The Impressionability of Lucien de Rubempre--and of Artists

In discussing how artists perceive and cognize the world, and what it means for their art, Upton Sinclair (among others) laid great stress on the "impressionability" of artists. Interestingly, in portraying Lucien Chardon/de Rubempre in Lost Illusions Balzac made impressionability a cultural aspect of the character--and his fate. Seeing his brother-in-law and lifelong friend Lucien off to Paris, David Sechard worried about "his friend's unlucky instability of character . . . so easily led for good or evil." Ultimately it was not good that he was led for--but for the purposes of this discussion it is that instability that matters, and which Sinclair saw as the key to the way in which artists portray the world, with this not least the case with their politics. Impressionable beings that they are, those who are more free, open, active, better-resourced and socially "respectable" are the more likely to succeed in swaying them--and it is, of course, those in favor of things as they are whose propaganda is necessarily most pervasive and most affecting on that level.

The Reported Decline of Marriage: A Few Thoughts

It is a commonplace today that marriage and dating are in decline among the younger adult cohorts (especially the naturally much-watched 18-30s), and while there is much argument over how to read the relevant statistical data, I know of nothing to refute the essential claim that they are rather less likely to be married than their parents and grandparents at the same point in their lives.

It seems to me easy enough to explain this in terms of plain and simple economics. The way the cost of living has exploded--the result of burgeoning college costs and mounting student debt and massive underemployment among college graduates who gambled on expensive credentials and lost, housing non-policies that favor real estate speculators over the human need for shelter, and much, much else connected with them have not made it easier to start a life, all as those who grew up in the shadow of a Great Recession which never ended, and a pandemic which never ended, and which hit the younger portion of the work force especially hard, can scarcely be blamed for being more concerned for personal security than an earlier generation. (Indeed, given the cost of just going out and meeting people, and certainly the often expensive, humiliating, even risky rituals of social life, and still more, courtship, can seem prohibitive for the pinched.) Thus young people delay, maybe to the point at which marrying seems less and less plausible an option, or even give up on the idea altogether.

However, it only seems fair that if the economics are the rightful first object of our attention, they need not be the only object of such attention, with two other things usefully kept in mind:

1. Those whom marriage simply does not suit now have more freedom to decline it, all as there may be more dissatisfaction with the institution than before, the more in as men and women alike regard themselves as getting a raw deal out of the arrangement--and one-sided as the arguments tend to be, it may be that both have claims here. After all, if we are living in a society where it feels like nothing is working, why would we expect marriage, which is not some bubble impervious to the forces of the world outside the "home circle," to somehow be an exception? Indeed, in a society where the swaggering idiot "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality" seem to ever more dictate the conventional wisdom, it does not seem implausible that there are that many more people who, having had little consideration, courtesy, respect, empathy, sympathy, acceptance from others, and little comfort or pleasure from others' company--who have found that being with other people mainly means being ignored, insulted or bullied by them--simply choose to have as little to do with others as possible, all while knowing that the "dating market" is a particularly brutal scene of social life, and dreading the thought of being tied to another person "for as long as you both shall live."

2. Because that freedom to decline marriage is greater those who really are open to marriage, or even really desirous of marriage, are also less likely to marry simply to be married. The result is that if not liking the dating market as they find it they are more prepared to decline to marry at all rather than marry unsatisfactorily. After all, prudish and hypocritical as the discussion of such matters is, few will really deny that we speak of "conventional attractiveness" because, whatever the aspect of a possible mate at issue (physical, financial, temperamental), most people's desires are conventional, and not up for negotiation; and the relevant qualities are distributed very unequally among the population at large; leaving a comparative few "in demand" and the great majority not so much, this especially the case where any sort of long-term commitment is concerned (people understandably pickier about that). Faced with that a great many persons have the choice between being with someone they do not really want, and who is not all that excited about being with them either, and thus "settling" or being single, and choose the latter rather than the former.

