Caesar would have written them, a sort of jumble of dialogues, curious knowledge and sayings not unlike Bacon’s own Natural History or New Organon.

“To be brief: all of being appeared as one great unity to me, who existed in a sort of continuous intoxication: the mental and physical world seemed to image no opposites to me, just as little as the world of court and the world of animals, art and un-art, loneliness and society; in all I felt Nature, in the confusions of madness as much as in the finest refinements of a Spanish ceremonial, in the boorishness of a young peasant not less than in the sweetest allegory; and in all nature I felt myself; when I in my hunting cap absorbed the foaming, warm milk that an unkept person milked out of a beautiful, soft eyed cow’s udder into a wooden bucket, it was the same to me as I was sitting in the built in window cove of my studio, sucking out of folios the sweet and foaming nurture of the mind. The one was as the other; one did not yield to the other, neither in terms of dreamy, super-earthly nature nor in physical force, and so it continued through the whole breadth of life, right hand, left hand. Everywhere I was in the middle, never was I conscious of a mere semblance. Or it seemed to me that everything was an allegory and every creature a key to another, and I felt myself to be the man who was able to seize their heads one after the other and unlock with them as much of the other as could be unlocked.”

Well, now, - if you have been a philosophy student or a lyric poet and not had this feeling, than you are highly in need of an ego. Having a full sense of what you possess when you are young gives you these buttery, milky moments of feeling, as though the crosspatch world has been waiting those dark dark eons just to encounter the revelatory moment of the tearing of the seals which has happened in your head. You are the angel of the Lord. Or you are Krishna, a god man who was pretty conversant, himself, with the ways of milkmaids. At least, so it was with me at twenty one, a fuckin’ mooncalf if there ever was one, but a common enough exhibit of the syndromes of the hyperborean consciousness. Lord Chandos is a recognizable type, the child of the century – his avatars are in Balzac, in Lermontov, in Tolstoy. The modernist moment is marked by the struggle to be impersonal – to deliver oneself from the milky moment – and that struggle requires some terrible sacrifices of ego for an uncertain outcome. One outcome is the Flaubertian artist. Another outcome is… well, as it is described in the Letter.

Perhaps it is a mistake, even, to confine this to the modernist moment, or at least to pretend that the modernist moment isn’t structured according to the precepts of a broader mythology. Wasn’t Prajapati found lying in a golden egg, the first man, Purusa? The egg is both his bearer and his product – for it was born, itself, of Prajapati’s union with Vac, or speech. Laurie Paton, in Authority, Anxiety and Canon, took the story of the Golden Egg and writes this:

“In my reconstruction of the two-phase process of creation, based on several accounts in the Brahmanas, Prajapati and Vac both participate in each stage. The division between the first and second stages of the cosmogonic process is demarcated in certain accounts by the measure of time, generally the period of a year. In the first stage the creator Prajapati has a desire to reproduce and unites with his consort Vac. The Vac with which Prajapati unites at this stage is the unexpressed, transcendent level of speech that is generally identified with the primordial waters. Prajapati implants his seed in the waters of Vac and the seed becomes an egg, which represents the totality of the universe in yet undifferentiated form. In the second stage of creation a child, representing the ‘second self’ of Prajapati, is born and speaks. This speech, which represents the second phase of Vac, is the expressed, covalized speech by means of which the creator introduces distinctions in the originally distinctionless totality of creation represented by the egg, dividing it into the three worlds and manifesting various types of beings.”

What the Letter records is an egg’s inward collapse. For on the brink of becoming an Elizabethan sage, Chandos found himself becoming something else entirely.

All eggs – Prajapati’s, Humpty Dumpty’s – crack. Far from being the kind of thing all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should deplore, cracking is the perfection of the egg, its designed endpoint. The milkfed days of Philip Lord Chandos were, apparently – or so his account would make us believe – appointed to lead him from glorious estate to glorious estate as he became a grandee of great learning. And thus he’d put one foot and then the other out of the egg. But it is a fact that some eggs fail. And it is a fact that promising minds are easily culled and spoiled, that entrance into real life is entrance into a bureaucratic labyrinth in which the many branches are all equally tedious, that energy is delight only as long as the divide between promise and attainment seems eminently surmountable. Hands, necks, cheeks wither. The great work, the grand instauration, the New Atlantis becomes a great mill, to which one finds oneself chained, one day, much like any other slave.

Or… perhaps in a horrible moment, all mental energies collapse, and the egg dies within.

“But, my honorable friend, even earthly concepts escape me in the same manner. How am I supposed to try to describe these rare mental pains to you, this elevation of the fruited branch above my outstretched hand, this retraction of the murmuring water before my thirsty lips?

In brief, my case is like this: the ability to think or speak consecutively over an object, something, has been completely lost to me.”

Now in my advance from middle age to the muddled age of 67, I have a personal sense of that particular moment. The imbecile gaps are longer; living as I do, now, with my wife and our son, in Paris, where the peeps do be speakin’ French,  I face them in a more tangential way perhaps than other,  more normal people do. When I was a young buck, I was a ready speaker, and could spin a line of bullshit that awed even myself at times. I can still tap mechanically into the old flow, but how easily the references, the memories, the names will suddenly fly out of my head at unbidden moments! I throw the dice and they come up … blank. Which makes me wonder how I never noticed this fourth dimensional surface of the dice. The dice, the web of speech, the golden egg. I’ll babble along when suddenly the web will tear off and fall in the dark – inside my head, of course – and I’ll have that magic, frightening aphasic moment, when the name-world become unfamiliar. It passes, but for a moment I question the whole path that lead me to become a babbler.

Intimations of Alzheimer’s, maybe. But Alzheimer’s simply names a badly understood disease, maybe not even one disease. Rather, in the aphasic moment, what spreads out irresistibly is the embarrassment that takes in my entire life. And the need to keep running it. The need to keep the diligent, unsteady spider weaving. It is as if at the center of the whole project was some covered up glitch. I can taste the poisonous, acrid flavor of this moment on my tongue.

Although I’m not going to exaggerate – this isn’t the kind of thing that makes you slit your wrist with a knife in the intervals. It is merely the kind of thing you don’t talk about with anyone. That Hoffmansthal, a man with the resources of the German language in his hands, could write about makes him a very rare genius indeed.

In his wake,  I write about it because, after all, it is an experience, and as long as I can tell one experience from another, I will write. It is this which makes the Letter a cult object for writers, a source book of failure, a destination that will overtake us all.

