In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

The Troop Committee -- II

We moved to Canterbury when I was just about at the age to join the Boy Scouts. That I would do so, and what troop I would join, was the subject of much discussion between my father and Mr. Evans, who rode together every day on the train to New York. I didn't know it then, but Mr. Evans had a very promising career; he made partner in a national accounting firm and then became a big player in the Democratic party. Long after I'd lost track of him, I spotted him again in the Los Angeles Times as a member of Jerry Brown's cabinet when he was Governor of California. There's no doubt that's why my father rode the train with him every day.

My father never did as well. He and my mother were always trying to attach themselves to people like Mr. Evans and Mrs. Throop, but things never quite worked out for them. We kept moving because my father would lose his job every few years, and we'd have to relocate when he found a new one. We always lived as far beyond our means as my father could push things. The house we bought in Canterbury was typical; it was an enormous, three-story Queen Anne with a Dutch roof and a carriage house and a grand staircase and a kitchen with a servant's room above it. At one time it faced Main Street, but in 1908 it was pulled half a block to the north using teams of horses when they built the Presbyterian church, which took over the lot where our house had been.

By the time my father bought it, it was a fixer-upper. It was, of course, on the wrong side of Main Street, but it was likely the biggest, oldest house on the wrong side of Main Street. I don't know if my father understood the social divide when he bought the place; he could easily have been impressed with its size alone. If he did understand the location problem, he may have thought its status as a big, old house would make up for it. That was how he thought, always looking for an angle, a way to do things on the cheap. He'd buy an enormous fixer-upper on the wrong side of Main Street and rise in society using sweat equity.

Mr. Evans hadn't yet made partner in New York, so he was living in a cheap split-level on what they paid associates, but he and my father had the same aspirations. His son, Webster, and I were the same age, and it was determined during the daily planning sessions on the train that he and I would join the same Boy Scout troop, Troop 25, which met in the Congregational parish hall partway up the hill. The Evanses were Congregationalists, but I think the social location of the church was more important to both Mr. Evans and my father. It was certainly farther away for both of us than Troop 5, which met in the Presbyterian church, right behind our house.

My father and Mr. Evans promptly joined the Troop Committee. This was the group of fathers who made what I suppose could be called policy for the troop. Since all Boy Scout troops did pretty much the same things, hiking, camping, merit badges, first aid, and general woodsy business, it's hard for me to imagine how much policy they actually had to discuss. Most likely they were all trying to sell each other insurance or use the contacts to land new clients for their law firms or ad agencies.

Their biggest problem was finding a Scoutmaster. There had been a big search not long before Webster and I joined the troop. The man they found, a Mr. Thrakelson, needed some persuading, and after they convinced him to take on the job, they discovered they couldn't get him a Scoutmaster's uniform that was big enough. Mr. Thrakelson was quite portly. He had thick glasses and a bad case of acne. I think the fathers on the Troop Committee may have had to pool together and have Mr. Thrakelson's uniform custom made.

Looking back, I've never been able to figure out why the fathers settled on Mr. Thrakelson in the first place. He didn't have a son of scouting age, which would be a big reason anyone would become a Scoutmaster. In fact, Mr. Thrakelson had no children, and he wasn't even married, which was apparently a source of contention on the Troop Committee, as, based on what my father told me many years later, some members thought Mr. Thrakelson was gay.

Webster and I were outsiders. We both came from the wrong side of Main Street. Nobody else in Troop 25 ever said as much, but whenever possible, we were excluded from anything we could be edged out of. Once all of the scouts were playing some game -- I can't remember what it was -- but the upshot was that everyone wound up in a big pile of bodies. I was somewhere close to the bottom, and all of a sudden someone punched me in the kidney, hard. It hurt, badly, a lot more than hitting my head or falling down. I could tell what direction it came from, and when I looked up, I saw who'd done it. It was one of the Firbank brothers, either Bob or Dick, I can't remember which. He had a smirk on his face. The game was over, there was no way I could get back at him in a new pile.

One day after school I was walking along Main Street, on my side, the north side, heading downtown on some errand. All of a sudden I felt a thump on my shoulder, hard. It was a rock. I turned around, and it was the same Firbank kid, Bob or Dick, walking in a hurry in the other direction on the other side of the street as if nothing had happened. He took a look over his shoulder; he was smirking. He hesitated in a shadowy way to be sure I knew who'd done it. He'd hit me from a good 150 feet away, though I didn't know how many tries he'd made. And no doubt he was aiming at my head, not my shoulder. He'd figured things well: the traffic on Main Street was heavy, and there was no way I could cross the street quickly and get to him. He had a good running start on me in the opposite direction anyhow.

