Crossing over: Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Hitchens.

Recently, over breakfast, my girlfriend and I chatted about some of the TV programs that she, having come to consciousness only in the mid-’90s, never had a chance to experience. She’s seen enough Cheers reruns to get the gist, but Family Ties, Night Court, and Newhart, among others, she knows only by reputation.

I told her how, in the final scene of the final episode of Newhart, it was revealed that the whole series had been dreamed by Bob Newhart’s character from his earlier The Bob Newhart Show. This reminded me of St. Elsewhere, and I summarized for her the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis: In outline, since all the events of St. Elsewhere were revealed in that show’s final episode to be the daydreams of a snowglobe-clutching autistic child named Tommy Westphall, and since characters from St. Elsewhere crossed over to a number of other TV shows, including Mash, Cheers, and Homicide: Life on the Street, implying that those shows took place in the same fictional reality, and since characters from those overcrossing shows in turn crossed over to a whole bunch of other shows, it can be argued that the events of all these other shows were also daydreamed by Tommy Westphall. The Tommy Westphall Universe turns out to encompass everything from Mission: Impossible to Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper.

Somehow this got me thinking of the connections among some of the books I’ve been reading lately. For instance, Christopher Hitchens in his memoir Hitch-22 crosses over with his old friend Martin Amis in his memoir Experience, providing complementary versions of the evening when Hitchens was introduced to Amis’s “literary father” Saul Bellow. [1] As Hitch tells it:

Martin offers a slightly oblique and esoteric account of a trip on which he took me in 1989, to visit Saul Bellow in Vermont. On our buddy-movie drive up there from Cape Cod – he’s almost word-perfect about this bit – he made it clear that I wasn’t to drag the conversation toward anything political, let alone left-wing, let alone anything to do with Israel. (“No sinister balls,” which was our colloquialism for a certain kind of too-easy leftism.) I knew I was being greatly honored by the invitation, not just because it was a huge distinction to meet Bellow but because, second only to an introduction to his father, it was the highest such gift that Martin could bestow. I needed no telling that I should seize the opportunity to do more listening than talking.

And yet it’s true, as he reports, that by the end of dinner nobody could meet anyone else’s eye and his own foot had become lamed and tired by its under-the-table collisions with my shins.

We learn that Bellow had provoked Hitchens by calumniating his friend, the erudite Palestinian radical and literary critic Edward Said (who was later to fall out with Hitchens as they drifted to ever more irreconcilable positions on the morality of Western intervention in the Arab world, and violent Arab reactions thereto). Hitchens’s defense of his friend had inevitably veered into a lengthy diatribe – “a blue streak of sinister balls”, Amis says – about the misdeeds of Bellow’s beloved Israel. Afterward, Hitchens regretted embarrassing his friend, but:

[Amis] suffered more agony than he needed to, because Bellow as an old former Trotskyist and Chicago streetfighter was used to much warmer work and hardly took offense at all. He later sent me a warm letter about my introduction to a new edition of Augie March.

Bellow makes several other appearances, besides that awkward dinner party, in Amis’s memoir. We hear for instance how Bellow nearly died of a rare neurological infection he picked up dining on a red snapper on a visit to the Caribbean, a story that appears in slightly fictionalized form in Bellow’s Ravelstein. That novel is about the death of Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom, the professor, philosopher, and author of The Closing of the American Mind. As Amis says,

I know Bellow’s novel far, far better than I ever knew Bellow’s friend. Yet Ravelstein comes close to persuading me otherwise. This book is numinous. It constitutes an act of resuscitation, and in its pages Bloom lives.

In the novel, Bloom-as-Ravelstein importunes the narrator, the Bellow stand-in, to write about him after his death.

“I’m laying this on you as an obligation. Do it in your after-supper-reminiscence manner, when you’ve had a few glasses of wine and you’re laid back and making remarks. I love listening when you are freewheeling about Edmund Wilson or John Berryman or Whittaker Chambers when you were hired at Time in the morning and fired by him before lunch.”

We learn in Hitch-22 that Hitchens, in real life, heard the Whittaker Chambers story from Bellow, on the evening of the awkwardness over Edward Said:

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he’d replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right.

Speaking of the “after-supper-reminiscence manner”: both Ravelstein and his model Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind refer to Plato’s Symposium, that famous gathering of Athenian intellects where Socrates, Alcibiades, and Aristophanes and their friends got drunk and declaimed on the nature of love. Taking a poke at modern critical theory, Bloom writes (paraphrasing Nietzche):

[A]fter the ministrations of modern scholarship the Symposium is so far away that it can no longer seduce us; its immediate charm has utterly vanished.

But for non-scholars, the Symposium will always be seductive because it shows us our heroes just as we want to imagine them – hanging out forever in a Valhalla of the intellect, joshing and quipping and making each other spray wine through their noses.

Which brings us to the Friday lunch. Hitch-22 devotes a few pages (and Experience a passing mention) to the boisterous weekly get-together that Hitchens and Amis shared through the 1970s and ’80s with Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Clive James, and illustrious others. Hitchens identifies James as the “chief whip” of the gatherings: “He needed an audience and damn well deserved one.” It’s James who gives us the vividest picture of the Friday lunch, in his memoir North Face of Soho, showing us how Amis could improvise a tall story, sustaining the massed laughter with “the economical stroke of the whip that did just enough to keep the top spinning”, while Hitchens’s specialty was the interjection of sarcastic asides:

[I]f someone was being straightforward, he could make them funny, and if someone was being funny, he could make them funnier.

The actual content of the proceedings, as repeated by James and Hitchens, isn’t quite the stuff of a modern Symposium­. Hitchens gives a few examples of the wordplay and concedes that there were “long interludes of puerility”; James credits, or blames, the illustrator Mark Boxer for “discouraging the anecdote as form – he wanted the flash of wit. … Nobody was allowed to take his time …” It sounds like a riot, in the sense that it must have been obnoxious and nerve-jangling, each man contending to make the biggest smash. [2]

Speaking of that lunch, which Hitchens says has “become the potential stuff of a new ‘Bloomsbury’ legend” – the legend would gain momentum more quickly if it had a catchier name than “the Friday lunch”, which is what Clive James also calls it in his memoir. James reports that when he kickstarted the gathering, he liked to refer to it mock-conspiratorially as the “Modish London Literary World”, a dig at the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis, who apparently believed such a conspiracy explained why his favoured authors kept getting bad reviews. Unfortunately the Modish brand never caught on. Before they all shuffle off to trade zingers with Aristophanes and Allan Bloom, can we agree on a name for this cohort of legendary British wits? (As with Bloomsbury, MacSpaunday, and the Algonquin Round Table, it’ll help future generations to keep them sorted.) In its heyday the group convened at the Bursa Kebab House; occasionally James calls it the Kebab House lunch. How about the Kebab House Group?

