For some decades it has been common for social critics to speak of professionals, "experts," technocrats, "the overclass" (Michael Lind's term, that one) or what have you as a distinct social grouping with a shared political sensibility that has been important in political social life because of the group's numbers, functions, affluence, social standing and broad cultural influence.
I think there is at least some truth to that view. Indeed, the outlook of the "professional" seems to me to have played a formative role in the political centrism that has dominated the mainstream of American political life for nearly a century now. If as I have said again and again centrism is readable as an extension of the American and Western conservative tradition, applying the classical conservative outlook to a liberal political and economic order, the specifics of the prevailing adaptation do reflect the outlook of professionals (a group whose conservatism is important to understanding its attitude toward its work, and toward society and its place in it), while centrism has an important base of support in the professional groups.
Still, I also think that one can make too much of professionals' supposed apartness from other groups, not concurring in how far apart from the "business class" some treat them as being. In the age of the MBA and "Big Law" and a thoroughly corporatized and financialized health care sector, in which engineers and lawyers rise through the ranks of their firms to become CEOs, the distinction between "professionals" and "business" can seem extremely overrated, especially at the top--business thoroughly "professionalized." At the same time the old-fashioned independent professional (like the lawyer or doctor with their own small practice) is themselves a businessperson, often servicing the needs of business. And at least among those simply doing well their being in the same tax bracket produces a certain commonality of interest between them (most obviously in opposition to high upper-bracket taxes, the more in as the use of the revenue so gained by the government is intended to benefit people other than themselves). Indeed, the up-and-coming lawyer in the blue-chip firm would seem to have far more in common in outlook and personal interest with an affluent businessperson than they would with, for example, a similarly professional schoolteacher (whose income, status, self-interest are, when looked at without illusions, make them working rather than "middle" class to the extent that that term ever had meaning).
The result is that the differences are often subtler than some make them out to be, with one matter that analysts of "the overclass" make much of their educational snobbery. This does not seem to me to me to be limited to the professionals by any means. But I do think it can be admitted that such snobbery has a different significance for the more elite, more technocracy-committed, professionals than to other elite groups. For the rich generally sending their children to an "elite" (read: exclusive and expensive, whatever the quality of the education it confers) college is simply what is expected of youth of a certain social standing, such an education one of the rituals and trappings of their social class little questioned, all as those looking for more justification find it easily enough in the view of college as a place for rich people to store their grown-up kids for a few years, a furthering of their socialization, an opportunity to integrate them into and develop the social networks of the elite. For the professional of the kind described here, however, there seems a snarling vehemence about attendance at such a school as a legitimator of the exalted status they demand and insist they deserve, proof that they are mentally and morally superior to those who never had occasion to park their car in Harvard yard, whose disadvantage and deprivations they regard as equally deserved--and thus not the problem of those more richly rewarded by what they insist (again, snarlingly) to be a meritocratic social system.
I think that in many ways this has been a more obfuscating and pernicious perspective than the view of elite college attendance as the mere badge of social privilege it has always been, and never ceased to be because it passes off what is almost always partly, and certainly usually, social privilege as if it were such superiority. Yet the different attitudes are merely parts of a common elitist package that in the end has far more to do with the money about which "respectable" persons are so reticent to speak than it does the "edumacation" they are so eager to extoll. Indeed, the next time you see the courtiers of the elite platform some "expert" for the purpose of telling the public what to think and shore up their "Because I say so" on the basis of their "credentials," rather than being awed by how they spent a decade after high school moving from Harvard to the Sorbonne to Oxford in the course of accumulating a mass of nearly unmarketable degrees, ask "Who paid the bill?" during all those years, and all that travel. And then after hearing the banalities they will almost inevitably speak ask yourself "Was the intellect I just saw on display worth the money?"