The Firbanks weren't up there with the Throops or the Holoheds or the Stanforths, but they thought they were, and they lived on the right side of Main Street, which was what was important. Actually, the children of the Throops, Holoheds, and Stanforths all went to private school and didn't bother with the scouts, any more than their parents bothered to be seen in church -- their names were on the windows, after all. But the Firbanks' kids certainly knew how to rig a game.

I think I got up to Star Scout at Troop 25, but all of a sudden the troop was disbanded. I didn't learn why until years later in the same talk with my father, when he told me one of the committee members who'd been convinced Mr. Thrakelson was gay had decided one day to follow the man. The result of his amateur detective work was apparently evidence that convinced the rest of the Troop Committee that Mr. Thrakelson was, in fact, gay, and he was discharged as Scoutmaster. Rather than go to the trouble of recruiting a new Scoutmaster, the committee voted to disband the troop and send those of us who were inclined to continue with scouting down to Troop 5 in the Presbyterian church. I never understood why my father and Mr. Evans had been so set on Troop 25 in the first place.

Nor could I understand why the committee voted to disband after seeing whatever proofs they had of Mr. Thrakelson's gayness. Looking back, I think half the Scoutmasters in the county were gay -- certainly many were single, childless, and working in occupations like librarian or musician or teacher. I knew some of them, certainly at an age when I didn't fully understand what gay meant, but over several long camping trips, including a two-week trip to New Mexico with them, I never had a problem, or heard of one. That was different from "Uncle" Ted, one of my father's friends, who was always putting his hand on my knee.

But assuming the committee was that fastidious, I still can't understand why one of the committee members, a troop father, couldn't have taken over the job, especially if some were taking the time after hours to follow the Scoutmaster they had around. But I suppose the whole point was that, if you were on the Troop Committee, you were too important to be the Scoutmaster.

My friend Webster Evans dropped out of scouting at that point. I think Mr. Evans, consulting with the school guidance counselors, had determined that whatever rank Webster achieved in the scouts, it wasn't going to help him in his college admissions effort, something that was, in their view, likely to be a touch and go thing under any circumstances. For that matter, Mr. Evans's career was probably doing well enough that he didn't need a Troop Committee to help it along. My parents, on the other hand, saw that I did have academic promise, and I could probably make Eagle Scout as well, so they packed me over to Troop 5. And my father wasn't doing that well in his career, so he still needed a Troop Committee.

The Troop Committee -- I

Canterbury, New Jersey, is located, socially as well as geographically, on the gradual northward-facing slope of a hill. Main Street runs east-west almost at its base, and the railroad that takes commuters back and forth to New York runs parallel to it, a block or so away. The railroad came through just before the Civil War, and that event marked the change in the town’s name from Jones Bog, which represented the source of the hematite that had gone to make cannon balls for the Revolution. After the railroad, the dry land farther up the hill became more valuable as residential real estate, and the robber barons saw the usefulness of a name like Canterbury, suggestive as it was of Episcopalianism and a fashionable preference for the English and the archaic. Thereafter, the town’s economic purpose drifted away from iron and cranberries and toward products far less tangible.

My father moved us there in the mid-1950s. By then, Main Street represented a dividing line between the old, respectable part of town and the postwar construction, which took place as the old cranberry and iron bog was drained. South of Main Street, up the hill, were rambling old houses, many of white clapboard with faux shutters at the windows, their insides with old-style sun porches and bookshelves built into the walls. North of Main Street were new split-levels and stucco boxes, inhabited by earnest and upwardly-mobile Swedes and Germans and Poles and Scotch-Irish, as opposed to the WASP and old Dutch families to the south, up the hill.

You could tell the names of the old families, because all the church windows in town had dedications to their members, with names in various combinations: “In Loving Memory of Louisa Throop Holohed”, or “In Honored Memory of Edward Stanforth Throop”, “In Cherished Memory of Elizabeth Holohed Stanforth”, and so on. By the mid-1950s, the Stanforths, Holoheds, and Throops, still very much in town, had stopped attending the churches, so all you saw were the names on the windows. In fact, they still intermarried. In 1962, just before my father moved us away, a plane crashed on takeoff from Idlewild Airport in New York, killing about 100 people, among them a contingent of Stanforths, Holoheds, and Throops. Canterbury was devastated; several of its leading citizens had been taken at once.