In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom mentions a student who fretted to him, after reading the Symposium, that “it was impossible to imagine that magic Athenian atmosphere reproduced” in his own place and time. Bloom disputes this: “such experiences are always accessible”; his student “had brains, friends, and a country happily free enough to let them gather and speak as they will”. Most of us will never enjoy after-dinner discussions quite as stirring as the Symposium, or as riotous as the Kebab House lunches. But as Bloom consolingly reflects,

This student did not have Socrates, but he had Plato’s book about him, which might even be better.

M.

1. Amis says of Bellow, “I am not his son, of course. What I am is his ideal reader. I am not my father [Kingsley]‘s ideal reader, however. His ideal reader, funnily enough, is Christopher Hitchens.”

James mentions in passing, in his essay collection Cultural Amnesia,

On the whole, writers find other writers hard to be enthusiastic about, even when the other writers are safely dead. It takes security in one’s talent on top of generosity of soul. … Martin Amis’s praise of Saul Bellow is especially valuable because the younger writer is continually faced, when reading the older one, with things he himself would like to have said.

2. Hitchens and James both note the absence of a restraining female presence at the Friday lunch: “It was a very competitive scene, though,” James writes, “and therefore very male.” This naturally brings to mind Hitchens’s famously shit-stirring Vanity Fair article on why women aren’t funny. His argument boils down to: because they don’t have to be.

M.

–

In previous entries I’ve discussed Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia and Martin Amis’s relationship with his father.

Paul Theroux and the Hanoi Christmas bombings.

In 1973, Paul Theroux chronicled his journey round Asia in The Great Railway Bazaar. In 2006, he retraced much of his route for a sequel, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

Changing political conditions had closed off certain routes that were formerly open – he was obliged to skip Iran and Afghanistan this time – and opened others once closed – he could now travel to Cambodia and what had been North Vietnam.

Theroux’s first visit to Vietnam closely followed the withdrawal of the last American troops in 1973. The armies of the South and North, and the North’s guerrilla proxies in the Viet Cong, pretended to observe the terms of the Paris Peace Accords, but the ceasefire was “a painful euphemism”. Theroux was able to travel as far north as Hué, where he gazed across the river at VC territory, its “scalped hills” defoliated by US chemicals. A month after his visit, the euphemistic ceasefire was abandoned and war officially resumed. Without American support, South Vietnam crumbled in April 1975.

Thirty-three years pass. Now Theroux is able to take the train all the way to Hanoi. He is surprised by the capital’s beauty:

But how was I to know? The noble city had always been represented to Americans as the enemy capital, a rat’s nest of villains, and belittled by our propaganda, better off bombed or wiped off the map.

(Did anyone really advocate “wiping it off the map”? True, the most hawkish of the hawks, General Curtis LeMay, famously said of the Communists, “they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age” – but that quote appears to have been invented by his ghostwriter.)

A couple pages later, recounting the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi, an “unambiguously genocidal act of pure wickedness”, Theroux reports that,

“Military targets” was the justification we were given at the time by Nixon and Kissinger [1], but this lie was transparent propaganda. In one instance, in an old neighborhood of Hanoi, every house on Kham Thien Street was destroyed, with a great loss of civilian life – nearly all women and children, because their husbands and fathers were away fighting.

(But…if the US government’s declared position was that Hanoi should be “wiped off the map”, why did its propagandists bother to pretend it had been targeting military installations?)

Many websites, including those maintained by the government of Vietnam, back up Theroux’s claim that Kham Thien Street and other civilian targets were targeted out of wickedness. Other sources more sympathetic to the US assert that the intended target was Hanoi’s main rail yard, about half a kilometre away, and that the bomber dropped its payload after being hit by enemy surface-to-air missiles.

But if it’s true that, as Theroux not-quite-accurately asserts (quoting J.M. Roberts), “a heavier tonnage of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than fell on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War”, mightn’t there be some truth to what one distinguished observer reported after visiting Hanoi in January 1973?

Telford Taylor, for one, refused to concede that bombing for the sake of terrorizing civilians was permissible but nonetheless concluded that the United States could have destroyed Hanoi in two or three nights if it had so desired. He also noted the proximity of the air base to the hospital at Bach Mai [also destroyed in the bombings] and observed that the damage to civilian areas within the city had obviously been an unintentional byproduct of attacks on legitimate military products.

[Quoted in William M. Hammond's Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968-1973.]

There’s some reason to think Telford Taylor was right. Pace J.M. Roberts, during the war the largest number of US bombs fell not on North Vietnam but on Viet Cong positions in the South. Take a look at these stats, from James P. Harrison’s essay “History’s Heaviest Bombing”, in The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives. The “tons” are tons of explosives dropped:

South Vietnam	4 million tons
Laos	1.5 million tons
North Vietnam	1 million tons
Cambodia	.5 million tons
All targets of Allied bombing, WWII	2.7 million tons

Harrison goes on to explain that despite the exponentially greater explosiveness of the Vietnam air campaigns, they killed relatively fewer people than WWII:

An example of the greater accuracy and attempts to avoid civilian casualties, however, might be shown by the contrast between the estimated … 593,000 Germans killed by 1.25 million tons of Allied bombs, and the 330,000 Japanese killed by some 147,000 tons of US bombs; with the perhaps 52,000 people killed by the 643,000 tons dropped by Rolling Thunder [1965-68] on North Vietnam.

To put it more clearly:

Japan WWII	2.2 deaths per ton
Germany WWII	0.47 deaths per ton
N. Vietnam 1965-68	0.08 deaths per ton [2]

Harrison supplies a figure of 20,000 tons for the 1972 Christmas Bombings of Hanoi. If 1,600 people were killed, as Theroux claims (based on Vietnamese statistics), the ratio is consistent with Rolling Thunder – 0.08 civilian deaths per ton.

How do modern air campaigns stack up? According to USA Today, a mere 18,858 tons were dropped on Iraq between 2003 and 2009. But the death ratio has gotten worse. This study in the journal PLOS Medicine compiles all civilian deaths from 2003-08 and categorizes them by cause of death. [3] I’ve combined the totals from the categories “air attacks without ground fire” and “air attacks with ground fire” for a total of 2,636 civilian deaths by air strike. [4] That gives us a very low-end ratio of 0.14 deaths per ton, which suggests US aerial bombing has become nearly 100% more lethal to bystanders than it was in the 1970s.

I don’t think anyone outside of the Chomskyan far left has accused the US and its allies of deliberately targeting civilians in their Iraqi air campaigns. Yet, somehow, in its “unambiguously genocidal act of pure wickedness” the Satanic team of Nixon and Kissinger failed to equal the lethality rate that our modern armed forces achieve through mere carelessness.

Or maybe they really were aiming for military targets.

***

That’s not to say the Christmas Bombings were okay, or the war was okay, only that it was more complicated than Theroux seems willing to admit. Which is funny, because his 33-years-younger-yet-oddly-wiser self offered a more balanced take (I quoted it in an earlier post):

Some [soldiers] watched the train, with their rifles at their shoulders, in those oversize uniforms – a metaphor of mismatching that never failed to remind me that these men – these boys – had been dressed and armed by much larger Americans. With the Americans gone, the war looked too big, an uncalled-for size, really, like those shirts whose cuffs reached to the soldiers’ knuckles and the helmets that fell over their eyes.
…
[T]he Vietnamese had been damaged and then abandoned, almost as if, dressed in our clothes, they had been mistaken for us and shot at; as if, just when they had come to believe that we were identified with them, we had bolted. It was not that simple, but it was nearer to describing that sad history than the urgent opinions of anguished Americans who, stropping Occam’s Razor, classified the war as a string of atrocities, a series of purely political errors, or a piece of interrupted heroism.