Of course, points 1. and 2. have to do with individuals' concern for what will suit them personally--make them happiest, or at least, given that in real life "choice" is something the privileged have while those less advantaged face only dilemmas, what will make them least unhappy.

By contrast those who speak of the present situation in tones of alarm are not in the slightest concerned with what individuals think will make them happy. They are sure there must be one rule for everybody, and that this is a lifelong, exclusively monogamous, partnership with another individual centered on cohabitation with a shared household and the rearing of children--and they get flustered the way Tony Randall does in Pillow Talk if someone asks them "Why?"

However, others have a reason "Why" in mind, albeit one not with the interest of the individual in mind. What they expect of the populace is that it work, and raise children who will be the workers of tomorrow, and provide the military-age cohorts required by the demands of realpolitik, all while being as small a drain as possible on the resources of those who own everything, and for whose benefit society is arranged, and whose interests are what people mean when they say such things as "society expects." If the individual does not agree, well, that is a want of virtue on the part of the individual, who had better learn to like it. If marrying and bringing up a family means their sacrifice of what little freedom or comfort or security they may have in their lives, tough. If it means raising children in conditions of hardship and insecurity, such that the children will be deprived or worse during their upbringing, and grow up with small prospects, and can only expect hard lives when they become adults, tough. Indeed, that they should think of such things at all is occasion to sneer that "Life's not fair" (oblivious to how the resort to nihilism is self-defeating for those pushing any agenda), while all this is underlined by the brazen expressions of the expendability of those who do not serve such purposes (highlighted by the way so many policymakers not-so-secretly welcomed the "culling" of the elderly by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ivy League professors openly calling for mass suicide for the elderly).

Of course, whatever their motive those whose views skew this way must be noticing that merely browbeating and shaming and bullying the young does not get them to do what they want them to do--but there is little sign of this failure making them think about all of those societal problems whose amelioration might actually make those who want to have marriages and families and children more likely to do so.

How Little Comfort the Home Circle May Avail

In the rather romantic view the prevailing bourgeois culture takes of "home" and "family" it is a shelter from the brutal world of individual striving outside.

Alas, it is a far from perfect shelter--and that great teller of truths Balzac, who dramatized what the cutting-edge social thinkers of his day discussed (not least that in the "cash nexus" "all that is solid melts into air"), was not unmindful of the fact. In the third and last volume of the three-decker novel Lost Illusions (Eve and David), Lucien Chardon/de Rubempre, returning home from his pursuit of his career in Paris not in glorious triumph but the shattering defeat far, far more common for those who walk his particular path (or any other career path, for that matter), seeing how little his sister regards him, thinks to himself that "In the home circle, as in the world without, success is a necessity." The realization cuts him so deeply in that low moment for him that he takes himself off to do away with himself.

So it goes--if you are a nobody out in the big world, command no respect out there, you can expect to be a nobody at home, without respect at home.

It is probably one of the more painful psychological and emotional aspects of inequality--and ought to be better acknowledged than it is in the ever misleading conventional wisdom.

Three Books to Read to Understand "The Writing Life"

I have often criticized the lousy job writers do of portraying what writers do, and what they go through in the course of their careers. Of course, a certain sort of idiot automatically dismisses such criticism. ("It's only a novel!" "It's only a movie!") But the fact remains that in this case writers are writing about their own profession rather than someone else's, often with no better reason than that they feel driven to write about "what they know," and in the process not only imply that they know nothing about what they think they no, but promote a great many pernicious illusions--all of which seems to me to warrant at least a little special attention.

Additionally other writers have done better than they on this score in the past. A lot better.

Here are three books I recommend as doing just that, not only "getting it right" in different and important ways, but which together give the reader a comprehensive understanding of the reality of "the writing life."