But the families regrouped. A Mrs. Holohed, widowed by the crash, promptly married a Mr. Throop, who’d lost his wife. The wedding happened in the Presbyterian church, in one of the old families’ rare appearances there, though the names of their forebears were on the windows. I saw it, because I was an usher. The former Mrs. Holohead, now Mrs. Throop, had the most spectacular set of knockers I’ve ever seen. After we moved away, my mother kept up with the Throops, apparently because I’d made it into Dartmouth and had become somehow respectable, even though we lived on the wrong side of Main Street. It probably didn’t hurt that we’d moved.

That marriage didn’t last long, notwithstanding Mrs. Throop’s knockers. The spouses both brought children to the new union, and Mrs. Throop somehow engineered the room assignments in the merged household so that her children had rooms of their own, but her new husband’s kids had to double up. Mrs. Throop, after the divorce, complained to my mother that “some people” had been opposed to the marriage from the start and didn’t want it to work. “Some people” referred to the husband’s kids.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- XI

Now I come to one of my great favorites, Henry James's novella "The Lesson of the Master". In this story, Paul Overt, a young writer on the verge of great things in his career, is visiting an English country house where he hopes to meet for the first time Henry St. George, apparently the greatest writer of his day, though his output has been less satisfactory for the past ten years or so. Overt has never even seen St. George, and he strains for a first glimpse of him as St. George's party comes back from church. He's already gained the acquaintance of Mrs. St. George, who makes the offhand remark that she once made St. George burn a "bad book". Overt muses on his first glimpse of St. George's facial features:

His superficial sense was that their owner might have passed for a lucky stockbroker - a gentleman driving eastward every morning from a sanitary suburb in a smart dog-cart. That carried out the impression already derived from his wife. . . . Her eyes rested but on her husband, and with unmistakeable serenity. That was the way she wanted him to be - she liked his conventional uniform. Overt longed to hear more about the book she had induced him to destroy.

Overt briefly meets and chats with St. George, who promises a more extensive talk later, but he almost despairs of missing him when St. George doesn't appear in the smoking room after dinner. Finally, however, the promising young writer gets to talk more seriously with the reigning master. St. George notes to Overt how good his writing is, and how Overt must keep working to make it better:

"But you MUST be better - you really must keep it up. I haven't of course. It's very difficult - that's the devil of the whole thing, keeping it up. But I see you'll be able to. It will be a great disgrace if you don't."

"It's very interesting to hear you speak of yourself; but I don't know what you mean by your allusions to your having fallen off," Paul Overt observed with pardonable hypocrisy. He liked his companion so much now that the fact of any decline of talent or of care had ceased for the moment to be vivid to him.

"Don't say that - don't say that," St. George returned gravely, his head resting on the top of the sofa-back and his eyes on the ceiling. "You know perfectly what I mean. I haven't read twenty pages of your book without seeing that you can't help it."

"You make me very miserable," Paul ecstatically breathed.

"I'm glad of that, for it may serve as a kind of warning. Shocking enough it must be, especially to a young fresh mind, full of faith - the spectacle of a man meant for better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel - cruel to himself - and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart - for it IS a lesson. Let that good come of it at least that you shudder with your pitiful impression, and that this may help to keep you straight in the future. Don't become in your old age what I have in mine - the depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods!"

"What do you mean by your old age?" the young man asked.

"It has made me old. But I like your youth."

Paul answered nothing - they sat for a minute in silence. They heard the others going on about the governmental majority. Then "What do you mean by false gods?" he enquired. His companion had no difficulty whatever in saying, "The idols of the market; money and luxury and 'the world;' placing one's children and dressing one's wife; everything that drives one to the short and easy way. Ah the vile things they make one do!"

"But surely one's right to want to place one's children."

"One has no business to have any children," St. George placidly declared. "I mean of course if one wants to do anything good."

"But aren't they an inspiration - an incentive?"

"An incentive to damnation, artistically speaking."

"You touch on very deep things - things I should like to discuss with you," Paul said.

Several weeks later, Overt and St. George take up the conversation again. St. George observes,

"Well, all I say is that one's children interfere with perfection. One's wife interferes. Marriage interferes."

"You think then the artist shouldn't marry?"