I think you already know the answer to that.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
The Artist as Aristocrat
Those of conventional, "middle class" (aka, bourgeois) mind may look at the steady 8-to-6 routine of the employee at a materially productive task they regard as the sole responsible and respectable path (the more in as the routine entails no intrinsic pleasure, and much displeasure), and see in a person's opting for the career of an artist instead something subversive of conservative values. However, the choice the artist makes is apt to be a choice of one conservatism over another--rejecting the life of the bourgeois in favor of the life of the aristocrat. Like the aristocrat (certainly as analyzed by Thorstein Veblen) the artist lives not by diligence at "industrial tasks," but by a personal prowess that makes them part of an elite presumed to be entitled to a claim on the resources of a society where the majority is obliged to live on that diligent-industrial basis, all as the artist's motives often include a more than usually strong aspiration to enjoy what the bourgeois conventionally has little opportunity to partake of but which loom large in the aristocrat's life--leisure, the graces of life, personal distinction. They also include their avoiding the unattractions of the "workaday life" to which they are, similarly, likely to be more than usually averse (the kind of penury unavoidable by persons who do not have really great wealth, control by a "boss" for most of their waking hours, etc.), with really full enjoyment of all this hinging on their being vaulted from obscurity to that sort of latterday aristocratic existence called "celebrity."
Of course, it is a notorious fact that very, very few of the aspirants to celebrity by way of art or anything else actually realize that aspiration--and fewer still do so who are not themselves born connected with the world of the arts do so, or at least from backgrounds of comparable privilege facilitating entrée into that world. (Perhaps their parents were not movie stars, but as the sons of publishing executives and daughters of broadcasters still part of the "media-industrial complex." Or maybe if they did not have media jobs their parents were lawyers or real estate agents--to the stars! Or dad was a billionaire or mom a Senator. And so forth.)
All this, too, can seem a very plausible basis for, as David Walsh put it, "Bohemianism, individualism and egotism" that a bourgeois may disapprove for its implications in such matters as their urbanity or even self-indulgence in deviations from traditional standards in sexual conduct or narcotics consumption, or their libertarian opposition to intrusions of state authority into personal pleasure-seeking or the censorship of their work by authority figures--but which for all that are a long way from being "left." One may add to this that in getting to that point in their careers and in the public's renown at which one can really speak of them as artists and celebrities in good standing, enjoying the perquisites of the position, many will have experienced a brutalizing upward climb, which lends their assertion of their status that edge that comes with having had to fight (perhaps, fight without the support of those nearest and dearest from whom they would have expected loyalty) to get what they regard as merely their due recognized--all as they remember all too well the way "the public" ignored or insulted them. Combined with their attachment to the considerable privileges they enjoy, one can easily picture this making them at least as self-absorbed, self-pitying, callous to the plight of the less fortunate and hostile to any demands that might be made on the fortunate (like a higher tax bill) as any other "self-made man"--with all that goes with that ideologically. This is reinforced, again, by the reality that in a situation where business ultimately prevails it is those artists who most readily produce what business wants who are more likely to work, to get ahead, to exercise any influence over what gets made--and these, of course, tend to more readily produce what is wanted because their personal thoughts and sentiments are in line with those of the businessmen, thoughts and sentiments to which they gravitate as they go from merely being courtiers of the elite to being of the elite themselves (as it seems safe to say happens when as can now happen a writer or film director or recording artist becomes a producer, and the producer becomes one of the world's few thousand billionaires, and thus part of the "0.0001 percent").
For all that, there are artists who do espouse socially critical, left-leaning views and manage to produce works in accordance with them in spite of the considerable obstacles in the way of such. However, what is at issue here is not the existence of individual artists of left-leaning views, but the prevailing norm, especially among those who actually get to make a living from finding an appreciable audience their artistic production, and its extreme distance from the simple-minded yet endlessly repeated stereotypes of artists as leftist--and its implications for artistic production, which leftist analysts have been logging since at least Upton Sinclair's time, not least the way that those attracted to an aristocratic way of life are likely to give the lower orders they must find the less attractive for having sought to escape them the short shrift the arts have always given them.
Of course, it is a notorious fact that very, very few of the aspirants to celebrity by way of art or anything else actually realize that aspiration--and fewer still do so who are not themselves born connected with the world of the arts do so, or at least from backgrounds of comparable privilege facilitating entrée into that world. (Perhaps their parents were not movie stars, but as the sons of publishing executives and daughters of broadcasters still part of the "media-industrial complex." Or maybe if they did not have media jobs their parents were lawyers or real estate agents--to the stars! Or dad was a billionaire or mom a Senator. And so forth.)