But Theroux seems to have come around to the opinion that the war was, after all, just “a string of atrocities” perpetrated by American villains. As cynical as he rightly is about 33-year-old American propaganda, he displays a perfect credulity in retailing the still-current propaganda of the Vietnamese regime. This would be fine, or at least consistent, if Theroux were in any way a credulous tourist. But he’s not. A couple chapters earlier, he dinged the Cambodian government for peddling its Killing Fields ruins as attractions for western tourists:

Even though I knew that this torture prison had been turned into a museum by a sanctimonious government that itself violated human rights (corruption, embezzlement, torture in police custody, land seizure, and extrajudicial killings) …

All fair. But for perspective, that year Human Rights Watch’s World Report had this to say about Cambodia:

Cambodia’s veneer of political pluralism wore even thinner in 2006.

Meanwhile Vietnam had no veneer of pluralism to wear away:

Despite having one of Asia’s highest growth rates, Vietnam’s respect for fundamental human rights continues to lag behind many other countries, and the one-party state remains intolerant of criticism.

But when Theroux meets a Vietnamese who spent time in a work camp after the fall of Saigon, who “allude[s], with exaggerated facial expressions, to the sinister ways of the current Vietnamese government”, he is treated as a mildly ridiculous character.

I don’t want to step on any American’s sense of guilt over Vietnam. It was of course a stupid, futile, insanely deathful war, and the US officials who ordered the napalming and Agent Orangeing of large swathes of the country (the cities got off pretty easy) deserve much of the blame. But it was also a civil war among native-born zealots who massacred and terrorized each other over ideology and religion. Even if the vast majority of Vietnamese were ultimately sympathetic to the Communists, Washington was understandably loth to abandon its allies in the South to execution, enslavement, and crackpot sociological experimentation. Theroux knows this, but Occam’s razor flies readily to his hand:

It was an astonishing paradox that, after we had failed to destroy their dream of a socialist paradise, divide their loyalties, and visit ruin upon them for our own profit, they had risen – in spite of all our efforts to demolish them – and become businessmen and entrepreneurs. Saigon was one big bazaar of ruthless capitalism, of frenzied moneymaking, of beating us at our own game.

But the paradox isn’t that Saigon rose up and “beat us at our own game” – how is rejoining the global economy beating us? Does Theroux think the 1972 Joint Chiefs of Staff were bombing the hell out of the Vietnamese to prevent their offspring from someday sewing our blue jeans? In 1972, Saigon was already well on its way to becoming a big bazaar. That’s what America was there to preserve.

The paradox is that Vietnam had to detour through another decade of war and a quarter century of economic backwardness to arrive, under its own steam, at the destination Saigon had already reached in the 1960s: political repression and economic liberty.

So much stupid, stupid waste.

***

Apart from all that, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is really good.

M.

1. Nixon in a press conference, June 29, 1972: “I do not intend to allow any orders to go out which would involve civilian casualties if they can be avoided. Military targets only will be allowed.” July 27, 1972: “When, as a result of what will often happen, a bomb is dropped, if it is an area of injury to civilians, it is not by intent, and there is a very great difference.”

2. Wikipedia provides different figures . It claims 864,000 tons of bombs were dropped during Rolling Thunder, resulting in 72,000 civilian casualties. The ratio would then be…0.08 deaths per ton.

3. The PLOS Medicine study is based on data from the website Iraq Body Count – which almost certainly undercounts deaths, since IBC relies on media reports to build its database.

4. I’m aware the date ranges for tonnage dropped in Iraq (2003-09) and casualties by airstrike (2003-08) don’t match up, but according to that USA Today article there were hardly any airstrikes in 2009 anyway, so it shouldn’t skew the results much.

Stanley and the Women, and why Martin Amis didn’t like it.

I read Kingsley Amis’s Stanley and the Women with curiosity. All I knew of it was what Martin Amis had said in his 2000 memoir Experience, that it was “a mean little novel in every sense, sour, spare, and viciously well-organized”, that with its “programmatic gynophobia” his father had effectively announced the “cancellation of his own artistic androgyny”.

Although Martin suggests these failings are evident from page one, for me it wasn’t until the end of the book that Kingsley’s agenda became apparent. True, the chief villain is a woman, a psychologist who lectures Stanley, whose schizophrenic son she’s treating, on the defects of his generation’s childrearing methods:

“Of course with changing social conditions the elitist role of education is passing too.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Nowadays there’s much more emphasis on the social function, training the kids to relate to each other and preparing them to take their places in the adult world.”

“At my school we got that thrown in, just by being there. We didn’t attend classes in it.”

“No, and we can see the results, can’t we?”

I thought about it. “Can we?” She probably meant sexism and censorship and things like that.

And true, other female characters are characterized as undependable, irrational, vindictive, and self-deluding. The men, meanwhile, even the minor characters, routinely take Stanley aside to share their unflattering take on gender relations. A police superintendent, after an encounter with the security chief of a Middle Eastern embassy:

“You know, Mr Duke, from a personal point of view, speaking just for myself you understand, the Major Fuads of this world have got one thing to be said not for them at all, just about them. They do seem to have got the women problem sorted out nice and neat. Whether you like it or not.”

An Irishman Stanley finds standing in the rain, kicking and punching a wall:

“The wife’s being a little bit provoking … you know, feminine. Now whenever that happens I don’t say a word, I come straight outside wherever I may be and I do what I just been doing for two minutes, and then I go back in the full joy of spring. When I got married I told myself I could be happy or I could be right, and I’ve been happy now for twenty-two years.”

In his memoir Martin mentions a recurring theme of Kingsley’s around the time he was writing Stanley:

It made my head drop, during this time, when my father, elaborately and not entirely unmordantly, started to liken women to the USSR (department of propaganda): when they do it they say this; when you do it they say that; and so on.

A variant of this made it into the novel. Here’s Stanley on the challenge of maintaining cordial relations with his self-absorbed ex-wife:

I remembered Cliff Wainwright saying once that women were like the Russians – if you did exactly what they wanted all the time you were being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace, and if you ever stood up to them you were resorting to cold-war tactics and pursuing imperialistic designs and interfering in their internal affairs. And by the way of course peace was more peaceful, but if you went on promoting its cause long enough you ended up Finlandized at best.