"He does so at his peril - he does so at his cost."

"Not even when his wife's in sympathy with his work?"

"She never is - she can't be! Women haven't a conception of such things."

"Surely they on occasion work themselves," Paul objected.

"Yes, very badly indeed. Oh of course, often, they think they understand, they think they sympathise. Then it is they're most dangerous. Their idea is that you shall do a great lot and get a great lot of money. Their great nobleness and virtue, their xemplary conscientiousness as British females, is in keeping you up to that."

St. George urges Overt

"Try to do some really good work."

"Oh I want to, heaven knows!"

"Well, you can't do it without sacrifices - don't believe that for a moment," the Master said. "I've made none. I've had everything. In other words I've missed everything."

"You've had the full rich masculine human general life, with all the responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys - all the domestic and social initiations and complications. They must be immensely suggestive, immensely amusing," Paul anxiously submitted.

. . .

"We've got everything handsome, even a carriage - we're perfect Philistines and prosperous hospitable eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don't try to stultify yourself and pretend you don't know what we HAVEN'T got. It's bigger than all the rest. Between artists - come!" the Master wound up. "You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!"

The upshot of further discussion between St. George and Overt is that Overt leaves England, eventually to spend two years in Switzerland polishing his next novel, which he believes is something great. In the first part of the story, Overt met Miriam Fancourt, already an acquaintance of St. George, who, due to her intelligence, sympathy, and strong understanding of literature, is likely the best wife a male writer could ever hope for. It briefly appeared that Overt and Fancourt might make a match, but in the two years Overt was away, St. George's own wife has died, and as Overt returns to London with his manuscript, he finds St. George is to marry Miriam Fancourt himself. Overt senses some kind of a strange trick. That is his question for St. George when he sees him:

Poor Overt looked hard at him. "Are you marrying Miss Fancourt to save me?"

"Not absolutely, but it adds to the pleasure. I shall be the making of you," St. George smiled. "I was greatly struck, after our talk, with the brave devoted way you quitted the country, and still more perhaps with your force of character in remaining abroad. You're very strong - you're wonderfully strong."

Paul tried to sound his shining eyes; the strange thing was that he seemed sincere - not a mocking fiend. He turned away, and as he did so heard the Master say something about his giving them all the proof, being the joy of his old age. He faced him again, taking another look. "Do you mean to say you've stopped writing?"

"My dear fellow, of course I have. It's too late. Didn't I tell you?"

Overt is, of course, devastated that any chance he might have had of marrying Miriam Fancourt is gone, and he still suspects a trick, but the story concludes:

[H]e had been saying to himself that he should have been "sold" indeed, diabolically sold, if now, on his new foundation, at the end of a year, St. George were to put forth something of his prime quality - something of the type of "Shadowmere" and finer than his finest. Greatly as he admired his talent Paul literally hoped such an incident wouldn't occur; it seemed to him just then that he shouldn't be able to bear it. His late adviser's words were still in his ears - "You're very strong, wonderfully strong." Was he really? Certainly he would have to be, and it might a little serve for revenge. IS he? the reader may ask in turn, if his interest has followed the perplexed young man so far. The best answer to that perhaps is that he's doing his best, but that it's too soon to say. When the new book came out in the autumn Mr. and Mrs. St. George found it really magnificent. The former still has published nothing but Paul doesn't even yet feel safe. I may say for him, however, that if this event were to occur he would really be the very first to appreciate it: which is perhaps a proof that the Master was essentially right and that Nature had dedicated him to intellectual, not to personal passion.

To be concluded.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- X

The Good Soldier (1927) actually has two destructive women, an American bitch-goddess and an old-world lady of the manor, for whom the American is no match. It takes place over the dozen or so years just before World War I, in the same imaginative universe as most of Henry James's novels. John Dowell, the narrator, a wealthy Philadelphian, marries, on stubborn impulse, Florence Hurlbird ("of the Stamford, Connecticut Hurlbirds"). Florence had previously accompanied her uncle and his amanuensis, Jimmy, on an around-the-world tour, but complications ensued with Jimmy, leading to an abrupt return home and a deal with Jimmy that kept him in Europe in return for a remittance from the uncle.