All this, too, can seem a very plausible basis for, as David Walsh put it, "Bohemianism, individualism and egotism" that a bourgeois may disapprove for its implications in such matters as their urbanity or even self-indulgence in deviations from traditional standards in sexual conduct or narcotics consumption, or their libertarian opposition to intrusions of state authority into personal pleasure-seeking or the censorship of their work by authority figures--but which for all that are a long way from being "left." One may add to this that in getting to that point in their careers and in the public's renown at which one can really speak of them as artists and celebrities in good standing, enjoying the perquisites of the position, many will have experienced a brutalizing upward climb, which lends their assertion of their status that edge that comes with having had to fight (perhaps, fight without the support of those nearest and dearest from whom they would have expected loyalty) to get what they regard as merely their due recognized--all as they remember all too well the way "the public" ignored or insulted them. Combined with their attachment to the considerable privileges they enjoy, one can easily picture this making them at least as self-absorbed, self-pitying, callous to the plight of the less fortunate and hostile to any demands that might be made on the fortunate (like a higher tax bill) as any other "self-made man"--with all that goes with that ideologically. This is reinforced, again, by the reality that in a situation where business ultimately prevails it is those artists who most readily produce what business wants who are more likely to work, to get ahead, to exercise any influence over what gets made--and these, of course, tend to more readily produce what is wanted because their personal thoughts and sentiments are in line with those of the businessmen, thoughts and sentiments to which they gravitate as they go from merely being courtiers of the elite to being of the elite themselves (as it seems safe to say happens when as can now happen a writer or film director or recording artist becomes a producer, and the producer becomes one of the world's few thousand billionaires, and thus part of the "0.0001 percent").
For all that, there are artists who do espouse socially critical, left-leaning views and manage to produce works in accordance with them in spite of the considerable obstacles in the way of such. However, what is at issue here is not the existence of individual artists of left-leaning views, but the prevailing norm, especially among those who actually get to make a living from finding an appreciable audience their artistic production, and its extreme distance from the simple-minded yet endlessly repeated stereotypes of artists as leftist--and its implications for artistic production, which leftist analysts have been logging since at least Upton Sinclair's time, not least the way that those attracted to an aristocratic way of life are likely to give the lower orders they must find the less attractive for having sought to escape them the short shrift the arts have always given them.
Upton Sinclair on the "Accomplishment" Imparted by the Finishing School
A couple of years ago I wrote a post on Jane Austen's treatment of the theme of "the accomplished young lady", and specifically the extent to which it was a matter of foolish leisure class pretension than substance. In his discussion of the education provided by America's diversity of school systems in The Goslings, Upton Sinclair does not overlook the "finishing school," nor his knowledge of what they provide by way of his wife, a graduate of one of them (on New York's Fifth Avenue, no less), who acquired the accomplishments they provide.
As Sinclair remarks, the "accomplishment" consisted of the ability to "play three pieces on the piano, and three on the violin . . . sing three songs, and recite three poems, and dance three dances," while "she had painted three pictures, and modeled three busts, and heard three operas." Some, like the hacks who write Hollywood's garbage, are impressed by such a level of "accomplishment"--but as Sinclair's description makes clear even without his comment it is all laughably superficial, conceived "from the standpoint of the drawing-room, and just enough to get by on." Moreover, in line with the overlooked reality that time and energy and resources spent learning one thing are time and energy and resources not spent learning other things--such that Sinclair informs us that in acquiring all this accomplishment Sinclair's wife had "read three books."
Those unclear on just how much accomplishment is involved in playing three pieces, singing three songs, etc. might do well to think of just how much reading that is--and treat it as an index of the actual level of accomplishment in those other areas that seem more exotic and impressive to those who have not graduated finishing schools.
As Sinclair remarks, the "accomplishment" consisted of the ability to "play three pieces on the piano, and three on the violin . . . sing three songs, and recite three poems, and dance three dances," while "she had painted three pictures, and modeled three busts, and heard three operas." Some, like the hacks who write Hollywood's garbage, are impressed by such a level of "accomplishment"--but as Sinclair's description makes clear even without his comment it is all laughably superficial, conceived "from the standpoint of the drawing-room, and just enough to get by on." Moreover, in line with the overlooked reality that time and energy and resources spent learning one thing are time and energy and resources not spent learning other things--such that Sinclair informs us that in acquiring all this accomplishment Sinclair's wife had "read three books."