The hero is unshocked by opinions like his friend Cliff’s, but he generously continues to make allowances for the females around him. If most of those females are “fucky nuck cases” (to quote a barroom interlocutor), at least Stanley’s wife is a paragon of good humour and well-adjustedness. I suppose it should have been more obvious to me as I read that finally she too would go off the rails, and so she does, precipitating Stanley’s acquiescence, at novel’s end, to Cliff’s resentful maunderings:

“According to some bloke on the telly the other night,” he said, “twenty-five per cent of violent crime in England and Wales is husbands assaulting wives. Amazing figure that, don’t you think? You’d expect it to be more like eighty per cent. Just goes to show what an easy-going lot English husbands are, only one in four of them bashing his wife. No, it doesn’t mean that, does it? But it’s funny about wife-battering. Nobody ever even asks what the wife had been doing or saying. She’s never anything but an ordinary God-fearing woman who happens to have a battering husband. Same as race prejudice. Here are a lot of fellows who belong to a race minding their own business and being as good as gold and not letting butter melt in their mouths, and bugger me if a gang of prejudiced chaps don’t rush up and start discriminating against them. Frightfully unfair.”

So I see what Martin Amis means when he talks about the novel’s “programmatic gynophobia”. I can also see how, with just the perfect tilt of one’s irony antennae, one might detect in Stanley a subtle satire of discombobulated manhood. Martin floated this possibility by his father:

- And by the way. There’s a huge piece in the London Review by Marilyn Butler saying that Stanley is pro-women after all. That’s balls, isn’t it.

- Oh, absolutely.

Martin’s verdict on Stanley and its similarly-themed predecessor Jake’s Thing:

The critique of womankind that seeps its way through Jake and Stanley is certainly not without interest or pertinence (both novels are sinisterly vigorous). … My objection to these novels is simpler than that: I can feel Dad’s thumb on the scales.

Of course, the author’s thumb is always on the scales, that’s how fiction happens. Books don’t write themselves, characters don’t dictate their own actions, however much it sometimes feels that way to an author in thrall to inspiration. Ultimately it’s you making your characters do and say particular things to achieve some intended effect, whether it’s to advance the plot or to make some didactic point, like Kingsley’s point that women are fucky nuck cases.

It’s no good to say that didacticism is itself a failing – Martin has himself written didactic fiction about the Holocaust, nuclear weapons (both of these things bad, let’s agree), and, over and over again, the delusions and dislocations of modern English manhood (also pretty bad). Nor is it a question of having to agree with the lesson the author is imparting. One can read Dickens or Jane Austen and be entirely unconvinced by the supposed moral conundrums faced by their characters – what are one’s obligations to a daughter who has dishonoured herself? what should be one’s attitude to a friend who marries a person of lower social station? – yet still respond to the books as literature.

Dickens and Austen are undoubtedly didactic authors – great ones. The problem with bad didactic authors like Ayn Rand or Upton Sinclair, say, is they’re clumsily didactic. Their characters say unbelievable things because their authors don’t have the skill to render any voice besides their own.

I guess that’s sort of Martin’s complaint about Stanley. It’s not the presence of his father’s thumb, it’s that he can feel it, Kingsley’s stubby digit, poking his characters in the ribs, reminding them to stick to the script. I don’t doubt that Martin Amis has subtler sensitivities than me. But I never noticed it, Kingsley’s thumb. It’s as well-hidden to me as it is in all his other novels, in every one of which, in just as ruthless a fashion, he prods his men and women along a preordained path toward a destiny he’s decided for them.

Stanley‘s women are wicked, as women sometimes are. Their creator is only showing a partial picture, of course, but that’s what a novel always by necessity is.

M.

Under weigh? Right away!

(Some observations on language in Charles Dickens’ American Notes.)

Shortly after landing at Boston, and installing himself at a “very excellent” hotel, the author encounters an unfamiliar turn of phrase:

“Dinner, if you please,” said I to the waiter.

“When?” said the waiter.

“As quick as possible,” said I.

“Right away?” said the waiter.

After a moment’s hesitation, I answered “No,” at hazard.

“Not right away?” cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that made me start.

I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, “No; I would rather have it in this private room. I like it very much.”

At this, I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his mind: as I believe he would have done, but for the interposition of another man, who whispered in his ear, “Directly.”

“Well! and that’s a fact!” said the waiter, looking helplessly at me: “Right away.”

The expression right away is now so ubiquitous that it’s practically un-Googlable, like the or and. Answers.com asserts that,

This idiom uses right as an intensifier and away in the sense of “at once,” the latter usage dating from the 1500s and surviving only in such phrases as this one and fire away. It was first recorded in 1818.

No citation is given for the 1818 appearance. I assumed, from Dickens’ confusion, that right away originated in the States and took a while to spread overseas. But the correspondents of the journal Notes and Queries – “devoted principally to English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism” – in 1880 investigated the phrase in response to an enquiry by an English reader named “Hermentrude”:

This expression is so familiar to me that until this moment I was not aware there was anything peculiar about it. If Hermentrude lived in these parts she might hear it every hour of the day. “Now, then, children, run off right away to school”; “She has been crying right away”; “It rained right away till tea-time”; “He has been working right away.” Even now I do not see much wrong about it. I should say it means not so much immediately as earnestly, directly. I think many of these forms of expression are very old.
– R.R., Boston, Lincolnshire

This is good North Lincolnshire. “It’s taken root and it’ll grow right away”; “I’m mending [recovering] right away, thank you.” It does not mean immediately. The young lady behind the counter meant that the boy was going straight past and along the road.
– J.T.F., Winterton, Brigg

This expression is a very common one in Liverpool, and always means immediately. I have never heard it used in the sense of a long distance, which Hermentrude seems to think the correct meaning.
– J.Y.W. MacAllister

This expression has for generations been used all over the south-west of Ireland in the way in which the Yorkshire shop girl applied it. “Right away” in Munster = immediately.
– Mary Agnes Hickson

Although there seems to be some vagueness about its precise meaning, these testimonies suggest that the phrase originated in Ireland or the north of England and spread via emigration to the United States, where Dickens mistook it for an Americanism and introduced it to the wider British reading public.

***

Note this weird spelling in Dickens’ description of a voyage by steamer on the Potomac River:

I wake, of course, when we get under weigh, for there is a good deal of noise.

Of course, I leaped to the assumption that Dickens, being nearer the wellspring of “pure” English, must have known what he was talking about, and that our word underway had derived from this extinct sailor’s term. But like right away, this is another example of a phrase that doubled back on itself: under weigh, it turns out, evolved from underway via the convolutions of folk etymology.

From Michael Quinion’s terrific website World Wide Words (the Notes and Queries of our time):

What happened was that the Dutch, who were European masters of the sea in the seventeenth century, gave us – among many other nautical expressions – the term onderweg, meaning “on the way”. This became naturalised as under way and is first recorded in English around 1740, specifically as a maritime term (its broader meanings didn’t appear until the following century). Some over-clever individuals connected with the sea almost immediately linked it erroneously with the phrase to weigh anchor. [...]

It’s easy to find a myriad of examples of under weigh from the best English authors in the following two centuries, such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Captain Marryat, Washington Irving, Thomas Carlyle, Herman Melville, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens [...]