The Hurlbirds determine that this episode and what it reveals about Florence make it a good idea to prevent her from marrying anyone, but Dowell is both stubborn and obtuse, and ignoring the family's warnings, he elopes with Florence. Florence's object is to return to Europe, where she can resume her liaison with Jimmy, and that's where Dowell takes her on their honeymoon. Florence feigns a heart condition, and during a convenient storm on the first night of the honeymoon voyage claims to have a heart attack, with the result that Dowell is warned by her doctors to avoid all "manifestations of affection". This leaves her free to carry on with Jimmy, who moves in with the couple in Paris, Dowell oblivious to everything.

Several years later, during the Dowells' annual visit to a German heart spa, they meet the Ashburnhams, an English couple that Dowell determines are the "right sort of people", and they begin a nine-year friendship which is actually a menage that suits everyone but Dowell himself -- but he's completely unaware of what's going on, and since he believes both they and the Ashburnhams are "the right sort of people", he's perfectly happy.

Edward Ashburnham has married Leonora in an arranged match; she is from an impoverished Irish family that has manipulated Edward's parents into the deal. Edward, however, has a roving eye. Early in their marriage, he causes a scandal by trying to kiss a servant girl in a railway compartment, and as his relationship with Leonora deteriorates, he has a series of liaisons with other women. Leonora, a Catholic, refuses to countanance divorce, and in any case, the marriage represents financial security to her. She's able to use Edward's remorse at his various wanderings to gain control of his estate's business, and she also becomes adept at keeping his amorous affairs at a manageable level where he can pursue them short of outright scandal, but appearances can be maintained.

In fact, Leonora has some hope that Edward will get tired of adultery and return to her, until they meet John and Florence Dowell at the German heart spa, where Leonora has followed Edward in pursuit of his latest amour. Florence, a true American bitch-goddess character, immediately transfixes Edward, who quickly loses interest in the woman he'd originally followed to Germany. John Dowell is, and continues to be, completely ignorant of what's happening.

Leonora is near despair that Edward has fallen prey to this new and irresistibly attractive woman, but she ties up loose ends by making sure Edward's former passion, Maisie Maidan, hears of the new one and her reduced status in a loud hallway conversation. Unlike either Florence or Edward, who are at the spa because they're feigning heart conditions, Maisie does have a bad heart, and she promptly dies of a heart attack at the news.

Leonora then, over a nine-year period, serves as a stage-manager, beard, and enabler for the affair between Edward and Florence, which is conducted during the couples' mutual stays at the heart spa, as well as during Edward's visits to the Dowells in Paris. Dowell throughout this period remains convinced that Florence must avoid all sex due to her heart condition, and he's still delighted with their friendship with the Ashburnhams. Leonora conceals not only the fact of the affair, but her abiding hatred and contempt for Florence.

Meanwhile, however, Leonora has brought into the Ashburnham household a protege from her convent school, victim of a broken home, whom Leonora wants to foster. Over the years, the young girl ripens, and it's plain that Leonora's intent is to use her to bring Edward's amatory interests into a closer and more controllable realm. Edward and the girl begin to fall in love. The girl, now about 22, visits the Ashburnhams and the Dowells at the heart spa, where Leonora skilfully manipulates Florence one evening into eavesdropping on a meeting between Edward and the girl. Florence immediately realizes Edward is losing interest in her, but returning to the hotel, she also discovers that John, her husband, is talking with a new acquaintance. The acquaintance, seeing Florence after many years and not realizing John is her husband, blurts out the details of her scandalous affair with Jimmy, which had happened before John married her.

Florence has kept a vial of cyanide as insurance against this possibility throughout her marriage, and she runs upstairs and takes it, though not before writing a note to her family back in Connecticut explaining everything. Leonora, not surprisingly the first to find Florence's body, promptly stamps and mails the envelope with the note. Nevertheless, she, Edward, and the spa authorities conceal from John Dowell that Florence has committed suicide.

Leonora's plan is now apparently to have the young girl she's fostering take Florence's place with Edward, and to have the girl marry the now-widowed John Dowell to serve as beard. This, in Leonora's mind, will continue to allow appearances to be maintained, and continue to give her the benefit of Edward's money. Both Edward and Leonora summon Dowell back from the US, where he's wrapping up Florence's estate, with this in mind. Edward, however, has gradually become remorseful over his infidelities, and he finally refuses to participate in Leonora's scheme with the girl, insisting that she be sent to India to live with her father, in order to avoid starting a new affair with her. However, a hopeless romantic, he's in love with the girl and can't live without her.