A chain of signifiers: Skhlovsky, Barthes, and the spell

 

I’m an inveterate comparer, so much so that I distrust the subjective pivot of comparison only because I compare it with other approaches to the true and the just. I compromise with that distrust by putting all comparison under the sign of quote marks – I mention, but I do not speak in propria persona.

So it is that, reading Skhlovsky’s Zoo, I thought: I wonder if Barthes read Zoo?

Looking around, I have noticed another reader, Linda Kaufmann, in Discourses of Desire, noticed: that Barthes’ Fragments of a lover’s discourse, Derrida’s Post Card, and Skhlovsky’s Zoo, or Letters not about Love have all used fragmentation to understand, or undergo, the spell of love as a spelling, an incorrigibly and frustratingly logo-bent moment, in which indirection is the only direction that can possibly find direction out.  And reader, he doesn’t marry her. That’s not in the cards.  

It is like that, eros and literature and its discontents.

The fragments part, though, those telegraphic, telepathic one sentence paragraphs of Skhlovsky, they fascinate me. Spells are usually a word, a phrase, a formula, which working against the causal current, bring about a result – at least in the once upon a time world – overwhelming both the producer and the receiver. The sorcerer may be distinguished from the sorcerer’s apprentice by the ability to follow the spell with a negation, a limit. But that is bluff.

Or at least out of the once upon a time world, in the world of, say, Berlin, 1923, that has been revealed as bluff.

Revealed once, which throws a demystifying retrospective over the entire past.

In Jameson’s Prison House of Language, Frederic Jameson connects Shklovsky’s style, and the form of his thought, to Vasily Rozanov, the oddest of Russian essayist:

“Rozanov illustrates the resolution of the novel back into its raw materials, into a kind of linguistic collage, made up of journal entries, newspaper clippings, letters, entries noted on stray envelopes and scraps of paper and so forth. From the point of view of content, he may be seen as a kind of Russian equivalent of Pirandello or Fernando Pessoa, with his multiple personalities (he was a conservative columnist under his own name for the Novoe Vremya, a liberal columnist under a pseudonym for the Russkoe Slovo). It is worth noting that for Skhlovsky, even this ideological content is not primary, but only the result of the form which it calls into being…”

What else is a form that calls something into being but a spell?

Barthes was another such a maker of spell books. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (a beautiful title), Barthes writes that the question that follows him around (like the rain cloud that follows Joe Btfsplk in the L’il Abner cartoons) is “what does this mean?”:

“This mania never allows for futility: for example, if I notice – and I force myself to notice – that in the country, I love to take a leak in the garden and not elsewhere, I want to know what this means. This rage to make the simplest facts signify socially marks the subject like a vice: one must not break the chain of names, one must not unchain language: the excess of namings is always ridiculous (M. Jourdain, Bouvard and Pecuchet)

(Even here, save in the amanuensis, of which it is precisely the price, one never records anything that one does not make signify: one doesn’t dare allow the fact to be left in a state of in-significance; this is the movement of the fable, which pulls from every fragment of the real a lesson, a sense. One can imagine a completely inverse book: which reports a thousand “incidents” while forbidding itself to ever pull out of them a line of meanings; that would be exactly a book of haikus.)”

Incidences without senses. Such is the threat posed by filling up a book, a thing of pages and pages. The novelist is always trying to give an impression of something going on without bogging it down to much in the material of incidence – or at least one kind of novelist is. The novelist that selects the mirror, that instrument which lacks the elements of editing, to be his or her symbol. Joyce, though, knew better: Stephen Dedalus chooses the cracked looking glass of a serving girl.  

Science, magic, the teller, the tale, and the critic who trails behind. Skhlovsky and Barthes are both writers first, even if they accumulate the outer look of critics, or at least essayists. And that essayistic melange was always destined to creep into, to infect, to invade, the other genres. The poem, the novel, the story.

Well. Let’s go bowling, dude.

 

My Mount Rushmore: DIDION MALCOLM ADLER HARDWICK

 

I have been thinking of Laura Kipnis’s applaudable and much applauded review of Lili Anolik’s book comparing the wondrous Eve Babitz -according to Anolik, her own personal discovery – and the evil Joan Didion. Kipnis makes short work of this nonsense, but she does knock Didion inthe process, implying that her influence is too great and it is time (accordingto the clock of literary reputation) to take Didion down. 

My Rushmore of the women essayists of the latter half of the 20^th century is: Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Janet Malcolm and Elizabeth Hardwick.

All Rushmores are a little ridiculous. My Rushmore could have included, say, Audre Lord or Toni Morrison. It did not have to be so white and upper class. But this is my paper mache Rushmore, my sense of the looming presences presiding above my own little fingers dancing on these keys.

Only Janet Malcolm avoided fiction altogether, although her work on reporters exposed a good deal of fictivity in the late twentieth century style of grand reportage. I would also say that Adler, however much I appreciated her essayist style, was better in her two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark. Didion’s novels, to my mind, got better as she went along – got more sharded and lethal. Democracy is more like Speedboat than it is like Play it as it lays. Hardwick, too, pared down to the parataxis beneath the plot – a very late seventies notion, where plot became a thing of dread, an instrument that was used against you. There is no better marker of the cultural mood in the States in the Seventies than Sleepless Nights.

Didion, though, was always special. From the very beginning she knew how to make style cast a spell. And in that beginning she was definitely a Goldwater girl, John Wayne’s erring but adoring daughter. The culture of the seventies, the reverb from Watergate and the, well, inelegance of the coming monster mash with Reagan, drove her away from thinking that the woman who bragged of hanging out at the gas station with the boys could accept these boys, all too visibly frat boys, on the right were of the same issue. She moved, as a novelist and essayist, to a thinker on the margins. With the advantage that she knew Anglo society in her bones. So with the short books – El Salvador and Miami – she adjusted her hearing.