It was still common as recently as the 1930s … but weigh has dropped off almost to nothing now. This paralleled another change, starting around the same time, in which the two words began to be combined into a single adverb, underway (though many style manuals still recommend it be written as two words). It may be that the influence of other words ending in -way, especially anyway, encouraged the shift in spelling back to the original and in the process killed off a persistent misunderstanding.

M.

John Howard Griffin and other people’s music.

Midway through John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, the author finds himself in a rundown boarding room in the black quarter of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

It’s 1959. Griffin has used drugs and dye to darken his white skin in order to experience firsthand life as a black man in the south. After a week in cosmopolitan New Orleans, enduring segregation, discrimination, and the “hate stares” of random whites, Griffin deems himself ready to explore the racist heartland of Mississippi.

Hattiesburg is tense. Not long before, a white mob lynched a black prisoner in neighbouring Poplarville. The grand jury refused to return indictments against the mob. Within minutes of Griffin’s arrival, some white punks in a passing car throw a tangerine at him. When another car roars down the road, he notices that everyone retreats indoors. He learns that in the last few days several blacks have been beaten by hooligans or framed by police.

Safe in his room, Griffin looks into the mirror and sees “tears slick on his cheeks in the yellow light.” He attempts to write a letter to his wife, but he’s brought up short by the incongruity of a black man writing a tender letter to a white woman. He goes outside and buys a barbecued meat sandwich. As he is handed his food, he imagines he can read the thoughts of the black woman at the barbecue stand: “Her eyes said with unmistakable clarity, ‘God…isn’t it awful?’”

Griffin sits down on the steps of his building to eat. “I felt disaster,” he writes. “Somewhere in the night’s future the tensions would explode into violence.”

Finally, for the first time in his adventure, he gives in. He calls some white friends in Hattiesburg and asks to be rescued. “I’m scared to death,” he says into the phone. The friends pick him up and take him to a comfortable house in the white section of town.

Griffin’s outrage and frustration are understandable, and yet he seems carried away by his imagination. Why not just hide out in his room? Why not strike up a conversation with the woman at the barbecue stand, or one of the several friendly blacks he’s talked to since arriving in Hattiesburg?

I think I know why Griffin really broke down. It was the music.

“Canned jazz blar[ing] through the street with a monstrous high-strutting rhythm that pulled at the viscera,” audible through the walls of his room.

“Music from the jukebox, a grinding rhythm,” which he transcribes as, “Harangity hangity hangity hangity oomp oomp oomp.”

“The music consumed in its blatant rhythm all other rhythms, even that of the heartbeat,” he writes. Hearing the “hoots and shouts” from the taverns of the black quarter, he speculates:

I wondered how all of this would look to the casual observer, or the whites in their homes. “The Niggers are whooping it up over on Mobile Street tonight,” they might say. “They’re happy.” Or, as one scholar put it, “Despite their lowly status, they are capable of living jubilantly.” Would they see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter, so oppressive that men had to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it? The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured out like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man’s soul. “You are black. You are condemned.” This is what the white man mistook for “jubilant living” and called “whooping it up.” This is how the white man can say, “They live like dogs,” never realizing why they must, to save themselves, shout, get drunk, shake the hip, pour pleasures into bellies deprived of happiness. Otherwise, the sounds from the quarter would lose order and rhythm and become wails.

This is condescension – not the condescension of a white man to blacks, but of a quiet man to the loud. As Griffin sees it, when blacks listen to music that irritates him, it can only be to cover the whispers in their soul. If their conditions were a little better, their souls wouldn’t have to whisper so loudly, and they’d listen to something less irritating – a little Beethoven, maybe.

That’s not how it turned out. Fifty years later, if they’re to be judged by the music they listen to, black people’s souls are whispering more loudly than ever. How would Griffin react to the news that the first black president has Jay-Z on his iPod?

I know how antagonizing other people’s music can be. I remember living in a bachelor apartment in Vancouver, depressed and unemployed, moaning in anguish whenever the upstairs neighbour turned on her stereo. I would put in earplugs, and put headphones over the earplugs, and watch inane sitcoms that I had no interest in watching, just to escape the music. I would put off eating because in order to make food I would have to remove the headphones and hear the music.

As I worked on this blog post, a white kid pulled his car into the parking lot beneath my window and sat there for five minutes pumping hip hop, which I felt as a steady pulsing in my sternum. I typed out Griffin’s sentence, The music consumed in its blatant rhythm all other rhythms, even the heartbeat. I sat here grinding my teeth, wishing death on the young, until the car pulled away.

That’s how it goes nowadays. In place of music we have beats. And in place of jukeboxes we have kids with 5000-watt subwoofers in their cars.

But the kids don’t install those subwoofers because they’re consumed with melancholy. They do it because they have shitty taste in music. Their shitty music isn’t a reaction to racism or poverty or poor living conditions, and neither was the music that John Howard Griffin heard in the black quarter of Hattiesburg in 1959.

But it makes sense that this was the only night of his experiment where Griffin chickened out. He was suffering under a double dose of oppression – the oppression of racism amplified by the oppression of other people’s music.

M.

Finding myself in a book.

I lose myself in books all the time. So it’s a relief occasionally when I find myself; when I encounter a character who shares with me some quirk or fixation that it’s never occurred to me to put into words.

***

I’ve been known to kill time, among the back shelves at my favourite used bookstore, patiently separating the Kingsley Amises from the Martin Amises, the Henry Roths from the Philip Roths, the precious and solitary Henry Green from among the heaps of Graham Greenes, all for the benefit of my fellow browsers.

I believe I share this habit with the great English writer of ghost-stories, M.R. James. At any rate, he bestows it on the narrator of “A Neighbour’s Landmark”:

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy.

Mind you, I don’t spend much time in the kind of houses that contain large private libraries, let alone the kind where careless housemaids are likely to invert the volumes. I can better identify with furtive Tommy Clay in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:

Three days later, on a Monday, Tommy stopped in at Spiegelman’s Drugs to arrange the comic books. This was a service he provided at no charge and, so far as he knew, unbeknownst to Mr. Spiegelman. The week’s new comics arrived on Monday and by Thursday, particularly toward the end of the month, the long rows of wire racks along the wall at the back of the store were often a jumble of disordered and dog-eared titles. Every week, Tommy sorted and alphabetized, putting the Nationals with the Nationals, the E.C.s with the E.C.s, the Timelys with the Timelys, reuniting the estranged members of the Marvel family, isolating the romance titles which, though he tried to conceal this fact from his mother, he despised, in a bottom corner. … He did all his rearranging surreptitiously, under the guise of browsing. Whenever another kid came in, or Mr. Spiegelman walked by, Tommy quickly stuffed back whatever errant stack he was holding, any old way, and engaged in a transparent bit of innocent whistling.

In my twenties I worked for a while in an adult video store, and I took great pleasure in sorting the dirty magazines by genre and title. This brought me into conflict with the manager of the store, who had his own obscure standards of taxonomy that I was frequently in violation of. After a few months I was fired – not exactly fired, but the manager made it clear that we’d both be happier if I sought other employment. The event that precipitated this ultimatum had nothing to do with magazines, but I think his dislike for me originated with my attempt to “straighten out” the magazine rack. Perhaps two obsessive alphabetizers are doomed to quarrel.