Soon after the girl is sent away to India, Edward commits suicide. The girl, hearing of Edward's suicide, goes mad. Dowell is sent to India with her old nurse to retrieve her. He becomes her guardian and buys Edward's estate from Leonora, who marries another local squire, so normal, as Dowell puts it, that he can buy most of his clothes ready-made. With the new marriage and the proceeds of Edward's estate, she is, of course, a wealthy woman, having reached that position by prompting two suicides, a death by heart attack, and a descent into madness.

To be continued.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- IX

Thoughts about bitch-goddesses and the sex drive now bring me to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. I'm just starting to re-read it (third time), but I'm already picking up a certain scent:

For do you understand my whole attentions, my whole endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics like the finds at Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater. I had to keep her at it, you understand, or she might die. For I was solemnly informed that if she became excited over anything or if her emotions were really stirred her little heart might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to watch every word that any person uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the English call "things" -- off love, poverty, crime, religion and the rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God, are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a reemasonry between all of them from end to end of the earth? That is what makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal

Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her towards culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't got to laugh, and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of love. Do you know the story? Las Tours of the Four Castles had for chatelaine Blanche Somebody-or-other who was called as a term of commendation, La Louve--the She-Wolf. And Peire Vidal the Troubadour paid his court to La Louve. And she wouldn't have anything to do with him. So, out of compliment to her--the things people do when they're in love!--he dressed himself up in wolfskins and went up into the Black Mountains. And the shepherds of the Montagne Noire and their dogs mistook him for a wolf and he was torn with the fangs and beaten with clubs. So they carried him back to Las Tours and La Louve wasn't at all impressed. They polished him up and her husband remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal was, you see, a great poet and it was not proper to treat a great poet with indifference.

So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or somewhere and the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet though La Louve wouldn't. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat with four companions to redeem the Holy Sepulchre. And they struck on a rock somewhere, and, at great expense, the husband had to fit out an expedition to fetch him back. And Peire Vidal fell all over the Lady's bed while the husband, who was a most ferocious warrior, remonstrated some more about the courtesy
that is due to great poets. But I suppose La Louve was the more ferocious of the two. Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn't that a story?

Don't you feel something coming on here? For a clue, it's worth pointing out that Leslie Fiedler traces the bitch-goddess to the courtly love tradition.

More anon.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- VIII

Is Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four a bitch-goddess? I raised the question of bitch-goddesses in my discussion of Ginny Good a couple of weeks ago. Leslie Fiedler identified the bitch-goddess as a literary type in Love and Death in the American Novel. A bitch-goddess is like Brett Ashley in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, irresistible to men, liberated, promiscuous, and destructive. Fiedler feels, I think correctly, that she's a representation of what he calls the bourgeois sentimental love religion.

Julia is promiscuous; she explains to Winston that she's had many men, and Winston's reaction is that for him, the more she's had, the bigger the turn-on. Well, OK, in 1949 maybe you didn't need to get tested as much. Their meeting places and protocols come, the narrator tells us, from Julia's extensive experience. Actually, there's no specific indication in the novel that Julia has given Winston any sort of exclusive, and when she shows up at the secret upstairs room with Inner Party coffee and chocolate, I'm inevitably curious as to how she's come by it.

Julia is attractive, in whatever way Outer Party ladies wearing overalls and anti-sex league sashes can be attractive. She's liberated, since as I discussed yesterday, she works in a job that in 1949 would be unusual for a woman, hardware technician on the novel writing machines. (This, I can't help wondering, may be Orwell's reaction to the "Rosie the Riveter" type -- in the US, it doesn't appear to have been as disturbing as Orwell may have felt it would be to UK readers.)

The bourgeois sentimental love religion is actually a key factor in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Party has the aim of eliminating sexual attraction. (An odd omission, of course, is gay and lesbian sexual attraction; UK writers like C.S.Lewis felt able to discuss this at the time, but it doesn't figure into Orwell's psychological universe.) Winston's only serious resistance to Party orthodoxy, other than his original crime of keeping a diary, is to have an affair with Julia, which quickly becomes pretty darn sentimental, to the point of seeming sappy to contemporary tastes. It's clear that somewhat goopy-traditional sentimentality is the only positive quality in the novel that opposes rigid, Party-bourgeois orthodoxy. (I see a similarity, and a similar weakness, in E.M.Forster here.)