Didion, like Janet Malcolm, could hear a text. She understood the art of citation – damning the establishment with their own words in their own media organs. For instance, in Miami, she does a marvelous rap on Miami’s purblind Anglo establishment by spotting things in the Miami Herald. For instance, a two page, dryly comic bit that begins with this innocent intro:

On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Dade County, in February of 1986, the Miami Herald asked four prominent amateurs of local history to name “the ten people and the ten events that had the most impact on the country’s history”. Each of the four submitted his or her own list of “The most influential people in Dade’s history”… She presents this newspaper turn to celebratory history for a page, just quoting, And then:

“On none of these lists of “The Most Influential People in Dade History” did the name Fidel Castro appear, nor for that matter did any Cuban, although the presence of Cubans in Dade County did not go entirely unnoted by the Herald panel. When it came to naming the Ten Most Important “Events”, as opposed to “People”, all four panelists mentioned the arrival of the Cubans, but at slightly off angles (“Mariel Boatlift of 1980” was the way one panelist saw it, as if this arrival had been just another of those isolated disasters or innovations which deflect the course of any growing community, on an approximate par with other events mentioned, for example the Freeze of 1895, the Hurricane of 1926, the opening of the Dixie Highway, the establishment of Miami International Airport, and the adoption, in 1957, of the metropolitan form of government, “enabling the Dade Country Commission to provide urban services to the increasingly populous unincorporated area.”

The Miami book strikes the note that Didion made her specialty – the differand between the white establishment’s view of American history, up to the present, and the reality of what was actually happening in America. The Miami Herald, in its notion that Miami was an Anglo city in the New South even as it became 56 percent Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian, etc., could be paralleled by the Washington Post’s quaint notion that the very heavily black city of Washington, D.C. existed merely as a backdrop – one that needed proper taming! - to super important connections being made in Georgetown. Perhaps the most powerful piece Didion did was on the Central Park Jogger case, the case of the woman who was raped while jogging in Central Park on April 10, 1989, the case that was “resolved” by  the roundup of six black or Hispanic teen boys, who were given all  the accountrements of a trial as they were disappeared down the sewage line leading to the penitentiary system. While Didion’s piece did not argue that the teens were innocent, it did argue that their presumption of innocence was grossly violated by the media frenzy, followed by the political frenzy, a freakout of the white establishment that revealed their “innocence”, to use Didion’s curious term – their lack of knowledge of the world that they presumed to own.

Sentimental Journeys, published in the New York Review of Books, was received as an insult and provocation when it came out. In 1992, Hedrick Herzberg, a 100 percent Clintonite liberal, gave her points for digging up the black viewpoint, but ends with this grave judgment:

“Ms. Didion plainly finds the “black” vison of systematic oppression morally superior to the “white” vision of systematic mayhem. But both visions are contemptible exaggerations, and it is far from clear which, in New York, is the most damaging.”

Oh, we are so close here to a Sister Soulja moment! And the oddity is, “Ms. Didion” is the Sister whose “contemptible exaggerations” we have to get rid of.

Louis Menard, in a review of a book about Didion, provides a good abbreviation of the way Didion’s comparative method works:

“The journalistic nut of the Jogger piece is the case of Laurie Sue Rosenthal. She was the mistress of an assistant city commissioner for elevator and boiler inspections, a man named Peter Franconeri, who happened to own an apartment at 36 East Sixty-eighth Street, between Madison and Park, and a house in Southampton. On the night of April 26, 1990, Rosenthal called her parents, in Queens, from the Sixty-eighth Street apartment and said she was being beaten. Sometime after that call, she died. In the morning, Franconeri rolled her body up in a carpet, put it out with the building's trash, and went to work.

The story did get into the papers, but officials downplayed the significance. "There were some minor bruises," said a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. A police officer complained to a reporter about Franconeri, "Everybody got upside down because of who he was. If it happened to anyone else, nothing would have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been the end of it."

Essentially, it was. Laurie Sue Rosenthal was determined to have suffered an accidental death from the combined effects of alcohol and Darvocet. Franconeri pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got seventy-five hours of community service. The suspects in the Jogger case got sentences of five to fifteen years, for crimes including a rape that, it turned out, they had not committed. But the Central Park suspects did not belong to what Didion called "the conspiracy of those in the know, those with a connection, those with a rabbi at the Department of Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or Foley Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because of who it was, it happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued and that's the end of it."

I will miss, oh I will miss, Didion reporting about the Luigi Mangione case.

 

 

Huddling

 

Whenever the wealthy and the powerful conspire together, the newspapers speak of “huddling”.

Conspire, of course, has a sinister sound. Meet might be more neutral, but newspapers which have some pepper in their bloodstream like verbs that will pique the reader’s interest. There is nothing more uninteresting than meeting. Meetings are things that emails are sent out for, reminding recipients that it is mandatory, setting the day and the hour, nailing a piece of the collective flesh to this or that room.

In the spectrum of meeting types, the “huddle” enjoys a long career of being what happens when moguls, politicos, and the offensive line of a football team rub shoulders. As in this Sunday NYT article that begins:

“This summer, Bill Gates huddled in London with representatives of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.”

The huddling here was about global climate change. Yadda Yadda Yadda went on. If your idea about changing our industrial structure to save the holocene includes representatives of Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, you may well be a centrist Democrat. Congratulations!

According to Skeat’s etymological dictionary, to huddle is genetically related to “hide”. To hide closely together, even. To hide in a crowd, or to be a crowd of hiders, presents us with a bit of a paradox, as crowds are mostly imagined as public and showy – a crowd or a mob or a demonstration makes a definite presence on the street. A hidden crowd, however, implies some disastrous social breakdown. The crowd of hiders in Saramago’s novel, Blindness, are suffering a peculiarly horrible fate, in that they have all contracted the epidemic blindness and that they are all collected and put away in a closely guarded reservation as a quarantine measure to stop the blindness from spreading. The crowd of the blind cannot, of course, see itself, although one of the characters is pretending blindness in order to stay with her husband, and can actually see the whole crowd – even as she is “hidden”, by counterfeiting being blind, from the crowd.

This notion of a hidden crowd is overlaid, in America, by the one instance of huddle that is known by all: “the huddled masses, yearning to be free”. Here the huddling has been done by tyrants overseas – from which said masses, en masse, are yearning to be free, and putting in action this yearning by getting third class tickets on boats and making the crossing in the holds of said boats to America. Once in America, of course, every manjack of them becomes an individual in his or her own right. And if they peddle, invest, sweat and save successfully, their descendants can one day hope to huddle, richly, with representatives of other rich people.

Perhaps, even, in a huddle room.

In the midst of the techmania of the year 2000, a Corey Kilgannon wrote a story for the Times about Ernst and Young, the accounting agency. Fearing that it was not cool enough, Ernst and Young set about arranging to be as cool as Boo.com – or any other dotcom startups.