***

In a short story called “Making Love In 2003″, from Miranda July’s collection No One Belongs Here More Than You:

It doesn’t really feel like driving when you don’t know where you’re going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination. I felt like I was fooling the other drivers and I just wanted to come clean. But the more I drove, the more I felt like I had somewhere to go. I was making difficult left turns that no one would ever do unless they had to. Sometimes I would make left turns all the way around a block, and when I returned to the original intersection, I would feel disappointed to find all the drivers were new.

As someone who’s been blessed with long stretches of unemployment, I know all about aimless driving. I’ve often had that sense that I was “fooling the other drivers” – all these busy people rushing off to the supermarket or the airport, and here I am, taking up a lane of traffic to no purpose. When I’m driving aimlessly, I try to be as unobtrusive as possible. Unlike the heroine of July’s story, I avoid left-hand turns; I worry that the length of the green light was optimized by some computer program for a certain amount of traffic, and that my unnecessary left-hand turn is throwing off the timing; and that because of me, some poor hardworking mom is going to be late for her appointment with the chiropractor.

***

Vladimir Nabokov describes, in his memoir Speak, Memory, an early attempt at composing poetry:

An innocent beginner, I fell into all the traps laid by the singing epithet. Not that I did not struggle. In fact, I was working at my elegy very hard, taking endless trouble over every line, choosing and rejecting, rolling the words on my tongue with the glazed-eyed solemnity of a tea-taster, and still it would come, that atrocious betrayal. The fame impelled the picture, the husk shaped the pulp. The hackneyed order of words (short verb or pronoun – long adjective – short noun) engendered the hackneyed disorder of thought, and some such line as poeta gorestnïe gryozï, translatable and accented as “the poet’s melancholy daydreams”, led fatally to a rhyming line ending in rozï (roses) or beryozï (birches) or grozï (thunderstorms), so that certain emotions were connected with certain surroundings not by a free act of one’s will, but by the faded ribbon of tradition.

The particular challenge of escaping the conventions of Russian poetry is, of course, unfamiliar to me. But “the husk shaped the pulp” perfectly sums up a failure I’ve experienced too often; the weary sense that, rather than having written what I wanted to write, I wrote what I was able to write; rather than choosing the words and images that best communicated my thoughts, I have deformed my thoughts to make them fit these unsuitable vessels, the words and images that were ready to hand.

The husk shapes the pulp. Thank you, Mr. Nabokov.

M.

PS. I don’t really write reviews any more because it turns out I’m pretty bad at it. For what it’s worth, all the above authors, as unlike each other as any four authors can be, are excellent.

“A Neighbour’s Landmark” can be found in The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, which every civilized reader of English should own.

Solzhenitsyn, funnyman.

Here’s the funny thing about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: he’s funny. You’d expect Gulag Archipelago to be a slog, but the very first lines of the preface, where the author describes some starving prisoners “flouting the higher claims of ichthyology” to wolf down a prehistoric fish they’d discovered frozen in the Siberian ice, made me laugh. Knowing that he survived the slave-camps himself, one would expect Solzhenitsyn to be embittered, indignant, aflame with righteous rage – and he is. But above all he’s a great writer with a keen ear for absurdity and a Siberia-sized index-card file full of astounding stories about life under the Soviets. *

Here’s one. A new prisoner arrives in camp and the guard raises an eyebrow at his long sentence. “Twenty-five years! What did you do?”

“Nothing at all,” comes the sullen reply.

“You’re lying!” says the guard. “The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.”

I laughed because it has the structure of a joke – and in fact, its tidiness and rim-shot pacing suggest to me that it is a joke. But whether or not the actual words were spoken by an actual guard, the joke is true. Consider (I open Volume One randomly, to page 82) the “traitors of the Motherland”, tens of thousands of ex-soldiers slapped with prison terms at the conclusion of World War II; their crime was to have spent time in German prisoner-of-war camps. (Their real offense, Solzhenitsyn points out, was to have been “witnesses to humiliating [Soviet] defeats.”) Their sentence? Ten years.

Here’s another one. The Solovki camp, on an island near the Arctic Circle, was getting some unwelcome publicity in the West. To put a stop to rumours that Solovki was something other than a socialist paradise in the making, in 1929 Moscow sent the famous proletarian writer Maxim Gorky on a fact-finding mission to the camp. The administrators scurried about preparing for Gorky’s visit, “hid the monstrosities and polished things up for show”, but…

Only in Kem was there an oversight. On Popov Island the ship Gleb Boky was being loaded by prisoners in underwear and sacks, when Gorky’s retinue appeared out of nowhere to embark on that steamer! You inventors and thinkers! Here is a worthy problem for you … a barren island, not one bush, no possible cover – and right there, at a distance of three hundred yards, Gorky’s retinue has shown up. Your solution? Where can this disgraceful spectacle – these men dressed in sacks – be hidden? The entire journey of the great Humanist will have been for naught if he sees them now. Well, of course, he will try hard not to notice them, but help him! … The work assigner ordered: “Stop work! Close ranks! Still closer! Sit down on the ground! Sit still!” And a tarpaulin was thrown over them. “Anyone who moves will be shot!” And the former stevedore Maxim Gorky ascended the ship’s ladder and admired the landscape for a full hour till sailing time – and he didn’t notice!

Gorky stands in for all those farsighted intellectuals who praised the Soviet experiment, eyes locked on the horizon while the victims of the regime huddled half-naked under their tarps. It’s a metaphor, and it’s funny, too!

M.

* Even Solzhenitsyn’s footnotes are funny. Consider the unlucky peasant given a ten-year sentence for stealing a spool of thread – or as the authorities grandiosely described it in their indictment, “200 meters of sewing material.”

Peter Watts is a jerk.

He’s a crank too. But I’ll get to that.

First let me tell you about his brilliant novel Blindsight.

I first heard of it two days ago in this article in io9′s Mad Science blog, Six scientists tell us about the most accurate science fiction in their fields. Terry Johnson, a bioengineer at UC Berkeley, volunteered the following:

I thought that Peter Watts’ Blindsight did a great job of reinventing vampires as an extinct subspecies of humanity. Humanity pieces together what the vampire genome must have been and then resurrects them using genetic engineering.

As Johnson’s endorsement would suggest, Watts has obviously put a lot of thought into his scientific account of vampirism. In the novel’s detailed Notes and References it’s explained that vampires acquired their “Crucifix Glitch” as a result of

a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex, resulting in grand mal-like feedback seizures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until H. sapiens sapiens developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed across H. sapiens vampiris via genetic drift, and – suddenly denied access to its prey – the entire subspecies went extinct shortly after the dawn of recorded history.

The novel’s main vampire character counteracts the effects of the Crucifix Glitch by injecting himself with “anti-Euclideans”, drugs that alter his brain chemistry so that he can glance at the rungs of a ladder without foaming at the mouth.