1. Lost Illusions (1837-1843) by Honoré de Balzac.
In Balzac's Lost Illusions, especially its middle part (A Great Man of the Provinces in Paris), we see poet Lucien de Rubempre get many a shock--not least in regard to how publishing really works. It is a banality that "publishing is a business," but few rarely think about what it really means for it to be a business, namely that it is a capitalist enterprise devoted to money-making, a motivation which only the stupidest market-worshipper would imagine harmonizes with a devotion to letters. Indeed, in Balzac's novel publishers care nothing at all for literature, have absolutely no interest in encouraging any newcomer no matter how talented they show themselves to be or how fine the work they bring them, traffic in printed paper bearing "Names" rather than "content," and buy the rave reviews that the gullible think are meaningful praise because "everyone does it" --with the result that it is a very naive person who thinks that there is any sort of meritocracy in literature, any sort of opportunity for the aspirant approaching the business with just their skill and their work, any justification in assuming that the reason something is not published must be that it is "just not very good." (Quite the contrary, the publishers will always prefer highly salable trash to the masterpiece that will only slowly win its way to acclaim, because the acclaim is genuine rather than purchased for cash or secured through string-pulling.)

So it goes today. And for the would-be writer it is such a dreary prospect that, after the king of the publishing business himself throws all the hard facts in his face in a vulnerable moment Lucien thinks less and less of trying to make it as a poet and more of ways of advancing himself in the world than working on his craft for a publishing business which wants nothing to do with a nobody simply because he is a nobody. As a result he became involved in journalistic and other intrigues by which he hopes to make a Name in which scum such as Dauriat would be willing to traffic--but thwarted in this way as well ends up going home in defeat, with that defeat determining the ultimate destiny of his all too short life. If that destiny ends up having its wildly melodramatic touches, the fact of frustration and defeat is all too realistic, the infinitely more common fate than we get in all those execrable movies where at story's end our protagonist is sitting in a bookshop signing copies for lined-up, eager, buyers.

2. Martin Eden (1909) by Jack London.
In Lost Illusions our writer hero, demoralized by the reality of publishing, increasingly occupied himself with other activities besides the writing that was supposed to be his principal activity. However, in Martin Eden Jack London's protagonist stuck by his writing, and by trying to sell it, without getting caught up in the sorts of intrigues and would-be flanking maneuvers that nearly bring Lucien success before he ends up destroyed. Moreover, if in Balzac's Dauriat we get a glimpse of the beginnings of modern publishing in the story of Martin Eden we see a world where all this has developed to the point of more obviously and fully looking like our own, such that Eden need not take himself off from the provinces to a cultural capital like New York, but instead, while never going further from his hometown of San Francisco than Oakland, embarks upon his quest. Indeed, I suspect no one else has depicted what it means for a writer to start out as he did, all alone, without guidance, remote from the centers of the publishing world, with the fullness of attention and emotional intensity that London did. The fumbling, stumbling, blundering beginning. (At the start Eden did not even know that he had to type his submissions.) The grim death march through the slush pile--not only the sense of waste and futility involved in writing material that has no takers, but the hassle and expense in time as well as money of sending it out and getting in reply only form rejection letters that feel as if they came out of a machine. (No, we do not "excuse the impersonal nature of your reply.") The sense of just what an isolating and lonely activity it is, with the writer embarked on it apt to get no support from their nearest and dearest even when they are in their lives. And of what sheer drivel the glib talk of "day jobs" is, given the sacrifices of the writer's quest they unavoidably entail.

Of course, at story's end Eden really does "make it," becoming "rich and famous" (as Jack London, who based Eden on himself, became rich and famous), and that is exceedingly unrepresentative of how this story goes. But all the same the strains and disillusionments involved in getting to his goal take their toll. "Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," Lucien says in Balzac's book--but never does attain success, and so can only speculate. By contrast this outcome is dramatized in London's book, because Eden does achieve success, while suffering that searing and callousness that deprives victory of its savor. Indeed, it seems notable that, if in quite different circumstances, Lucien and Martin Eden both end the same way, dying by their own hand--as, alas, Jack London may have died, the fate of the autobiographically-inspired Eden seeming to darkly anticipate London's own death.