“A smiling 20-something receptionist wears a name tag identifying him as Elvis Presley, and a blast of Bob Marley music accompanies an employee leaving a conference room. Actually, they are called “huddle rooms” and have plush easy chairs and white walls on which employees can write. The “college rooms” nearby have dormitory-style couches where workers on marathon shifts can take naps.”

I wonder if huddle rooms still survive in the Corporate archipelago? I have an idea that the “huddle room” in which Bill Gates huddled has more up-scale accoutrements than were ever dreamt of by Elvis Presley of Ernst and Young.

Somehow, I still prefer conspire.

Reviewing, a retrospective

 I’ve done my time as a book reviewer. I’ve lived in the foxhole, or the book-reviewer’s equivalent: an efficiency apartment overflowing with reviewer copies of books, books in every corner, books on the desk, the table, the bed, books like a madness or some fungus.

Thus, even after saying a happy goodbye to the whole ill-paid business,

I do think about reviewing. I think about how my time, in the 00s, was a pretty bad time for the business as a whole: newspapers that used to host book reviews as a natural function, just as they’d host obituaries and wedding announcements, were in the midst of the great change that would destroy most of them. Part of that change was the weird idea that reviewing anything but reading material – in a forum that depended on people, well, reading – would make papers ‘relevant”. The video game, cable tv, social media – great things in themselves, but competitors for the attention space – became the obsession of newspapers (the latest iteration of this being AI – a sort of imbecilic end to the newspaper obsession with a world in which newspapers are marginal or extinct. A Darwinist business historian would have a name for this fatal tendency. I lieu of which, I'll name it: the Sears Roebuck complex. How to fuck up a good thing, from the top).

On the other hand, newspapers had been on the skids for years, as the variety of papers in market after market thinned to a monopolistic one. And book reviews, in such an environment, were never going to make it.

I at the time had regular freelance gigs with the Chicago Sun, the Austin Chronicle and the Austin Statesman, and found a niche, here and there, with some odd characters: The National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Examiner, even the Wall Street Journal (which in the old days had a book review section edited by a man whose name I can’t remember, but who was, I do remember, politically inclined to socialism – in the pre-Murdoch days, the WSJ, always far to the right, still did things like hiring Alexander Cockburn to write a regular column). So I was in touch with the sickness of the whole reviewing world in North America.

Thus – I am a big man for a thus, and though I seem to be throwing out random reminiscence, there is a point, goddamn it! – the awful NYT review of Gabriel’s Moon, which seems to be an awful book by the British novelist William Boyd, has been weighing on my mind. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/books/review/gabriels-moon-william-boyd.html

The review that calls the main character a "turd", after calling him a "meatloaf". A hatchet job in which the hatchet man does not know how to swing a hatchet.

My mind goes back, reviewerishly, to the figure of John Leonard.

John Leonard is a name that rings a chime, most likely, only for older writers. Leonard reviewed TV. Leonard wrote novels (one of which Hugh Kenner called the “anti-V”, which is the only time, I believe, Kenner ever referred to Pynchon), Leonard wrote a column full of musings about society, but mostly, Leonard reviewed books.

In 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick launched a famous salvo against the sheer mediocrity of the book review section of the Times. Looking back at that time through the archives, one finds that every new thing written in the U.S. was dissed by reviewers who seemed to be closer to the Edwardian age than their own. For them, Naked Lunch was tedious pornography. So was Lolita. And so on. On the other hand, one is also surprised that, well into the sixties, the section kept tabs on the literary scene in disparate foreign parts – Marc Slonim, for instance, wrote a regular column on what was happening in Italian, French, German and Eastern European literature. There is a reason that the NYT of that period becomes practically a Greek chorus in Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries.

The slough of the review was, however, sloughlike for a decade after Hardwick’s attack. And then, for a period of about five years, John Leonard somehow, through some synaptic blackout of the managing editor, was given charge of the book page.

As a result, the Edwardian age was swept away. Exhibit one in what a book review section could be like: November 9, 1975. The NYT Book section features two reviews on its front page (in the book reviewing world, the front page of the NYT is, or was, the most valuable property in the fame – it is Park Place with four hotels): one is of Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, and the other is of William Gaddis’s JR. The latter is a particularly sweet victory, of sorts, for art. Notoriously, Gaddis’s The Recognitions was subject to a completely uncomprehending review by Granville Hicks, of blessed memory, probably playing his harp in the heaven of the middle brow that must exist if God is just somewhere in our universe, back in the fifties, that had the effect of submerging Gaddis for almost two decades. It is a famous case.

In the collection of Leonard pieces, Reading for my Life, Leonard tells a story:

“In 1947, a young American and a middle-aged Japanese climbed a tower in Tokyo to look at the bombed temple and the burned-out plain of the Asakusa. The twenty-three-year-old American, in U.S. Army PX jacket, was the critic Donald Richie. The forty-eight-year-old Japanese, wearing a kimono and a fedora, was the novelist Kawabata. Kawabata spoke no English; Richie, no Japanese, and their interpreter stayed home, sick in bed with a cold. And so they talked in writers. That is, Richie said, “André Gide.” Kawabata thought about it, then replied, “Thomas Mann.” They both grinned. And they’d go on grinning the rest of the afternoon, trading names like Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stefan Zweig; Colette and Proust.

It’s a lovely story, isn’t it? Two men on a tower, after a war, waving the names of writers as if they were signal flags or semaphores… I take it personally. It seems to me that my whole life I’ve been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue.”

Leave it to Leonard to find a parable for book reviewers. That dying breed.

private lives, impersonal authors

 

When the New Criticism was at its height in the postwar period, a lotta intellectual energy was devoted to dispelling belles lettres and its tiresome construction of the author as the constant reference point for the work. In choosing between life and the work, the New Criticism robustly chose the work, and purged fantasies of authorial intention as much as they could. The Eliotic impersonality of the author was the ideal. What did the text say? That was the question. Not: what did the author want?

Yet, concurrently with the feverish coldness of the cult of impersonality, outside of academia, celebrity culture was moving in precisely the opposite direction. Just as the actor in a movie overshadowed the character he or she is playing (so that we often speak of Humphrey Bogart in x movie or Marilyn Monroe in y movie with little regard for the names of the characters in x or y movie), so, too, the publicity machine was rolling out countless personal facts and quirks about authors.

Joseph Roth, in 1929, was already writing about this. In an essay entitled “The Private Life”, Roth wrote: “For some years I have struggled, vainly, not to know about the private life of contemporary authors.”

