Things That Make My Blood Boil

One of them is Republican Senators whose heads are not screwed on straight.

Another is lunatic right-wing preachers.
And then there's the stupidity of some in my age cohort.

And egregious liar Betsy McCaughey.

What I'm Reading

Notes on The House of Mirth, Book Two:

Why do we care about Lily Bart? (If you don't, make that "I.") After all, in her own words, she's "a very useless person."

As one character observes of Lily, "sometimes I think ..., at heart, she despises the things she's trying for." Exactly right. But what else has her social milieu given her to try for except a rich husband? Lily learns the flaws of society the hard way. After her betrayal by Bertha Dorset she realizes that even the truth can't save her: "What is truth? Where a woman is concerned it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good terms with her." The truth is what's convenient -- a Whartonian spin on pragmatism.

And so Lily descends the social ladder, first down a rung to the bohemian set of the Gormers -- "a kind of social Coney Island, where everybody is welcome who can make noise enough and put on airs." She develops a carapace against social misfortune -- "a hard glaze of indifference was fast forming over her delicacies and susceptibilities, and each concession to expediency hardened the surface a little more." (And there's that word "glaze" again.) With the Gormers she travels to Alaska -- an adventure I wish Wharton had given us more of, perhaps as a contrast of the newest part of the New World with the Old World intrigues of Europe -- but Lily realizes that she has become "of no more account among them than an expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child." The glaze is beginning to crack, admitting some of the "dinginess" that she has been brought up to contemn.

There is still, of course, the possibility of marrying Rosedale. A friend commented to me that he wasn't ready to forgive the anti-Semitism in Wharton's references to Rosedale, but I may have overstated them in my earlier post. Or perhaps Wharton herself was inspired to draw back from them, for she begins to soften Rosedale in the scene in which Lily spies on him playing with a child -- "something in his attitude made him seem a simply and kindly being." And by the end of the book he presents an almost welcome alternative to the desperation into which Lily has plunged. Still, though he is capable of kindness, Rosedale is a man without scruples, and he presents to her the book's key moral choice -- to save herself by revealing the letters between Bertha Dorset and Lawrence Selden.

And so Lily's moral center becomes evident -- she decides not to use the letters to shame Bertha, and she decides to endure hardship so she can pay back the money that Gus Trenor has given her. And to do so, she takes another step down the ladder -- one that once again earns Selden's disapprobation. She enters, as a social secretary, the garish nouveau riche circle of the divorcée Norma Hatch. "Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from 'art exhibit' to dress-maker's opening."

The trouble for the contemporary reader is that it's hard to distinguish this louche stratum of society from the upper-crust layer that Lily is accustomed to -- both seem to us equally empty and frivolous, and its denizens can be similarly poisonous. We have to take it on Wharton's word that, "Compared with the vast gilded void of Mrs. Hatch's existence, the life of Lily's former friends seemed packed with ordered activities." And obviously there is a difference, for Lily takes flight from Mrs. Hatch's set, choosing to plunge into the life of a laborer in the workroom of the milliner Miss Haines.

By the novel's end, it becomes evident that the real villain of the story is not Gus Trenor or Bertha Dorset, but Selden, "an emotional coward" who flees "from an infatuation his reason had conquered." Every time he gets a chance to set things right, for himself and more especially for Lily, he backs off. "He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that the ground was failing her." Selden sees clearly the meretriciousness of society in which Lily shines forth -- "her grace cheapening the other women's smartness as her finely-discriminated silences made their chatter dull." He scorns "the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dullness of the talk, ... the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance." But he takes no action to prevent her being a victim of the circle in which she moves. He chooses instead "the sense of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her."

The trouble with the relationship of Selden and Lily is that each reinforces the other's passivity. Lily has her own emotional cowardice. Rather like Micawber confidently expecting something to turn up, she remains content to "worry along, as she had so often done before, with the hope of some happy change of fortune to sustain her." We learn from Carry Fisher that Lily blew her opportunity to marry a rich Italian prince and in the process caused a scandal: "That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic." (The reference to oversleeping is a bitterly ironic anticipation of the novel's ending.)