Julia is destructive. She's perhaps not as callously and consciously destructive as the classic American bitch-goddesses, but certainly she initiates the relationship with Winston Smith by sending him a mash note -- and while the narrator doesn't say so, you've got to wonder how much practice she's had in doing this. Smith, who's hated the sight of Julia before she palms him the note, suddenly changes his mind and jumps into the illicit relationship, which, of course, is the specific act that destroys him, notwithstanding the diary.

I think Julia is a Leslie Fiedler bitch-goddess. This, of course, hurts Fiedler's theory that the bitch-goddess figure is specific to American literature and a symptom of American sexual or psychological dysfunction.

More tomorrow.

Food Fight at New Partisan

I've got an interesting group blog called New Partisan on my blogroll. It means to cover the same territory as the old Partisan Review, which I suppose means, at various times, anticommunist liberalism or neoconservatism. Its politics are predictable, and I don't read them, but its literary commentary is at least not dull.

One thing I've learned on this blog is to avoid criticism of other blogs, unless I want a major spike in my traffic and much angry trolling in my comment section. It appears that New Partisan is belatedly learning this lesson as well: the latest somewhat bemused response from its editor is here. You'll need to go to the main page and scroll down to see the earlier developments. For those who'd like a summary, one of the bloggers, Sam Munson, attacked a self-described literary blog for giving out dull and unperceptive material that Munson thought was unworthy to be called "criticism".

I would tend to agree with Munson's assessment of nearly all literary blogs. I have a link to a list of literary blogs on my blogroll, largely so visitors here can get a sense of my focus, but nothing draws me to read any of them more than occasionally, and I'd say that, on the whole, they're dull, gossipy, and decidedly unliterary.

But here's the problem. If I read Joe Blow's lit blog and post that Joe's saying nothing new, he's boring me, he's self-absorbed, he's wasting my time, and so forth, I will irritate Joe's claque, and I will get hundreds of visits from lookie-loos who've read Joe's angry response on his site and come over to browbeat me in the normal ways trolls do, to my bemusement and the bemusement of my regular visitors. You can see New Partisan's editor's very similar bemusement in the post linked above.

This is a waste of my time and energy. I've pretty much decided it's not worth criticizing other blogs on this site -- and actually, I think this was at one point part of blog etiquette. We can get into a civilized debate on any number of things, but it's probably counterproductive just to say a blog doesn't fit my view of what literature should be like. And even if I think I can defend my position, I'll be nibbled to death by trolling ducks in the comments, just as New Partisan has been.

What's disappointing is that New Partisan doesn't seem to be paying the same attention to blogs like mine that, in my view, are in fact doing new and interesting things with blogging and literary forms. It's lonely work, guys, when it doesn't have to be that way. My blog probably isn't boring. My visitors, I suspect, are intelligent and courteous. If you visit and read my blog, I'll respond intelligently to criticism. It likely would be a much better use of all our time, guys.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- VII

Nineteen Eighty-Four comes off as a puzzling book. Winston Smith starts out as a sympathetic character, if weak-willed and obtuse. But once we reach the scene where, just before his mother's disappearance, he bullies his dying sister out of her chocolate ration, he's losing credibility fast. At that point, much of his motivation seems simple dissatisfaction at his ration level. Maybe if he can get up to O'Brien's pay grade, with real coffee and good chocolate, he might give up on the diary altogether.

The affair with Julia fits here, too: Smith is carried away by nostalgia for soft mattresses and double beds, and now he's got a shack job who'll dress up to suit his fantasies. And Julia, when you look closely, isn't much more than that. She falls asleep, habitually, when Winston tries to talk to her about politics. I'm almost wondering if Orwell has drawn this to show what he thinks is feminine nature. O'Brien passes Goldstein's book to Winston, who grandly reads it aloud to Julia in someone's dated vision of domestic bliss, the authoritarian male reading the truth to the grateful female, except the grateful female falls asleep. Unless someone can show a better overall scheme here, I'm inclined to say Nineteen Eighty-Four is aging very, very badly.

Goldstein's book, for that matter, is another puzzle. Its tone is windy and pedantic, as you might expect from a quasi-socialist political tract. But Orwell has included so much of it -- two whole chapters -- in the novel that he must have intended it as a serious commentary of some sort on the world as he saw it. That world, as best I can determine from Goldstein's somewhat muddled expression, consists of three equal and countervailing power blocs who are constantly at war with each other, primarily to absorb surplus production, which, if unabsorbed, would otherwise result in another Great Depression.