Those unclear on just how much accomplishment is involved in playing three pieces, singing three songs, etc. might do well to think of just how much reading that is--and treat it as an index of the actual level of accomplishment in those other areas that seem more exotic and impressive to those who have not graduated finishing schools.
The Intellectual Incuriosity of the Student
A certain sort of older person, addicted to the use of phrases like "Back in my day," commonly acts as if no want of what they regard as virtue ever appeared before the current crop of young people. As attitudes go it is as stupid as it is false and nasty, and in considering the incuriosity of young people more interested in their pleasures than in their schoolwork, or simply learning about the world around them--as has quite naturally always been the case--Sinclair raises the matter in The Goslings. Citing the answers turned in by young people to a contest quizzing them on such things as prominent public figures of the day the participants showed themselves generally ignorant of such things as the name of the governor of their state, but very knowledgeable about sports stars. (Thus did they all know who "Babe" Ruth was.) What makes Sinclair's recitation of what can seem a pedestrian enough sampling of youthful ignorance and disinterest worth noting (at least, to those who already understood that things were no different from what they are today a century ago) is that he sees it not as a matter of some failure of the "younger generation," but of the society around them, not least the schools that do so little to feed and encourage their curiosity, and so much to stultify it instead.
The Teaching Life and its Hidden Psychological Costs
One of the more interesting aspects of Upton Sinclair's study of the American school system The Goslings is his treatment of the situation and outlook of the schoolteacher with respect and sympathy, but also without the hypocrisy to which our "convenient social virtue"-demanding era is addicted. Yes, teachers do important work under lousy conditions--many of them rather heroically--but they are also human beings with human weaknesses and failings, the more in as they must cope with those lousy conditions. As Sinclair remarks, "[t]he effect" of these "is to reinforce and intensify the occupational diseases of the teaching profession, which are . . . aloofness from real life," and "timidity."
As Sinclair puts it, a "teacher lives in a little world of her own," during which she spends time primarily with students who, at the K-12 level, and especially its lower levels, are "children," and primarily has contact with other adults "whose life is as narrow as her own." Moreover, the same administrators, the same society, that accords them so little pay and respect apart from the "compliments [that] cost less than nothing" that John Galbraith spoke of as the aforementioned "virtue," "shut up" the teacher's "mind in class greed and snobbery," telling the teacher that they are a "lady" or "gentleman," a salary-earning member of the white collar middle class rather than a wage-earning member of the working class that people with the barest claim to gentility so fear, and desire to set themselves apart from (and are afraid of falling into) they really are members of that working class in the ways that count as "an employe of the school board and the superintendent" rather than "a free citizen" or "professional expert" (however much that propaganda of convenient social virtue tells them they are "professionals").
Indeed, as Sinclair remarks, his experience of "school and college administrators" expect the loyal, cheerful, "willing and obliging" attitude that he remembered in "want advertisements of 'domestics' in the days of [his] boyhood"--all as, as he puts in in a chapter titled "Teachers' Terror," he discusses the frightened attitude of those instructors who see through the illusions and delusions. As Sinclair remarks, those persons in professions that society really respects as professions--"lawyers . . . doctors . . . engineers" do not "permit their superiors to exercise control over their social life, and forbid them to dance or play an occasional game of bridge," nor keep them in a state of "such subservience that they regard themselves as bold progressives when they utter harmless platitudes." Moreover, the habit of being afraid makes "rabbits" of them, a tendency that in many a case remains with them long after many of them have departed the profession altogether and so can no longer be tyrannized the way they were before.
I imagine that many think all this today--but very few would dare put it the way Sinclair did, especially when arguing on behalf of teachers.
As Sinclair puts it, a "teacher lives in a little world of her own," during which she spends time primarily with students who, at the K-12 level, and especially its lower levels, are "children," and primarily has contact with other adults "whose life is as narrow as her own." Moreover, the same administrators, the same society, that accords them so little pay and respect apart from the "compliments [that] cost less than nothing" that John Galbraith spoke of as the aforementioned "virtue," "shut up" the teacher's "mind in class greed and snobbery," telling the teacher that they are a "lady" or "gentleman," a salary-earning member of the white collar middle class rather than a wage-earning member of the working class that people with the barest claim to gentility so fear, and desire to set themselves apart from (and are afraid of falling into) they really are members of that working class in the ways that count as "an employe of the school board and the superintendent" rather than "a free citizen" or "professional expert" (however much that propaganda of convenient social virtue tells them they are "professionals").