3. Money Writes! (1927) by Upton Sinclair.
In contrast with Lost Illusions and Martin Eden--Sinclair's Money Writes! is not a novel, but a work of nonfiction, part of his Dead Hand series offering an "economic interpretation" of contemporary literature covering what gets produced, and on what terms. If London shared Sinclair's political views, indeed had presented such views in novels like The Iron Heel while having been important in helping Sinclair early in his career, Martin Eden did not deal with the political side of the publishing business in the way that Sinclair did in his study of how the "bourgeois point of view" defined what could and could not be published, how those who shared it or accommodated themselves to it had careers, how those who could not so accommodate themselves were driven to the margins, if they were published at all, as he showed how the principles he described in his historical study Mammonart remained very much operative in twentieth century America--and with characteristic brilliance. (Once again, success has its price, and so does failure, with really attractive outcomes pretty much implausible for any thinking and feeling human being, as they end up torn between writing what is meaningful and true--what could be great--and the slop the publishers would be willing to take.)

Sinclair also dealt with something else not yet quite so developed when London published Martin Eden almost two decades earlier--the cult of celebrity, and the pursuit of celebrity as a way out of the deprivations and miseries of ordinary, everyday, working life. If there are far, far more people genuinely possessed of the talent and the desire to become novelists, even great novelists, than there are places for them, that desire to escape a dead-end, lower-class life is indisputably what makes so many desperate to embark on a career as a novelist that, in spite of all the obstacles, and the depressingly low odds of success, that they put so much effort into it--and few have dealt with the matter so forthrightly and insightfully as Sinclair as ever.

Reviewing this list I am of course reminded that even the most recent of the books on it is almost a century old, and that much has changed in that time. However, for the most part we still live in the world that the nineteenth century created, because the twentieth century's attempt to move beyond that, depending on how one looks at it, has either been defeated or remains unfinished, such that in this case these writers give us far more truth about the publishing world, about contemporary letters, about what it is to try and get into and make a living in that world than a library of more recently written books. This is because so much of what is written about publishing is designed to pick the pockets of would-be writers, because even to the limited extent to which they may be allowed to do so few writers with access to any sort of mainstream audience at all these days ever dare to really look at the world around them, and really cognize it, and tell us what they have seen--and because in this world the Dauriats of Big Media still sneer cruelly, as today's counterparts to Lucien de Rubempre and Martin Eden can expect to face similar miseries, and those who pick up a new release from the Big Five can still expect to see between the covers what "Money writes," and nothing else.

Upton Sinclair on Vegetarianism

Those familiar with Upton Sinclair as the author of The Jungle will probably not be too surprised to learn of his "experimenting with vegetarianism." However, his use of that phrase in his study of organized religion The Profits of Religion makes clear that the "experiment" was behind him--and that his historical researches were not encouraging in his attempt to be a vegetarian. As he tells us, in those days he "sought earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eating race; but candor compelled me to admit that man was like the monkey and the pig and the bear--he was vegetarian when he could not help it." Indeed, he found "that all men crave meat, all struggle for it," and the privileged "get it" as the unprivileged do not, a situation exemplified by "the subject classes living in the midst of animals which they tend, but whose flesh they rarely taste" to be found the world over--and exemplified, too, by the prominence of sacrifices of meat (essentially, the giving of meat up to priests) within religious teaching likely "go[ing] back to the days of the cave-man." Indeed, especially in olden times it seemed to Sinclair that "a taboo upon meat" was an important part of the "mighty fortress of Graft" the priests built on the foundation of human fears and human needs, with the words in which he summed this up worth citing: "Confess your own ignorance and your own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred Caste, the Keepers of the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon and respite . . . in exchange for fresh meat" (emphasis added).