And so the novel culminates in an epiphany for Lily, perhaps unfortunately sentimentalized in the form of Nettie Struther's baby. Lily realizes "that there had never been a time when she had any real relation to life." It's a didactic moment, revealing that Wharton doesn't yet fully trust her readers to draw their own lessons.

So why do we/I care about Lily Bart? Because Wharton does, of course. The question is whether Wharton cares about Lily as a person or as an idea, a victim of of society's materialism or the embodiment of a moral dilemma. The answer is, naturally, a bit of both, and it's Wharton's ambivalence that weakens the novel -- not fatally, but significantly.

Mad Mannion

Lance Mannion's take on "Mad Men" here is provocative. But lots of works -- Shakespeare's romances, the plays of Chekhov and Beckett, the fiction of Kafka -- can be played or read as both comic and tragic. Criticizing "Mad Men" for not being played as a comedy seems to me to miss the point -- we do laugh at it. (Well, I do, anyway.) To assume that its creators intend it to be taken seriously because the actors are playing it straight is to miss the genius of the work. And to reduce Don Draper to just "a jerk" is to miss the devastating portrayal of the compartmentalized life.

What I'm Reading

Notes on The House of Mirth, Book One, Chapters X through XV:

As the novel nears its midpoint, Wharton becomes less Jane Austen (analysis of social mores) and more George Eliot (moral earnestness). She begins to indulge more in Eliotic commentary: "No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity; and the sense of being of importance among the insignificant was enough to restore to Miss Bart the gratifying consciousness of power."

Now, I love both Austen and Eliot, but when forced to choose, I go for wit over gravitas, and prefer showing to telling. This is not to say that Wharton doesn't often mix wit into her commentary, e.g.: "It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness." That observation could have come from either Austen or Eliot.

Wharton also shares Eliot's mistrust of the beautiful. Lily resembles the fatally selfish Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda more than she does the icily destructive Rosamond Vincy of Middlemarch, but all three characters manipulate others with their beauty to no good end. Lily's beauty is apotheosized in the tableau vivant at the Wellington Brys, and it ensnares Lawrence Selden, who, we are told, has inherited "the Stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the Epicurean's pleasure in them" -- a dangerous blend. He witnesses "the touch of poetry in her beauty that [he] always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. ... [H]e seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part."

But disharmony is to follow, in the form of Gus Trenor's proposition and Simon Rosedale's proposal, and Selden's fatal glimpse of Lily fleeing from the Trenors' town house. Having reached a pinnacle, Lily can only fall from it, becoming prey to her pursuers and to the viciousness of Society: "The winged Furies were now prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea." Lily has had a glimpse of the world that lies outside of Society, in Gerty Farish's charitable work, but its full reality has not thrust itself upon her: "She had always accepted with philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter's night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers." It's easy to sense here that Lily is about to find out what is beneath her pedestalled existence.

It's also easy to sense the threat that Lily poses not only to Selden, but also to Gerty, whose infatuation with Selden is dashed when he comes to her sitting room -- "where they fitted as snugly as bits in a puzzle" -- only to talk of nothing but Lily: "There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and that third had taken her own place." Selden's talk of Lily inspires Gerty to an unaccustomed bitterness: "When had Lily ever really felt, or pitied, or understood? All she wanted was the taste of new experiences: she seemed like some cruel creature experimenting in a laboratory." And yet Gerty swallows her resentment when Lily presents herself in distress on her doorstep.

Wharton shares one other thing with Eliot: a difficulty when it comes to writing about men. (Austen solved the problem by presenting men as her women saw them.) The key sexual confrontations -- between Lily and Trenor, and between Lily and Rosedale -- teeter precariously on the verge of melodrama, largely because Wharton is unable to bring either Trenor or Rosedale to life -- to make them as fully dimensional as Lily. (We can overlook the casual prejudice of her time in Wharton's references to Rosedale -- described by one character as "the little Jew who bought the Greiner house" -- as presenting "the instincts of his race," but they certainly don't add depth to him as character.) Trenor's proposition and Rosedale's proposal come from cardboard villains, not flesh-and-blood threats. Wharton's attempts to characterize them through the coarse slanginess of their language -- e.g., Trenor's "Gad, you go to men's houses fast enough in broad daylight -- strikes me you're not always so deuced careful of of appearances" and Rosedale's "But why ain't you straight with me -- why do you put up that kind of bluff?" -- come across as stagy.