Indeed, as Sinclair remarks, his experience of "school and college administrators" expect the loyal, cheerful, "willing and obliging" attitude that he remembered in "want advertisements of 'domestics' in the days of [his] boyhood"--all as, as he puts in in a chapter titled "Teachers' Terror," he discusses the frightened attitude of those instructors who see through the illusions and delusions. As Sinclair remarks, those persons in professions that society really respects as professions--"lawyers . . . doctors . . . engineers" do not "permit their superiors to exercise control over their social life, and forbid them to dance or play an occasional game of bridge," nor keep them in a state of "such subservience that they regard themselves as bold progressives when they utter harmless platitudes." Moreover, the habit of being afraid makes "rabbits" of them, a tendency that in many a case remains with them long after many of them have departed the profession altogether and so can no longer be tyrannized the way they were before.
I imagine that many think all this today--but very few would dare put it the way Sinclair did, especially when arguing on behalf of teachers.
Upton Sinclair's The Goslings and the Burden of Teaching English Composition
In Upton Sinclair's rather exhaustively researched study of American education, The Goslings, Sinclair refers to the prevailing ideal of the contemporary school system as the "education mill," churning out a standardized product in its students on a "machine" and "quantity production basis."
In discussing this he refers to a survey of conditions in the profession of the National Council of Teachers of English which took into account their "theme" reading--which is to say, how much reading of student papers they had to do. This survey "found that the average teacher had four hours of 'theme' reading to do every day, while the average high school teacher had five hours," as a result of being "required to take care of 125 pupils per teacher." Many responded by simply not doing the work. Some went so far as to destroy "the great bulk of them unread and [give] credit without reading."
I do not have knowledge of any English teacher I have ever met, at the high school or college or any other level, doing anything like destroying papers, or even being able to do this, given just how much monitoring they are often subject to. (I remember getting every paper back, remember giving every paper back when I was an instructor.) But I am not shocked by the fact that someone facing five hours a day of student papers--five hours a day of the grading that English teachers do loathe--they have dodged the duty in such an extreme manner, in part because there is so much dodging of the task. Thus do colleges see full-time instructors dump the job of teaching "theme"-intensive composition on student Teaching Assistants, adjuncts, etc. and other lower-ranking, more disposable, personnel who cannot refuse the charge. The Assistants, who are apt to teach just one class a semester, have only so many papers to deal with (and anyway look forward to not teaching comp when they graduate), while the adjuncts' situations often vary, frequently working rather less than full-time, so they are likely to have a lot less than 125 students actually turning in papers regularly. Meanwhile, as Sinclair writes, teachers who did not destroy papers often "skimmed and skipped through every paper"--and it would be harder to prove this never happened, the more in as standards are less clear. (Just what counts as a really satisfactory or unsatisfactory examination of the paper? Where does one draw the line between a fast read and a skim? Etcetera. Besides, going into the job with even the best will in the world someone getting through a mountain of papers is likely to be a bit less thorough as they weary of the task.)
However, what seems to me worth pointing out is that Sinclair concludes from this that the system has put them in a very difficult spot (remember, they had to spend all day teaching, and after that prepare for the next day's courses, the associated paperwork, etc.)--and that here as elsewhere the "overworked, underpaid, underequipped" can only put forth the effort demanded of them by their bosses for so long before something gives.
Very, very, few would be so lucid and so frank as Sinclair about the matter today, either bashing the teachers for their lapses in "convenient social virtue" (in a way they would never bash, for example, people in business or those professions they really did respect as professions)--or vociferously denying that such lapses existed at all, because those who presume to speak for "society" are rather less inclined to cut teachers any slack than they are bankers.
In discussing this he refers to a survey of conditions in the profession of the National Council of Teachers of English which took into account their "theme" reading--which is to say, how much reading of student papers they had to do. This survey "found that the average teacher had four hours of 'theme' reading to do every day, while the average high school teacher had five hours," as a result of being "required to take care of 125 pupils per teacher." Many responded by simply not doing the work. Some went so far as to destroy "the great bulk of them unread and [give] credit without reading."