Frank Capra's Trip to Sicily: A Few Thoughts

Joseph McBride's biography of film director Frank Capra (1992's Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success) begins with an episode from near the end of his life--his U.S. State Department-arranged trip back to the village in Sicily where he was born (Bisacquino). The project is half-baked from the very beginning (indeed, reading the chapter I was aghast that taxpayer money was squandered on this foolishness), but what really interested me was what in McBride's account Capra said afterward about the experience: "I felt nothing."

Looking at what others have said about the event, and Capra's attitude toward it, it seems common for them to emphasize Capra's alienation from his "roots," bespeaking his truly horrible childhood, and the discrimination and anxieties he experienced as a Sicilian immigrant to America in that time. Yet one can see another aspect to it, especially when you look at the rest of his statement. "I felt nothing," he said, continuing "Who the hell cares where you were born?" and criticizing the whole idea of "roots" and pride in them (using what good old Commandant Lassard would have called "many, many bad words").

While alienation is not the most desirable of emotional states, it does sometimes bring with it clarity, enabling one to see straight through muddle and lies, with the idea of "roots" an instance in this case. That "people are so proud of their roots it's sickening" as Capra put it is a matter of their romanticizing their ancestry, a behavior that has pretty much always been in the service of an agenda. As anyone who has seriously bothered with the history of these matters is aware, in reality nations are not born, but invented, and those who become their people encouraged and even forced to "imagine" themselves a community by an elite for its own reasons, which never fails to use that imagining to take advantage of them for its selfish purposes (in the deflection of demands for freedom and equality from below, the deflection of attention to socioeconomic differences with images of "national unity," the call to lay down their lives in war that has made nationalism so much a tool of reaction, and internationalism so much the standard borne by progressives).

All of this, of course, can seem the more forced when it is a matter of identifying not with the country where you had your upbringing and lived your life but a place you left so early on as to not remember it, and had no real ties to it afterward (a place that was their parents' world rather than their own), as was the case with Capra. It does not help that those who care very much about where they were born, and others knowing it, have generally expected to derive social advantages from it--and to subject others born less advantageously to that disadvantage amid a status politics running amok and twisting the nation's life in all sorts of ways, such that many of those being told "Be proud!" are told to be proud of something that had brought them nothing but pain. Certainly Capra fell into that category--with the result that whatever else one may say of his emotional baggage and the way in which it twisted his life and his thinking (as McBride put it, "Capra dealt with it by becoming a reactionary and a terrible bigot himself," and writing an autobiography that in Barry Gewen's words "appears to have been a lie practically from beginning to end," with all that implies), romance about those roots was one delusion for which he never fell, a bit of clarity that deserves a lot more attention than it has got in this regressively roots-obsessed era, the more in as where the obsession was concerned Capra in '77, when Roots was helping to begin to make this fashionable hadn't "seen anything yet."

"You Get What You Pay For": A Few More Thoughts

"You get what you pay for" is one of those stupid phrases that people speak after someone has suffered a disappointment that offers neither comfort nor wisdom.

Someone purchases something at low cost; they end up unsatisfied; and so the speaker trots out those six little words, "You get what you pay for."

In reality the best you can say is that "On average you get what you pay for," and even that is questionable from the standpoint of anyone who does not believe Price is the voice of the Great God Market (which is to say, anyone not driven insane by immersion in orthodox economic theory).

Some people get cheated and exploited, as others reap the benefit. One party got less than they paid for, the other got a lot more. And some just end up unfortunate. (Even high-quality products are unlikely to be perfect, defects rarer, but not absolutely nonexistent--and the buyer might simply end up with the very rare dud.)

Still, it would probably be giving those addicted to this phrase too much credit to act as if they had any pretense toward representing reality. Their real motive in throwing around that phrase is apt to be kicking the disappointed person when they are already down, making them feel worse with the taunt "You get what you pay for."

"The Hidden and Awful Wisdom Which Apportions The Destinies of Mankind"

At one point in recounting the sufferings of Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray writes of "[t]he hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind" being "pleased . . . to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise, and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked," and this being the case admonishing the reader,

Oh, be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving. Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor's accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.