For Roth, the fortress of privacy around the individual was being dissolved in the twentieth century by the medias in which we all bathe. He spots, in the discussion of authors, the kind of stereotypical motifs that introduce us to the lives of actors or politicians:

“Thus, for example, the important author Döblin, whose public influence is without doubt interesting enough, almost never introduced in regards to his books without the assertion that begins: he is a neurologist and practices in the North of Berlin. The repulsive and childish arrogance of the intrusive writing, who is so “well informed”, is everywhere unconstrained. The writer has to announce it – and even, at each occasion, with a foolish, joyful cry: aha! I knew it! A worker’s doctor in the North – thus diminishing the meaning of the author just as much as he devalues his necessary distance from the public. Compared to this barbarism, the mockable efforts of an eager Germanist to uncover superfluous trivialities out of the private life of his object of study are gestures of an aristocratic delicatesse.”

We could bookend the literary culture of modernism by putting, on one side, the impersonal artist of the New Critics, and on the other side, the Life magazine adoring portraits of authors. The Hemingways and Scott Fitzgeralds, who, in the American context, are the celebrity authors par excellence, stars in the Hollywood mold. They played themselves and they wrote. But what they wrote was only who they were.

Roth was of course concerned about literature, but not just literature. His notion was that the private life, with all its splendours and miseries, was being de-formed by being subject to the thousandfold pokings of the media, businesses, and the state. The harm in this for literature, to Roth, was self-evident: “for it has already become customary to view the writer a such a priori in terms of his private life.”

Live by the buzz, die by the buzz.

In this period, the late twenties and early thirties, Roth was withdrawing from his earlier fellow traveling sentiments and trying to find a politics to stand on against the Nazis and the Stalinists. This was his vector. Out of the loss of the private life, Roth foresaw the loss of the meaning of life entirely.;

“Nothing makes an author hotter than his quality as an “eyewitness” of the events that he is treating. Since some time, book reviewers have loved to give particular praise to those books which aren’t books – meaning: the lack of a literary quality qualifies as a plus. Then they pull out the slogan: This book is more than a novel! It is a piece of life!

What does that mean? More than a novel?

Within literature a piece of life only receives value when it has been given a worthy form. An unformed “piece of life” is not more than a novel, but less: it is nothing, it doesn’t even come into the picture. Or one begins to publish the written correspondence of paramilitary murders… They are so neat, round, juicy pieces of life! And literature has ceased to exist.”

Leo (Tolstoy) and Luigi (Mangeone)

 

Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil… - Anton Chekhov

Assassination is a fact of political history.

For instance: on Sunday, June 29th, 1900, King Umberto of Italy visited Monza, a little town near Milan where he had a residence, and attended mass, there. In the afternoon, he distributed prizes at a local sporting event. He awarded the gold medal, and got into his carriage. There his body received the brunt of four bullets from a 9-millimeter Harrington & Richardson pistol wielded by Gaetano Bresci, who had come from America precisely to do that. Umberto died almost immediately.

From the NYT: “The 30-year-old Bresci had emigrated from Milan two years before. He was a silk weaver at the Hamil & Booth Mill on Spruce Street in Paterson, where he was regarded by his boss as "a good worker who never caused trouble." He had married an American woman from Chicago, Sophie Neil, and had a baby daughter. His wife later described him as "a loving husband and father."

Among his other acts, King Umberto had approved of a police action that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of revolting factory workers in Mila: known as the  Bava Beccaris massacre, after the General that had ordered it. King Umberto gave the general a medal.

Bresci belonged to a small anarchist group in Patterson, New Jersey. He looked around him and saw that the “deed” – the assassination of those who assassinated the workers – was an ongoing happening. Inspired, he purchased his pistol and a ticket for Italy.

Tolstoy wrote an article about King “Humbert’s” murder, entitled: Thou shalt not kill. The article is included in Recollections and Essays, translated by Maude Aylmer.  With that title, one expects the usual liberal denunciation of murder. But it doesn’t take that route. Today, if a comparable article was written about the killing of Brian Thompson, it would certainly get him as roundly denounced today – for his moral relativism and moral equivalences, his objective support for terrorism. One can imagine the quacking of a thousand ducks, and the op ed space accorded to them. It definitely got him denounced by the establishment back in 1900. It’s bold premise is that we should not be shocked that we sow what we reap. The connection between our previous acts and our present circumstances – the tie of social karma – is always gripped tightly by Tolstoy. Thou Shalt Not Kill begins like this:

“When Kings are executed after trial, as in the case of Charles L, Louis XVI., and Maximilian of Mexico; or when they are killed in Court conspiracies, like. Peter Ill., Paul, and various Sultans, Shahs, and Khans-little is said about it; but when they are killed without a trial and without a Court conspiracy- as in the case of Henry IV. of France, Alexander ll., the Empress of Austria, the late Shah of Persia, and, recently, Humbert- such murders excite the greatest surprise and indignation among Kings and Emperors and their adherents, just as if they themselves never took part in murders, nor profited by them, nor instigated them. But, in fact, the mildest of the murdered Kings (Alexander 11. or Humbert, for instance), not to speak of executions in their own countries, were instigators of, and accomplices and partakers in, the murder of tens of thousands of men who perished on the field of battle ; while more cruel Kings and Emperors have been guilty of hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of murders.”

Tolstoy pursues his theme without any preliminaries. Shaw once wrote that Tolstoy, seeing that pre-war European society was, as it were, sitting in a room into which poisonous gas was seeping, applied the remedies you’d apply in cases of gas poisoning – seizing the victim by the scruff of the neck and marching him around and around over his vociferous protests. Here’s the way Tolstoy seizes the victim:

“The teaching of Christ repeals the law, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'; but those who have always clung to that law, and still cling to it, and who apply it to a terrible degree-not only claiming an eye for an eye,' but without provocation decreeing the slaughter of thousands, as they do when they declare war- have no right to be indignant at the application of that same law to themselves in so small and insignificant a degree that hardly one King or Emperor is killed for each hundred thousand, or perhaps even for each million, who are killed by the order and with the consent of Kings and Emperors.”