I do not have knowledge of any English teacher I have ever met, at the high school or college or any other level, doing anything like destroying papers, or even being able to do this, given just how much monitoring they are often subject to. (I remember getting every paper back, remember giving every paper back when I was an instructor.) But I am not shocked by the fact that someone facing five hours a day of student papers--five hours a day of the grading that English teachers do loathe--they have dodged the duty in such an extreme manner, in part because there is so much dodging of the task. Thus do colleges see full-time instructors dump the job of teaching "theme"-intensive composition on student Teaching Assistants, adjuncts, etc. and other lower-ranking, more disposable, personnel who cannot refuse the charge. The Assistants, who are apt to teach just one class a semester, have only so many papers to deal with (and anyway look forward to not teaching comp when they graduate), while the adjuncts' situations often vary, frequently working rather less than full-time, so they are likely to have a lot less than 125 students actually turning in papers regularly. Meanwhile, as Sinclair writes, teachers who did not destroy papers often "skimmed and skipped through every paper"--and it would be harder to prove this never happened, the more in as standards are less clear. (Just what counts as a really satisfactory or unsatisfactory examination of the paper? Where does one draw the line between a fast read and a skim? Etcetera. Besides, going into the job with even the best will in the world someone getting through a mountain of papers is likely to be a bit less thorough as they weary of the task.)
However, what seems to me worth pointing out is that Sinclair concludes from this that the system has put them in a very difficult spot (remember, they had to spend all day teaching, and after that prepare for the next day's courses, the associated paperwork, etc.)--and that here as elsewhere the "overworked, underpaid, underequipped" can only put forth the effort demanded of them by their bosses for so long before something gives.
Very, very, few would be so lucid and so frank as Sinclair about the matter today, either bashing the teachers for their lapses in "convenient social virtue" (in a way they would never bash, for example, people in business or those professions they really did respect as professions)--or vociferously denying that such lapses existed at all, because those who presume to speak for "society" are rather less inclined to cut teachers any slack than they are bankers.
"Overeducated"
I think we have all heard people toss around the term "overeducated"--usually as an epithet--but I suspect that few have given much thought, or even any, to what is in back of it.
Obviously to call someone overeducated is to say they have been given more education than they ought to have had. Sometimes the word is an insult of someone else's intelligence--as in, yes, they have an advanced degree, but really they are quite stupid and the education was wasted on a person of such limited faculties. However, it seems to me that it is much more common for the speaker to mean something else--something which frankly gives away society's hypocrisy about respect for education to reveal what people who talk this way tend to be really thinking, two things in particular:
1. Society is, must and always will be a hierarchical thing, and the lower orders ought not to have knowledge beyond what will make them useful to their "betters."
2. Knowledge that is not of immediate practical utility--which in this society is equated with its monetary return to themselves or their employer--is of no value.
In short: people, especially the poor, but not necessarily just the poor, should be given enough education to enable them to do their jobs, but no more, and intellectuals who would seek knowledge for any other purpose are be despised.
I leave it to you to infer from this the politics of those who throw around terms like "overeducated."
Obviously to call someone overeducated is to say they have been given more education than they ought to have had. Sometimes the word is an insult of someone else's intelligence--as in, yes, they have an advanced degree, but really they are quite stupid and the education was wasted on a person of such limited faculties. However, it seems to me that it is much more common for the speaker to mean something else--something which frankly gives away society's hypocrisy about respect for education to reveal what people who talk this way tend to be really thinking, two things in particular:
1. Society is, must and always will be a hierarchical thing, and the lower orders ought not to have knowledge beyond what will make them useful to their "betters."
2. Knowledge that is not of immediate practical utility--which in this society is equated with its monetary return to themselves or their employer--is of no value.
In short: people, especially the poor, but not necessarily just the poor, should be given enough education to enable them to do their jobs, but no more, and intellectuals who would seek knowledge for any other purpose are be despised.
I leave it to you to infer from this the politics of those who throw around terms like "overeducated."
Why Does Popular Culture Do Such a Bad Job of Depicting Intelligence?
Over the years I have more than once remarked how badly popular culture depicts intelligence--and had something to say about why it does so.
Right now it seems to me that, apart from the extent to which pop culture simply imitates other pop culture, or the reality that intelligence is rarely an ostentatious trait that lends itself to dramatic convenience, it reflects two fundamental aspects of how society treats intelligence:
1. Relentlessly referencing intelligence as a legitimator for inequality, with this epitomized by the constant portrayal of society's elite as geniuses.