To all evidences the view Thackeray explained in this paragraph is either completely incomprehensible or utterly taboo to at least 99 percent of those who have any appreciable platform from which to speak in this society. Instead they snarl about "hard work," and "genius," and the society in which we live as a "meritocracy" in which people get what they "deserve."

All that, of course, is to their very great discredit.

Of the Word "Badass"

I have always disliked the term "badass."

There seem to me many reasons for this. There is, for instance, the fact that I am just not a fan of the formation of compound words which tack the word "ass" onto some other term for emphasis, or other such effect.

However, what I particularly dislike about the term is how much it reeks of the unhinged worship of self-assertion at its most idiotic and its meanest--the worship of the bully, the worship of the asshole, that seem deeply reflective of the derangement of this culture.

This is all the more in as, if the term's origins are admittedly obscure, it seems that "badass" was once Marine Corps slang for those who merely postured--those who were not really tough, but just ostentatiously acting as if they were. The poser and the faker.

Those of conventional mind who consider such a bit of etymological history might remark how usages change; how sometimes they can even be "reclaimed" so that what was derogatory becomes complimentary, a matter of pride, like some oppressed minority which turns around the words once used to put them down.

However, whatever one thinks of such notions (I admit to not thinking much of them), "badasses" were never "oppressed" by others. Badasses were far more likely to be doing the oppressing--and those who oppress others deserve every bit of opprobrium they get for it.

Thus it seems to me worth thinking about in a different way--the usage of the word "badass" reflecting not reclamation, but confusion. As characteristic of a culture that, in that unhinged worship of self-assertion at its most idiotic and its meanest--the worship of the bully, the worship of the asshole--has lost the ability to tell the difference between those who are really tough, and those who just pose as tough, the real thing and the poseur. Or maybe even stopped caring at all about the difference because its worship of these things is so out of control, and frankly because whatever handle on reality it ever had has totally gone.

Because that is exactly where society broadly is in this day and age, as anyone who still has any handle on reality at all is continually reminded to their eternal exasperation.

The Artist and Society: A Few More Reflections

Recently reviewing and more generally discussing Upton Sinclair's Mammonart and Money Writes! I have found myself particularly attentive to what Sinclair had to say about how artists work, and what it means for them and their work in societal life--not just the extent to which "money writes," but to which artists' "impressionability" leaves them following rather than leading, and serving power very willingly, the "ruling-class artist" the norm and the "hero artist" the rarity, especially when we consider those who ever had the chance to make an impact on the world.

I cannot say that these ideas were new to me--but I do not think I ever spent so much time considering them as I have since turning my attention to Sinclair's books the way I have this year, and certainly never felt the weight of those ideas so much as I do now. Perhaps it is because ever since I looked to literature for more than entertainment it has been the hero artists--whom, I might add, have tended to be more than conveyors of "impressions"--that I have found worthiest of my interest and my time, all as, frankly, I have been still more attentive to them since I stopped bothering with books just because they are canonical. (Perhaps, too, that I have spent so much time on science fiction, and especially its more cerebral writers, matters in this.)

Now having done so I find it awfully depressing given the conventional view of the artist as a sort of latterday seer, and of the artist as, in Graham Greene's "The Virtue of Disloyalty," a champion of the downtrodden. Yet there is no denying that this explains much we see in the past, and the present--however unhappily--with illusions about what artists can do for us better set aside than sustained, demanding of art everything that it can give us but not expecting from it what it cannot.

Reflections on the Third Season of Game of Thrones

As I think I remarked some years ago I pretty much gave up on Game of Thrones after season three.

This was, I think, because the ways in which the adaptation of the books fell short kept adding up for me, and totaling higher than what the adaptation was getting right--all as my experience of the books was that their interest pretty much goes downhill after number three, the more in as the comparative slog of the fourth and fifth volumes was as yet unredeemed by the "winds of winter" whose coming seemed no certainty.