Tolstoy’s point is that choosing to apply a barbaric law thrusts you into a barbaric world. Barbarism starts at the top. You, the establishment,  have dug your own grave. If a Civilization rests on top of thousands or millions of such graves, what is it worth? And Tolstoy is not one who is going to dicker with the thin membrane, spun of a thousand casuistries, that separates war from murder. His description of the army and of Mission Accomplishing heads of states is still effective:

“The crowd are so hypnotized that they see what is going on before their eyes, but do not understand its meaning. They see what constant care Kings, Emperors, and Presidents devote to their disciplined armies; they see the reviews, parades, and manaeuvres the rulers hold, about which they boast to one another; and the people crowd to see their own brothers, brightly dressed up in fools' clothes, turned into machines to the sound of drum and trumpet, all, at the shout of one man, making one and the same movement at one and the same moment-but they do not understand what it all means. Yet the meaning of this drilling is very clear and simple: it is nothing but a preparation for killing.

It is stupefying men in order to make them fit instruments for murder. And those who do this, who chiefly direct this and are proud of it, are the Kings, Emperors and Presidents. And it is just these men- who are specially occupied in organizing murder and who have made murder their profession, who wear military uniforms and carry murderous weapons (swords) at their sides-that are horrified and indignant when one of themselves is murdered.”

In his polemical work, Tolstoy often uses words depicting some form of altered consciousness – hypnotized, stupefied, drunk. The formalist critic, Victor Skhlovsky, in a famous essay in 1919, Art as Technique, used Tolstoy as an example of an artist who can make an object, act or gesture strange by rearranging the way we see it. The essay begins, beautifully, with some generalizations about automatism that apply not just to Tolstoy’s moral vocabulary, but to the connection between Tolstoy’s art and the sense of shock that runs through his polemical essays – that ties them, in ways that Tolstoy might not have admitted or understood, to his most aesthetic works:

“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the example of a boy considering the sentence "The Swiss mountains are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b. [1]

This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why we fail to hear the prose word in its entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky's article[2]) and, hence, why (along with other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The process of "algebrization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature - a number, for example - or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.”

‘We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack.” Surely Skhlovsky must have been thinking of the death of Ivan Ivanovich, who feels a sack closing about himself as he dies. The sack connects automatism to death – and it is a desperate struggle to get out of the sack, to get out of this life of sacks, that I see in Tolstoy – a struggle that constitutes the whole of his moral eminence.

We all must struggle to get out of the sack. It is the political cause of our time.

calasso on the singular book

 Roberto Calasso is a writer who has had too much influence on me: I like knowledge, book reading, broken into a wilderness of mirrors and re-assembled. Many of his books have a little too much gaseous material – and politically, as well, I have always considered him one of those “New Philosopher” types who rejected Marx because of Pol Pot or something – which struck me as showing a very thin knowledge of Marx.

Caveats to the side, though, in certain books – Ka, for instance, and the Ruins of Karsch – he creates a unique sound, a beat.

In his book about being an editor and founder of Adelphi, the Art of the Publisher, a more personal Calasso breaks the surface. Someone who has, evidently, a fund of gossip about the entirety of Europe’s intellectual class from the sixties through the 21st century.

The gem of the book is the chapter entitled, The Singular Book. Simon During has been “unpacking his library” on Facebook for years, a sort of installation piece: I find this chapter a sort of coordinate effort, from the side of the production of books. The history of Adelphi is the history of a particular page setup, matched to a certain constellation of authors (the authors of Mitteleuropa, translated into Italian, for instance), and to a very meditated process of finding the right cover illustration. The Adelphi layout for Thomas Bernhardt’s books so impressed Bernhardt that his last book, published after he died by his Austrian publisher, Residenz, looked, Calasso claims, like a Adelphi book, and not the usual Residenz issue.

“The front cover was not on glossy paper—like that of every other Residenz book—but matte, of the kind we used. The page layout was exactly the same as that of Adelphi’s Narrativa Contempora-nea series in which the first volumes of the Bernhard autobiography had appeared. I telephoned Residenz and asked for an explanation of this change, which made it quite unlike all the publisher’s other books. They told me it had been Bernhard’s express wish. Indeed, he had made it a condition that the book should be pre-sented in this way. I took it as a farewell gesture.”

It wouldn’t be a Calasso essay if he didn’t mix into it various interesting marginal observations. Joseph Roth was introduced into Italy by way of Adelphi and an editor, Luciano Foa. Foa made the observation, which I made myself when I bought the Radetzky March for a friend who loved the Charterhouse of Parma, that Roth was the spiritual heir of Stendhal. This is what Calasso sez about the translation of Roth’s Flight without End, which features a man who fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War :

“And to our amazement we realized that, at a time when literature had become a dirty word, the novel was being covertly adopted by youth of the far Left. I remember some members of the Lotta Continua extremist party saying that it was the only story with which they could identify—or at least, with which they would have liked to identify, in that moment of turmoil. It would have been good if they had pursued Roth even further.”

I hear all too often that tone (“when literature had become a dirty word”) as if there were some golden past when everyone read literature, instead of the real past when illiteracy and a stunted educational system kept literature in the hands of a minority. Literature is an institution, true, but it is also a large part of the mental furniture of even those who aren’t continuously reading the “great books”. I connect Calasso’s comment about the political radicals in the years of lead to Ralph Ellison’s essay, The little man at the Chehaw station, which begins:

“IT was at Tuskegee Institute during the mid-1930s that I was made aware of the little man behind the stove. At the time I was a trumpeter majoring in music, and had aspirations of becoming a classical composer. As such, shortly before the little man came to my attention, I had outraged the faculty members who judged my monthly student’s recital by substituting a certain skill of lips and fingers for the intelligent and artistic structuring of emotion that was demanded in performing the music assigned to me. Afterward, still dressed in my hired tuxedo, my ears burning from the harsh negatives of their criticism, I had sought solace in the basement studio of Hazel Harrison, a highly respected concert pianist and teacher. Miss Harrison had been one of Ferruccio Busoni’s prize pupils, had lived (until the rise of Hitler had driven her back to a U.S.A. that was not yet ready to recognize her talents) in Busoni’s home in Berlin, and was a friend of such masters as Egon Petri, Percy Grainger and Sergei Prokofiev…

“Yes,” she said, “but there’s more to it than you’re usually told. Of course you’ve always been taught to do your best, look your best, be your best. You’ve been told such things all your life. But now you’re becoming a musician, an artist, and when it comes to performing the classics in this country, there’s something more involved..”

“All right,” she said, “you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove.”

“A what?”

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!”

This is to my mind a simple statement of the case. And I suppose my faith in the little man at the Chehaw station is what ultimately separates me from Calasso, who, in spite of the excellent sales of many of the singular books he published, often writes as though all of them went down the drain.