And so a novel that had begun with such brightness grows dark. Is the tonal shift in The House of Mirth a bug or a feature? I'm not sure yet.

The Plain Sense of Things

The Plain Sense of Things: In the Sunday New York Times Book Review, Helen Vendler reviews the first edition of Wallace Stevens’s work in 20 years, edited by John N. Serio. Stevens has always been one of my favorite poets, and Vendler's review inspired me to re-read a poem from which I have always managed to derive a strange sustenance:

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly around us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one ...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

The Guns of August

Frank Rich's Sunday column, The Guns of August, deals with the violent talk and action on the right, an elaboration on what he said on Rachel Maddow's show, i.e.: "The simmering undertone of violence in our politics seems to be getting darker."

The prevailing fear of the government that Rich touches on in this column is disturbing. During conservative regimes -- Reagan, the Bushes -- liberals seem to be able to handle their lack of power better than conservatives do when the Democrats (not to call them liberals) are in charge. I recently saw this at work when an old high school friend, with whom I had got in touch in connection with my class's reunion last year, commented on one of my Facebook posts that she was appalled at the liberalism in the link (to a Daily Kos item, I think) it contained. I responded that I appreciated her point of view, but that I naturally disagreed with hers.

It turned out that she had been participating in tea party and town hall protests, and she seemed to be terrified that the White House would find out and somehow punish her for it. (Evidently, she and her husband had once been audited by the IRS.) She wrote that she was discontinuing our Facebook connection -- "defriending" me -- and that she would prefer that I not contact her again.

I'm certain that she would never do anything violent, but it's clear that the merchants of fear had found in her a ready customer. I only wonder what other customers they have sold their brands to.

It's About Time

I don't usually count on Time magazine (which we get because someone once gave us a gift subscription) for anything but conventional wisdom skewed to the right. But this short review of T.R. Reid's book about American health care put in a very few words what's wrong with it, and why reform is so damn essential. Boldface is mine:

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care By T.R. Reid; Penguin; 288 pages

The U.S. health-care system is in a remedial class by itself. In no other industrialized country do 20,000 people die each year because they can't afford to see a doctor; nowhere else do 700,000 a year go bankrupt because of their medical bills. When it comes to health-care policy, an economist tells T.R. Reid, the U.S. is the "bogeyman of the world." The question Reid poses, however, isn't, What are we doing wrong? It's, What are other countries doing right--and how can the U.S. learn from them? A Washington Post correspondent with a nagging shoulder injury from his Navy days, Reid traveled the world to see how other countries' health-care systems would treat him. From Germany to Canada to Taiwan, he finds several different models for success, all with one thing in common.

When considering whether a government has a moral obligation to provide access to health care for all its citizens, Reid notes, "every developed country except the United States has reached the same conclusion."

What I'm Reading

Notes on The House of Mirth, Book One, Chapters I-IX.

Such an elegant setup in the first chapter: the introduction of Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, the neatly handled exposition, and the seemingly incidental detail of the charwoman on the stairs. Maybe naming Selden's residence "the Benedick" is a shade heavy-handed -- that she is Beatrice to his Benedick is obvious on its own.

The point-of-view shift at chapter's end, from Selden to Lily, has an abruptness that might get a reprimand from a creative writing teacher. But we need Selden's awareness of Lily's skill at creating an image -- that both her discretions and her imprudences "were part of the same carefully-elaborated plan"; that her hair may have been "ever so slightly brightened by art"; that "she must have cost a great deal to make"; that "a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay" -- to set up her regret that "one could never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice." For Lily can't "do a natural thing" -- it is forbidden to her by the society in which she lives, the more so because of her lack of money.