I was also annoyed with the way the producers lamely split the third book into two seasons, dragging out the best part of the series (thus far) as if to stall us as they figured out what to do about what the much weaker later material.

However, it was also because of what they filled that third season with when they could have been advancing the plot instead.

George R.R. Martin's books depicted the quasi-Medieval world of Westeros as a brutal place, and anyone watching the TV series could hardly complain if it depicted that brutality. However, the makers of the show all too obviously wallowed in it, an impression I first had at the end of the third episode, "Walk of Punishment," when Jaime Lannister's captors cut off his sword hand. The scene is of course in the original book and an important part of his character arc, and the presentation of the incident as such unobjectionable. But the episode's cutting from the severing of the hand to the end credits with "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" blaring over them smacked of the cheap nihilism of the edgelord (and as if to confirm it, had the commensurate praises of the claqueurs!). Likewise I deeply disliked the way the show disposed of Rose, and the decision to very lengthily (and tastelessly) dramatize Theon Greyjoy's captivity and torture, and a good deal else (while it said to me an awful lot that few in the commentariat found anything at all objectionable about all this).

Of course, some go on watching shows in which they have lost interest. I certainly had done it in the past. But by this point I was outgrowing that bad habit, just walked away, and have not really bothered to look back since--all as, of course, The Winds of Winter remains an unkept promise over a decade on.

Of Geniuses Without Money

In Balzac's Lost Illusions David Sechard remarked that "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved some signal success."

What does the world accept as such "signal success?" Most people, being of conventional mind, and the prevailing schema of values being thoroughly bourgeois, are unlikely to accept anything but the attainment of wealth, as they show through such vulgar and stupid aphorisms as "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?"

As they show, too, in the haste of people of conventional mind to declare anyone with a large sum of money a "genius"--a Ken Lay, a Bernie Madoff, a Jeffrey Epstein, a Sam Bankman-Fried.

This seems to me something to keep in mind when we consider the intellectual who feels aggrieved at being given less than his due by the world. The conventional response is to sneer at them as "self-pitying," "entitled" and worse for thinking they deserve better than the extreme disrespect that is the lot of all those lacking "some signal success" to their credit. Yet the reality is that the intelligent person whose intelligence is unrecognized and unrespected, perhaps ceaselessly insulted, really is being given less than their due in that way, and they do have something to feel badly about--especially if their intelligence is the only trait they have about which they can feel good. And I dare say that the state is not an uncommon one. The reality is that, even if superior intellect may be a comparative rarity in this world, the chances for "signal success" are still very, very few indeed relative to the number of superior intellects that do exist, especially insofar as society equates such success with riches.

Balzac's Vautrin, the Making of Fortunes, and the Dream of Becoming a Celebrity

It was Thomas Piketty's discussion of the novels of Balzac in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that persuaded me his Human Comedy was worth my while--and having read through a fair portion of at least the more oft-cited of the books belonging to it I have only felt more and more with time that the impression was correct.

Perhaps the most striking part of Piketty's discussion of the works was his reference to the dialogue in Father Goriot between the arch-criminal Vautrin and law student Eugene de Rastignac regarding how one really acquires wealth in this profoundly unequal and profoundly unjust world. For all the pious bourgeois prattle the road to riches is not "hard work," even for a learned man of the professions such as de Rastignac is in school to become. For all the drudgery of the work and the indignities one must suffer year after year, decade after decade ("I would sooner turn pirate on the high seas than have my soul shrivel up inside me like that" Vautrin says of himself), even for the very few who rise high in it ("there are but twenty Procureurs Generaux . . . in all France," but "twenty thousand of you young men who aspire to that elevated position," such that they "must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot"), the rewards of such a professional life are apt to be paltry by the standard of anything that could really be called luxury (Vautrin challenging Rastignac to find even "five advocates" in all of "Paris who by the time that they are fifty are making fifty thousand francs a year").