2. Equally relentless anti-intellectualism.
Thus we end up with a society which despises intellectualism yet holds up the apparent intellectualism of the elite (so commonly presented as hyper-articulate, ultra-cultured, with a multitude of interests making them a polymath's polymath, etc.) is held up as proof of their inherent superiority with an expectation of the public deferring to it.
Of course, there are ways of finessing such contradictions. One is that point 1 comes before point 2, the propaganda on behalf of elite superiority coming in ahead of the detestation of intellectualism, and this easily enough. After all, the principal reason for the fear and hate shown intellectuals is the association of intellectualism with dissent--of which there is rarely any in the elite discussed here. Instead their intellectualism is made to seem a mere overflow of supposedly superabundant mental powers, and therefore harmless in itself, while affirming the idea that they are more than ordinary human beings. Besides, the rich and powerful are conventionally excused every sin and every crime in a hierarchical society--they the "unbound but protected"--with this going for the sins and crimes of intellectualism. It is those intellectuals in the other category, of and from and for the bound but unprotected, the more in as many of them do challenge the claims of the powerful (their claims to having a monopoly on intelligence, the social order which so privileges them), who are the real target of anti-intellectual sentiment.
Promulgators of conventional wisdom that they tend to be, artists are rarely equipped to question such things--and as a result of the conventional wisdom being complete idiocy generate complete and utter crap of the kind discussed here on a constant basis.
Right now it seems to me that, apart from the extent to which pop culture simply imitates other pop culture, or the reality that intelligence is rarely an ostentatious trait that lends itself to dramatic convenience, it reflects two fundamental aspects of how society treats intelligence:
1. Relentlessly referencing intelligence as a legitimator for inequality, with this epitomized by the constant portrayal of society's elite as geniuses.
2. Equally relentless anti-intellectualism.
Thus we end up with a society which despises intellectualism yet holds up the apparent intellectualism of the elite (so commonly presented as hyper-articulate, ultra-cultured, with a multitude of interests making them a polymath's polymath, etc.) is held up as proof of their inherent superiority with an expectation of the public deferring to it.
Of course, there are ways of finessing such contradictions. One is that point 1 comes before point 2, the propaganda on behalf of elite superiority coming in ahead of the detestation of intellectualism, and this easily enough. After all, the principal reason for the fear and hate shown intellectuals is the association of intellectualism with dissent--of which there is rarely any in the elite discussed here. Instead their intellectualism is made to seem a mere overflow of supposedly superabundant mental powers, and therefore harmless in itself, while affirming the idea that they are more than ordinary human beings. Besides, the rich and powerful are conventionally excused every sin and every crime in a hierarchical society--they the "unbound but protected"--with this going for the sins and crimes of intellectualism. It is those intellectuals in the other category, of and from and for the bound but unprotected, the more in as many of them do challenge the claims of the powerful (their claims to having a monopoly on intelligence, the social order which so privileges them), who are the real target of anti-intellectual sentiment.
Promulgators of conventional wisdom that they tend to be, artists are rarely equipped to question such things--and as a result of the conventional wisdom being complete idiocy generate complete and utter crap of the kind discussed here on a constant basis.
P.G. Wodehouse and "The Supercilious Stare"
Wodehouse characterizes the Supercilious Stare as uniquely English, and "the highly-strung foreigner" among Englishmen like those invading soldiers especially sensitive to it. I suppose that most Americans would not disagree with his characterization, given American stereotypes about England, and especially of the sort of English person that was Wodehouse's point of reference. (It is not England's working-class folks who find themselves among people in evening wear at strange dinner parties in tweed suits.) Still, it seems to me that as with many of those things we think as being uniquely of one culture or another, we can easily find much the same thing elsewhere, and maybe all over the world--England's more privileged social strata having no monopoly on The Supercilious Stare, a thing frequently encountered by native and new arrival alike on the other side of the Atlantic as well, and for much the same reason, the enforcement of social norms protecting privilege. This is all the more the case in that it is so often deployed when anyone utters a protest of things as they are among mindless devotees of the status quo who, as the privileged have so often been known to do, regard the aggrieved as insane and therefore not worth bothering about.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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