The depth with which we enter both Selden's and Lily's consciousnesses also serves to highlight the shallowness of the other characters, such as Percy Gryce -- the superrich and ineffably dull collector of Americana on whom Lily decides to take "the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life" -- and his mother, "a monumental woman with the voice of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied with the iniquities of her servants." Wharton's epigrammatic descriptions of her characters are brilliant: Mrs. Dorset is "like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room." "Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull."

"Misfortune," Wharton tells us, "had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one." But it has also made her self-centered, a rebel without a cause other than her own, who "had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations." She is forced to put her trust in the one thing she believes she can rely on: "Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end." But as all of Western literature has drummed into us, beauty is not to be trusted.

It doesn't help that "poor Lily, for all the hard glaze of her exterior" -- there's that word "glaze" again -- "was inwardly as malleable as wax." Her problem lies in whether she will allow the right person to take advantage of that malleability. As she tells Selden, when she re-encounters him at Bellomont, "the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over[.] Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?" The trouble is that Lily doesn't use either society or money with great intelligence.

Lily is almost immediately punished for her decision to forgo church -- and therewith Percy Gryce -- and to enter into a conversation with Selden that turns into a beautiful Beatrice-and-Benedick duel of wit and emotional brinksmanship. And in her need for money, she makes an uninformed decision to trust Mr. Trenor, for which the punishment is likely to be even greater. She mistrusts Selden "because his presence always had the effect of cheapening her aspirations, of throwing her whole world out of focus," when that's precisely what needs to happen. For her aspirations are cheap: "She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume."

Reasons to Be Scared

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It occurs to me, watching this exchange between Rachel Maddow and Frank Rich, that a lot of you whippersnappers are too young to remember what it was like before the Kennedy assassination. Rich himself alerted me to this in the clip, when he talks about how he sort of recalls the political climate in which the assassination took place.

Well, I remember it clearly, and a lot of the right-wing gabble of today reminds me of it -- chillingly. Kennedy's death turned him into a hero, and neutralized all of the vitriol. But when he was killed in Dallas, I wasn't surprised, because I knew what Dallas -- and the South in which I grew up -- was like in the early '60s. Visceral hatred of Kennedy was widespread -- irrational hatred, to be sure, given that Kennedy was a moderate, even center-right politician. In fact, the things that are said in public about Obama are mild, compared to some of the things that were said about Kennedy.

But there's another element that has changed: In the early '60s, the Republican party had a substantial and lively complement of moderates like Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller. And the Democrats included fire-breathing right-wingers like James Eastland, Orval Faubus and George Wallace. In short, the political parties were less polarized than they are now. All of that would change after Kennedy's death and especially after the passage of the landmark civil rights legislation -- with some support from Republicans. In other words, bipartisanship was possible then. I don't think it is now.

So I'm scared, deeply scared by the tumult and shouting. And by the fact that no one in the Republican party has the courage and the conscience to try to put a damper on it. Those who do, after all, get mocked and smeared by talk radio and Fox News. These times remind me of the times of my youth. And that's not a good thing.

What I'm Reading

I've never read Edith Wharton. Not even that bane of high school English students, Ethan Frome. I saw and admired Martin Scorsese's version of The Age of Innocence, but that's about the extent of my Whartonizing. So I took down the old volume of The House of Mirth that's been yellowing on my shelves lo these many years. (Don't know where or when I got it. Maybe in graduate school, when I figured I needed to read something by her.)

Lately, I've been "doing" American lit. Twain, as you know, if you've been following these posts. And before that Henry James's The American -- one of those early James novels that true Jamesians regard almost as juvenilia. (I've never been much of a Jamesian. I foundered in my attempt to get through The Wings of the Dove.)

One reason for my current immersion in Am Lit is my lately heightened awareness of the ongoing oddness of America's relationship with the rest of the world, as well as the current squealing on the right about the loss of "the America I knew," as some of the participants in the town halls have put it. No profound insights into that as yet.