Balzac, and Vautrin, are prepared to allow that "brilliant genius" may stand a chance--but in the absence of that rather unlikely path "skilful corruption" is the only alternative, the more in as one hopes to make their fortune quickly, as Vautrin tells de Rastignac in softening him up for a thoroughly criminal "offer that no one would decline," in Vautrin's words.

Desperate as his circumstances may be de Rastignac does "decline" that offer, and it is off to jail for Vautrin--while de Rastignac ends up making his way to fortune and power and fame by other means no more flattering to conventional attitudes about work and wealth, confirming rather than refuting what Vautrin has to say.

Considering that--the way that the rewards of even a respectable professional career are a matter of long and painful effort, highly uncertain, and in the event that one does attain them, pretty paltry--I find myself thinking again of a different writer who was not at all friendly toward Balzac, Upton Sinclair, and what he had to say in Money Writes! about the quest after celebrity already recognizable in his day. The odds of actually attaining celebrity are not high--but all the same, for most people it looks likelier than a conventional "career" (and those who embark upon it at least hope to make a success this way without committing a crime).

The Consideration of Poor People in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise

In the final chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's rather autobiographical novel This Side of Paradise (1920) the protagonist of the story, Amory Blaine, who started out very privileged but at this point has been rather knocked about by life--by the Great War, by the fickleness of fortune in a capitalist society, by much else--he finds himself confronting social realities. "Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people," Fitzgerald tells us, but Amory was poor now, and "the numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening procession." He thinks of the subway ride--its "ghastly, stinking crush" with its "squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men ate," amid which were "the car cards thrusting themselves out at one," the people who might be "leaning on you," the indignities and worse involved in the little selfishnesses toward which it pressed the riders ("the man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it"). Blaine "pictured," too, "the rooms where these people lived," with their cheap and "blistered" wallpaper, and "tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings," while "even love dressed as seduction--a sordid murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above" and made of "birth and marriage and death . . . loathsome, secret things," as indeed everything seemed loathsome, not least the shame people felt at being "tired and poor," and the disgust that others who were tired and poor felt when they saw it in others. Such lives impressed Amory as "dirtier than any battle-field he had seen" as a veteran of the Great War, and "harder to contemplate than any actual hardship moulded of mire and sweat and danger."

Contrasting it with the stories of O. Henry it seemed to him that no, there was no romance or beauty in it, no matter what some said, just "coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity," and if his first reaction to it all was hatred for poor people, ultimately he found himself hating the System, though with what consequence we never see. The novel, after all, was about the disillusioning of a youth who "had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies" that made of him a "romantic egotist"--while now the egotist became a "personage," and it is there that the tale ends.

Involuntary Celibacy in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise

In the course of reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise I cannot say that the first nine chapters of the book made very much impression on me--but it all came together for me in the tenth, when we see what it all led up to, the disillusionment of a once romantic youth facing reality in a way he had never done before, even amid the horrors of the Western Front. It all comes to a head when he finds himself taking a long drive with the father of a friend of his from Princeton who, unlike Amory, did not come back from the killing fields of World War I.

In the course of that dialogue Amory declares that "I'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her," all as working men are "condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence" for the larger part of their youth "to give some man's son an automobile."

It is a striking statement, certainly from the vantage point of a century on in which the terms of political discourse have changed so profoundly. These days what passes for the left (as with the status politics-defined pseudo-liberals) chastises such young men as Amory spoke of for feeling frustrated, for daring to speak of an inequality of chances in this area of life, even for thinking of such things at all. Meanwhile some on the right profess sympathy for their frustration--but tell them the causes are anything and everything but the socioeconomic inequalities of "the system," the defense of the inequalities of which, after all, have been the raison d'etre of the right from the start (with the same, frankly, going for what most Americans are prone to call "left").

Naturally I wonder what people make of the passage these days when they read it. But then that's just it--people don't read much these days, do they? And of those who do read, few are likely to read a book like this one all the way down to the end with the kind of alertness that would have them noticing the passage, and thinking about what it has to say.