The funny thing is, it turns out Blindsight isn’t about resurrected vampires as much as it is about brain chemistry. Particularly, it’s about the nature of consciousness. What does it mean to be self-aware? Does self-awareness necessarily correlate with intelligence? Is it even an adaptive advantage, when so many species get along just fine without it? The vampires play a crucial but only a small role in Watts’ exploration of these questions.

All that, and aliens too! Blindsight is a top-drawer example of the subgenre ably taxonomized by an Amazon reviewer named Conrad J. Obregon:

There is a sub-genre of science fiction that I like to think of as the alien-encounter procedural. Among its most famous of members is Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. Humans meet a new species of alien and must figure out what procedures to follow to make some kind of contact. Emphasis is on the technology of contact, with suspense created by the unknown nature of the aliens.

But forget about the literary antecedents. Forget about the science. The main thing is, Blindsight is a hell of a lot of fun. I scanned the opening pages after supper on Thursday, with the intention of maybe putting it next on my reading pile. Suddenly it was midnight, and I had to force myself to stop reading so I wouldn’t be a zombie at work the next day. I sped through the remaining hundred pages in a few hours on Friday night, stopping only once to use the bathroom.

Go read it. Thank me later.

***

Blindsight (and other novels and stories) are available on Peter Watts’ website for free download under a Creative Commons license.

***

I’m glad I read Blindsight before I read Peter Watts’ blog. Because based on his blog, I’ve concluded that he’s kind of a jerk. If I’d known that in advance, I might not have read the novel.

Watts was in the news recently. Last December he had a scuffle with US border guards during an “exit search” while trying to cross back into his (and my) native Canada at Port Huron, Michigan. From his blog:

If you buy into the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no apparent reason; or perhaps they did, and I simply kept my eyes downcast and refrained from asking questions.

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.).

(I have no reason to disbelieve the above account of the incident. Although one of the border guards alleged that Watts choked him, that claim was apparently discredited in the trial. Here are more details of Watts’ arrest and eventual conviction; in the end he was fined a couple thousand dollars and banned from entering the States.)

I’ve driven across the Canada-US border a bunch of times since 2001. (Including, I think, at least once at Port Huron.) I’ve crossed into the US from Mexico twice. On several occasions I was stopped while driving alone on south Texas secondary highways by border agents who pawed through my luggage for traces of heroin or Mexicans. Through all these interactions, American authorities were unerringly friendly, even when obliged to shunt my vehicle to a side lane for more detailed disarraying of my underwear.

So when I read about Peter Watts’ experience, I wondered, Have I just been lucky? Or was Watts especially unlucky?

Then I read this anecdote from a recent appearance at a sci-fi convention in Toronto:

At some point I – as is my wont – used the word “fucking” as an adjective.

Exhibit A sat in the front row, two sprogs in tow (one 5-10, one possible preteen – my expertise in the age-determination of human larvae is not all it could be). She took strong exception: “Could we keep this PG? There are children in the audience, and if I hear that again I’m out of here.”

I explained that the word “fuck” has a 900-year history, throughout most of which it was considered completely inoffensive. “It only became offensive 100-200 years ago, when a bunch of bible-thumping prudes who couldn’t get laid decided to stigmatize anything with an orifice.” Sadly, this cut no ice: “Well, I find it offensive.”

Watts soon let fly another PG-13 adjective, and the woman gathered her sprogs and huffed out. This led to an encounter between the author and four convention organizers who reprimanded him for, basically, being a jerk.

All because Peter Watts just had to say the word “shit-kicking”. Now, how would a non-jerk have responded to this situation? Being one, I can tell you: with an inward eye roll, a deferential head nod (calibrated to convey a shade of irony without being overtly offensive), and a mental note to sprinkle some sugar on the salty language.

I don’t think this is a symptom of undue servility. It’s just a sense of proportion. No-one should be forced to kowtow for the mere maintenance of social harmony. But in the absence of overt coercion, when the stakes are so comically small – we make a slight bow.

Watts doesn’t bow. When someone waves a sceptre in his direction, he hops up, grabs the sceptre, and, well…jerks. That’s when coercive methods are applied. Authorities are summoned. Things spiral.

It’s worth mentioning that Watts is a bit of a crank, too. (This is another way of saying he lacks a sense of proportion.) He’s the kind of crank who writes about how we live in a “soft dictatorship“. Who posts a picture of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper with rifle crosshairs superimposed over his forehead. Who composes measured passages like,

British Petroleum – a criminal corporation with countless infractions and convictions already notched onto its bedpost – is already a serial murderer. It kills entire ecosystems as we speak, ruins countless lives. If any of us little people tried to repay even a fraction of that in kind the whole weight of governments and armies would try to squash us flat. I know first-hand the righteous outrage that inflames such cocksuckers when anyone tries to do to them the merest fraction of what they do to us on a daily basis. We all know the overwhelming force that would be brought to bear on the “anarchists” and “criminals” who dared to “take the law into their own hands”.

(In a comment below his original post, he clarifies that he’s “not advocating anything”.)

None of the foregoing is necessarily relevant. His arrest in Port Huron predates all the above comments; perhaps the incident radicalized him. Anyway, I know people who say even more intemperate things, yet are nevertheless meek and mild when approached by folks in uniform.

But if you’re the kind of guy who believes things like the above, and you’re a jerk to boot, is it a surprise when you get into a tussle with authorities?

I’m not minimizing the injustice of what Watts went through. No-one should be punched in the face, or pepper-sprayed, or prosecuted, let alone threatened with two years in jail in a foreign country, just for being a jerk.

I’m just saying I can picture how it happened. Border guards surround Watts’ vehicle. Instead of quietly rolling his eyes, the author – a big guy, not a weedy Carl Sagan type – jumps out to protest. A guard politely but firmly orders him back into the car. Watts mutters something ill-advised. The guard barks an order. Events spiral. Pepper is dispersed.

Now, we need border guards. (Not as much as they think we need them, but still.) They protect us from people far more dangerous than Peter Watts. But there aren’t many such dangerous people around, so the border guards have a lot of time on their hands. They use this time to peer up our tailpipes, to poke suspicious fingers into our shaving kits, and occasionally to pull over some random Canadian because something about his posture or haircut looks suspicious.

It would be better if border guards were astute enough to display a sense of proportion when dealing with jerks like Peter Watts. But they’re not always that astute.

Some of them, in fact, are real jerks.

M.

Update, April 1 2013: I’ve had a few critical comments on this post, like the guy who today accused me of “attacking” Watts over the 2009 border incident. I was going to defend myself, but on reflection, maybe those commenters have a fair point.

As I’ve now said repeatedly, I believe Watts’s description of what happened that day. Of course I wasn’t there. But the prosecutors’ scenario, where a middle-aged science-fiction writer physically assaults a group of border guards, strikes me as less plausible than Watts’s version, where he was merely slow to obey the guards’ instructions and they monstrously overreacted.