Not to end on a down note: those interested in the how of book publishing should read, if they haven’t read, this book.

Our terrorist/our hero: Luigi Magione

 

1.
On January 5, 1943, the Paris papers all agreed: another act of terrorism
As reported by Le Cri de Peuple, Madame Claire Vioix, a concierge, 7 rue Neuve Popincourt, received a visit from two men. The were let in by her boy. She went with them into the courtyard.
“It was then that her young boy heard a shot…”
According to the Emancipation Nationale, the cowardly murder happened on Sunday, at 7 p.m. The daughter of Madame Vioix, according to the same paper, was a member of the Jeunesse Populaire Francaise. They opened a register, a sign- up sheet where citizens could inscribe their name and their indignant sentiments. Madame Vioix was an activist in the PPF, the Petit Parisien noted, and the mother of four children.
L'oeuvre noted that she had received several threatening letters.
The funeral cortege was graced with officials from her party, the government, and the police.
Reading the account of the terrorist murder in Le Cri de Peuple, one discovers that Madame Claire Vioix was a 'patriot', a true citizen of the occupation:
“A P.P.F. activist, Mme Vioix never hid her opinions. Thus, she never missed an occasion to call to order, in the waiting lines, the Jews, who were not conforming to the regulations.”
Exemplary woman, as we can see.
Reading the officially allowed French newspapers during the occupation is a good exercise. It helps you, in a sense, see how a term like terrorist is picked up and used. It helps you see that “normal” things like the regulations allow one to remind the Jews of them – Jews that one sees, with some satisfaction, rounded up from the streets – although in the eleventh she would not have seen the “rafle” she would have seen in the Marais.
Le Cri de Peuple last mentioned the fallen heroine, Vioix, in June of 1944, when the PPF had a cortege to pay homage to the martyrs of “Jewish capitalism”. No mention is made of reprisal. Apparently, the terrorists – who were also labelled communists – had escaped retribution.
Although surely the price on their head was high enough, nobody snitched on them.
As though moved by the spirit of the assassinated Vioix, the Cris de la Peuple reported in May 20, 1943, the following: “Jews were forbidden to go to the official state pawn shop, the Hotel des Ventes. “Thus there should be an end to the scandalous black market trade of Jewish second hand goods dealers who corrupt the price regulations. However, for some time, we have seen reappear on Rue Douot some disquieting figures, individuals who do not wear the star and use borrowed names for signing the checks that they use to pay for their purchases.
This must be put a stop to.”
Now, neither Vioix nor, say, health insurance executives, nor the newspaper participated in the murder of anyone specifically, although condoning it generally. And the two “communist” terrorists did murder someone specific, who was condoning a general massacre. The latter action is not the kind of action we should need in an order that was fair, solidaire, and just. But, as Dickens or Lloyd Garrison might have put it, there are higher courts than the courts of law, and those two French terrorists – or resistors – were its instruments.
So: of what is, or was, a CEO of a mega Health Insurance Company the instrument?
2.
In the 60s, it was popular to say that "society" was to blame for crime. This has fallen out of fashion. Yet in the case of the assassination of Brian Thompson, this seems close to the truth. It is American society, its politics, economics, and media that allowed a man like Brian Thompson in a company like United Healthcare unparalleled power over the life and death of millions of people. They abused that power as much as they could, and we watched, and knew. We knew about the algorithms, we knew about the medical bankruptcies, we knew about the pain, pointless misery, and the barbarous second guessing of doctors by people with a high school knowledge of biology. We knew about the trail of death that leads directly to the offices of United Healthcare. We knew and did nothing and Luigi M. did something.

To put it another way: if Brian Thompson, in the streets of NYC, had smashed himself down repeatedly onto the body of Luigi Mangioni, damaging his spine for life, he would have been arrested and jailed. But instead, phone callers from Thompson's division of United Healthcare just denied and delayed back pain care, so it is all good. Well, it isn't good. If you like your healthcare insurance, as President Smooth put it, you can keep your healthcare insurance. He didn't add: as they kill and maim other clients. That's the unspoken part.

There are few cases where America, as it is now, is directly on trial. But this is definitely one of them.

"The natural outlawry of women"

 

In a famous passage in Marx’s Grundrisse, Marx wrote about the character form introduced by money: “The exchangeability of all products, services, relationships against a third, material one, which can without exception be exchanged – thus the development of exchange value (and the money relationship) is identical with general venality, corruption. General prostitution appears as a necessary phase of the development of the social character of personal resources, faculties, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relationships of exploitation and need.”

The Grundrisse was published by the Marx Engels institute, after its discovery among the manuscripts, in the 1930s. Long after the publication of Emmy Hennings Branded (or Stigma – Der Brandmal). This journal of a prostitute is easily assimilated into Emmy Hennings own life, but it is written as and conceived as a novel. The protagonist is, like Hennings, an actress and dancer, who is “guided” to prostitution by a man who provides her with the money to live. When we first meet her, she is on the verge of starvation – and nobody is going to feed her for free. Her use value at this point seems to be nill. The man who buys her food, however, sees a use and exchange value in her. And the narrator – without using the word prostitution – soon “has” money.

In a very brilliant bit (the book, written in the high style of the expressionists, is full of brilliant bits), the narrator has a sort of revery in which she becomes money – the coin or paper bill in her hand or pocket. And the money that she is, is everywhere, throughout the town. She is as available, as widespread, as common, as money.

“I would really like to know if money is the only visible sign of my “fallen state” (Verwarhlosung). Money in my pocket appears, to me at least, questionable. More and more suspicious. Money is disgrace, the most overt sign of scandal. I clean my money with a pocket tissue before I put it in harmless hands; thus, it is at least externally clean. The money is always false, but even so, it works capitally as exchange. There is no real (echtes) money, I tell myself. It would be only by chance that such a thing could be called real. What one exchanges is always something other. I can not, however, so subjectively make these value judgments. I have ordered a roll and a cup of coffee, and for this I put down my insane ten mark piece on the marble table. For this ten mark piece I will lay myself on the table, I will pay with myself Thus I lay a ringing gold coin on the table. And am I just this? Can one compare oneself with a gold piece? Me? Still I have something glimmering in me.”