Political arrangements within the power blocs appear to be essentially uniform, with most of the world population, the proles, exploited but ignored, and the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in an uneasy minority alliance that has to be enforced via viewscreens and thought police. This might have worked as a superficial view of world politics immediately after Yalta. But the actual course of world events up to the actual year 1984 involved, after some hesitancy and failure of Western nerve, the not-gradual triumph of bourgeois capitalist democracy, in fact if not in name in "Eastasia", and within a decade in both fact and name in "Eurasia".

The main tasks facing the three former blocs half a century after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published are to bring to heel the various client states that became renegade following the collapse of the post-Yalta system, as well as to solve the problem of the humanitarian catastrophes that regularly erupt in the African post-colonial vacuum. Assuming continued Western nerve, these can be accomplished. Nothing in Orwell's world view remotely predicts these developments.

Orwell's view in Nineteen Eighty-Four is nostalgic and pessimistic. Things can only get worse. Things used to be better. Julia is something of an exemplary woman. As Goldstein's book points our, supported by Smith's ruminations, the Party seeks to abolish sexual attraction in order to sublimate the drive into political hysteria. Party women don't use makeup, and while Orwell doesn't describe the issues in detail, it appears that abolishing sexual attractiveness leads to greater equality between the sexes in the INGSOC world -- Julia is, after all, a hardware tech on the novel-writing machines, a kind of women's work that wouldn't have been familiar to Orwell (though is completely unremarkable to us now). There's also, of course, a deep-seated fear of technology in Orwell -- a liberated woman working as a technician is, I suspect, part of the nightmare he's trying to convince us is artistically true.

More tomorrow.

Misogyny and Bourgeois Discontents -- VI

Now let's look at exactly why Mr. Stringler saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as a dirty book. It had, of course, what people 50 years ago thought were dirty parts, though I suspect that in the contemporary context, nobody's corporate net-watchdog will bounce an attempt to read the online version [UPDATE: My wife reports she was able to read this passage just fine from her company's network, which has very stringent filters]. For general edification, I reproduce a typical dirty part here:

He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her face. . . . As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.

‘Scent too!’ he said.

‘Yes, dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to do next? I'm going to get hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody trousers. I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.’

They flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It was the first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence. Until now he had been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle. There were no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size and springiness of the bed astonished both of them.

This, like other aspects of Nineteen Eighty-Four, hasn't aged well, though by the time (in college) I got my hands on a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover, I was just as disappointed. I can certainly see how someone who named his daughter Prudence would object to passages like these, but I think they also reflect a deeper problem with the novel, and with how readers have normally approached it.

The first part of the book covers Winston Smith's political awakening. He decides to start a diary, and the mere intention, the mere glimmer that fathers the intention, is thoughtcrime, and he knows it. As he makes his first entry, he compulsively writes DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, over and over. We might, from this beginning, expect some type of political action to take place.

Instead, Smith is deflected in his intention, however inchoate it may be. He gets a mash note from Julia, and all of a sudden his response to his political awakening is to have an affair. Much of the action in the book then describes the couple's attempts to meet furtively, and when you think about it, the constraints in Oceanian INGSOC society aren't much different from what they are in contemporary bourgeois-capitalist-democratic society: if you're married, if your friends and co-workers will disapprove, if it's against company policy, you're going to have to sneak around if you want to have an affair.

So the action, and the attitude of Winston and Julia to their circumstances, isn't much different from any other bourgeois couple having some hanky-pank on the side. My wife doesn't understand me. I hate my boss. Society is too judgmental. Our motives are pure. Boy, this wine you bought on the way over to the motel is pretty darn good. Wow! Did you get that at Victoria's Secret?

The two of them visit the supposed Inner Party renegade O'Brien in an odd attempt, as far as I can see, to have him bless their relationship. O'Brien simply thinks they're fools to come to his place together. He quizzes them perfunctorily on their willingness to endure hardship, commit acts of sabotage, or even kill people if necessary, to accomplish the end of deposing Big Brother. These acts, it seems to me, would be reasonable under the circumstances, but that's the only place in the novel where any such thing is mooted. Winston Smith's political awakening is oddly somnambulistic.

If I were Mr. Stringler, I might have modified my complaint to the school board to say it's a dirty book to go a little farther and say it's a strange dirty book, but of course that's probably one reason his daughter Prudence never took my crush on her very seriously.

More tomorrow.