To be identical to one’s pocket money – and at the same time, not to be identified with it, as it is purely exchangeable. Hennings’ prostitute experiences, due to her position, the impossible identity of the capitalist subject, who is what she earns. Prostitutes exist in the pores of the system – especially back in prewar Europe, half ancien regime, half industrial treadmill of production. In those pores, consumer culture is being transformed, and that transformation is the landscape of bars and restaurants and rent for the hour rooms, the places where eating, drinking and fucking is going on, the place of the transitory, where the narrator (we find that she is named Dagney, or at least uses that name, a third of the way into the book, when she records a conversation) is most at home, and most homeless. “I or the money? What a phantasmagoric, licenced swindle (Schwindel – also, vertigo).” Licenced, pantentierte – as in the licence to be a freelance prostitute.

In a sense, I read this book, or encounter it, with too much knowledge, since I know that this is a chapter not only from Dagny’s life, but Emmy Hennings. Though I might be clever enough to think that no piece of money is really authentic, I can be dull enough, as many a reviewer has been, to think that the woman who writes the journal in the novel is actually Hennings. Memoir, and not fiction. Hennings, however, was a writer with high talents, and if this journal is Dagney’s, I think we can assume that, at least for the author, Dagney’s life is not merely her shadow. Role-playing, who would know better? This is, in a sense, the way expressionist fiction often crossed the boundary between life and art, but not so that we can so directly privilege the former without losing a crucial nuance. The former only gains its value – its desperation is earned – only if it can be poured into the latter. Hamsun, Hennings contemporary, also put his adventures in Copenhagen in Hunger, yet that is read as a novel, and I think it is on that model that Hennings was working. The intensity of a life, the “glimmer” that is not in the gold piece, provides an illumination within the novel, which is a fictive in its gestures, its specifics, its self-reflection. Prison, another of Hennings novels, is bound up with Branded: the former novel also lifts a chapter, or chapters, from her real life. Hennings had short stays in prison, once for “stealing” – apparently, some client didn’t want to pay, so she took her pay and the client went to the police. She wrote Prison in 1918, and her partner, Hugo Ball, read it: “I now live as quietly as though in a cell. Your book, my dear, lies in my arms and legs. It entered my blood like a poison. I am a by no means contemptible public; it will have a wide effect.”

I don’t know if Grisélidis Réal, the Swiss prostitute and poet who militated for sex workers rights in the seventies, read Hennings Branded. And I’m almost sure that Colette, Hennings contemporary, never read her work, and may never have heard of her. All three, however, share an outlook, which is novelistically summoned by Christina Stead in her portrait of Henny Pollit, the wife and sworn enemy of Sam Pollit in The Man who loved Children: “the natural outlawry of womankind.” If law is founded in the will of the people, this outlawry is simply a fact: women have been denied full citizenship for millenia. Under the boot of the law, but never of the law. This chthonic postulate is hard to reconcile with feminism, with a feminism that has been so much about the law, within the law. It does inject a certain scepticism, not so much of nature but of history, into any feminist dogma. It is no accident that Hennings novels (Branded, Prison) are so concerned with the justice and the injustice of the law. And reflect her curious Catholic anarchism.

Hennings reflections on money might well have been influenced by reading Bakunin. Hugo Ball notes he was reading Bakunin’s The Paris Commune and the idea of the state in 1915, when he and Hennings were starting the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

From Ball’s letter to a friend: ’Socialism, life with and in the people – at the moment Emmy Hennings and I are playing in a small suburban Variete. We have snake charmers, fire-eaters and ropewalker, everything one could wish for. One looks deeply into life here. One is poor, and yet very enriched.”

 

 

The imaginary Democratic Party

 I love the imaginary Democratic Party! The one against plutocracy, That is for hammering billionaires into millionaires via such things as a progressive capital gains tax. The one that is against corruption on the Supreme Court. The one acutely attuned to the problems of working class families, which begins, indeed,with the price of eggs and ends with the price of medical visits. The party against genocide! We should have a party like that.

But we don't. We have the party of Clinton. We have the party that dropped the A bomb, fought the Korean and Vietnam war, is aiding Israel as it commits genocide in Israel, and recently ran a presidential candidate who was closely advised by Lorene Powell Jobs, a billionaire.

Of course, the imaginary image of a party, a movement, an institution, a state is a sociological inevitability. We are, like all monkeys, creatures of fantasy.

But when imagination so interferes with real life that we develop problems in coping with real life, we have a neurosis.

Unfortunately, nobody has ever found a simple cure for neurosis.

Recognition, though, is a step forward.

2. The question is not what is good for the Democratic Party but what is good? And how do we get there?

I am generally lefitst by disposition. But I can imagine what it is like to be a Trumpist, or a Clinton liberal, etc.

In one party states (Texas, Kansas, Idaho, etc.) we've seen the liberal part of the population waste its time, for decades, hoping to put a Democrat in a Senate seat. We've seen, in Texas, the liberals waste their time trying to put a Democrat in the governorship. And we have seen the Dems nominate candidates that profess to be to the right of Manchin on the issues.

The controversial suggestion I would have is: in one party states, the game is in the party. Trump has done something to the GOP that is so far seemingly unrecognized. Republican women in Kansas, in Ohio, in Florida vote for abortion rights and for Trump, and the liberal commentariat, far from seeing that this opens up a space in the Republican party for the famous "moderate" candidate, come down on these women as racist pigs. Etc.

Now, it might well be that many of them are racist pigs. But they are racist pigs for abortion rights. In Texas, if the Trump standard of 15 weeks I believe it is was represented by some Republican in a Republican primary, it would be both a startling turnabout and a viable political ploy. The ploy would not be to elect a rightwing Democrat, but a 'populist" Republican. And in so doing, do something concrete to bring back abortion rights to Texas women.

Why, then, is the obvious not a political career path? It is because the imaginary and the real Democratic party are confused. There is no liberal Democratic party - save for a few reserved House seats - in Texas. There are Democratic mayors galore., however.

These mayors would do more if they became populist Republican mayors. They would have more power on the statewide playing field. That is a sad fact. But a happy fact is, the GOP can't, or rather won't, gerrymander against its own. If the state GOP did that, then the division between populist and far right GOP would become a politically interesting space for the Texas liberal.

Every once in a while, there is a sport of nature - a Democratic governor of Kansas, for instance. But you will notice these folks usually are center right. In NY, they would be mainstream Republicans.

This has been the state of play now for thirty years, yet the liberal activist in the South simply does not accept the party reality. It is as if the Democratic party - the party of Clinton, the party of Obama (who said, himself, that he was pursuing the politics of a liberal Republican), were a leftist org.

It isn't.