My argument was only that people with cranky and combative personalities (like Watts, as he has frequently exhibited on his blog) are more likely to get into scrapes like these. Conflict-averse weenies like me, when confronted with seemingly capricious displays of authority, rather than assume we are being unjustly handled, will pause to consider the possibility that there are factors at play which we don’t understand. On the few occasions when I have indignantly trumpeted my sense of victimization, I’ve always come to realize on reflection that I was getting worked up over nothing. I have no idea why US Customs would suddenly start conducting “exit searches”, like the one Watts was subjected to while trying to leave the USA. It strikes me as pretty absurd. But if I were pulled aside for such a search, I would sit in the car meditating on the absurdity, rather than leaping out to yap at the guards about it. Which is probably why I’ve never been punched by a border guard.

There’s something to be said for an attitude of quiet deference. It makes for a polite and law-abiding society, such as we have customarily enjoyed here in Canada. But there’s also something to be said for getting up in the faces of authority figures when they start bossing us around. If we sanction cops bashing the skulls of those who ask tough questions – even those who ask quite rudely – we will soon find ourselves living in a society where even polite questions are forbidden. A certain amount of jerkiness is necessary to keep us from subsiding into authoritarianism. So, although I frequently deplore his opinions, I’m grateful to Watts for being a jerk on my behalf.

The role of the jerk-by-proxy is to get worked up over things the rest of us let slide. Nine times out of ten he makes himself look like an ass, and the rest of us steer wide and avoid eye contact while he stands on a street corner haranguing a weary cop over some wholly imaginary outrage. Occasionally, inevitably, our jerk-by-proxy pushes a cop or a judge too far, gets clapped in handcuffs, poked in the eye with a baton, hauled off to court. That means the jerk is doing his job. That’s not the time to cavil about what an uncouth fellow he is. That’s when you leap to the ramparts on his behalf.

I felt like by praising Watts’s book, while doing nothing to conceal my annoyance with the opinions expressed on his blog, I was doing him justice. But the events called for a bit more indulgence. I cavilled when I should have leapt. So I suppose I deserve some abuse from Watts’s defenders. As penance I’ve chipped in $20 to the tip jar on Watts’s website.

 

The Red and the Black: Julien’s game.

What two things do Nancy Mitford’s 1960 parlour comedy Don’t Tell Alfred and the 1959 Gary Cooper maritime adventure flick The Wreck of the Mary Deare have in common?

1. They have at the centre of their plots an obscure chain of unpopulated islets in the English Channel, the Minquiers (or “Minkies”, as Gary Cooper calls them).
2. By happenstance I found myself reading one and watching the other on the same evening in 2008.

A meaningless coincidence, but because of it Mitford, Cooper, and the Minkies will forever be linked in my imagination.*

***

Here’s another coincidence. Much of the action in the middle section of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black occurs in the French provincial capital of Besançon, a town that to my recollection I’d never heard of before. (A forgivable lapse of memory: I learn via Wikipedia that Besançon makes an appearance, disguised under the Latinized name “Vesontio”, in Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul.)

Besançon is the first stop on Julien Sorel’s journey from small-town obscurity to the heights of French society. He spends some unhappy months as a student in a seminary there, befriending the rector, who will eventually help him get appointed as secretary to a rich nobleman in Paris. By the end of the novel Julien finds himself back in Besançon – in prison.

Putting aside Stendhal, I opened up a collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton, and came across this:

For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious town of Besançon, which stands like a sort of peninsula in a horseshoe of river. You may learn from the guide-books that it was the birthplace of Victor Hugo, and that it is a military station with many forts, near to the French frontier. But you will not learn from guide-books that the very tiles on the roofs seem to be of some quainter and more delicate colour than the tiles of all the other towns of the world; that the tiles look like the little clouds of some strange sunset, or like the lustrous scales of some strange fish. They will not tell you that in this town the eye cannot rest on anything without finding it in some way attractive and even elvish, a carved face at a street corner, a gleam of green fields through a stunted arch, or some unexpected colour for the enamel of a spire or dome.

This helpfully augments Stendhal’s meagre description of Besançon as “one of the most beautiful cities in France”. Never having previously heard of the place, now I’d like to go there.

But the essay that appears just before the one quoted above is as eerily relevant to the reader of The Red and the Black. It’s called The Contented Man:

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare. The absence of this digestive talent is what makes so cold and incredible the tales of so many people who say they have been “through” things; when it is evident that they have come out on the other side quite unchanged…

[W]e may ask of those who profess to have passed through trivial or tragic experiences whether they have absorbed the content of them; whether they licked up such living water as there was. It is a pertinent question in connection with many modern problems.

Thus the young genius says, “I have lived in my dreary and squalid village before I found success in Paris or Vienna.” The sound philosopher will answer, “You have never lived in your village, or you would not call it dreary and squalid.”

Julien Sorel, with his self-destructive pride and ambition, is the epitome of the small-town Uncontented Man, so much so that I’m tempted to theorize that Chesterton marked his visit to Besançon by reading The Red and the Black and writing these two essays back-to-back – except that they originally appeared in collections published three years apart.

Just a coincidence.

***

Working as a secretary in the house of the Marquis de La Mole, Julien is introduced to the Marquis’ daughter Mathilde. Beautiful, haughty, and too intelligent to take seriously the elegant fatuities of the young men of her social circle, Mathilde is attracted to her father’s clever new secretary, though he’s an uncultured hick from the provinces, far beneath her station.

Julien in his pride interprets Mathilde’s interest as mere condescension, and responds coldly; this only intrigues her further. Eventually, after many mutual misunderstandings, Julien realizes that he has accidentally captured the heart of the most eligible girl in Paris, and he determines to seduce her.

Unfortunately, after the successful seduction, he discovers that he’s in love with her – and worse for him, she discovers it too. As his sangfroid melts into gooey fondness, her admiration turns to contempt. She rebukes herself for ever having cared for him. He can only mope about, casting sad-eyed glances her way, while she ignores him to gossip with her society friends.

Before long, Julien runs into a frivolous Russian playboy, Prince Korasov, who diagnoses the situation:

“[She] is profoundly self-centered, like all women to whom heaven has given either too high a rank or too much money. She looks at herself instead of looking at you, so she doesn’t know you. During the two or three outbursts of passion for you that she’s allowed herself to indulge in, with great efforts of imagination, she saw in you the hero of her dreams, not what you actually are.”

Korasov outlines a scheme by which Julien can manipulate Mathilde’s jealousy to win her back. And this is where The Red and the Black begins to uncannily resemble a handbook of “game”, that semi-competitive sport wherein aspiring male “players” use principles divined from evolutionary psychology to imitate the “alpha” behaviours of our primate forebears and render themselves irresistable to women.

“Game” as propounded by its most eloquent evangelist, the blogger known as Roissy, is about 50/50 misogynistic bullshit and disturbingly spot-on social analysis. I refer you to Roissy’s Sixteen Commandments Of Poon. (Gird yourself, good liberals.)

Sixteen Commandments Of Poon	The Red and the Black
Women want to feel like they have to overcome obstacles to win a man’s heart… The man who gives his emotional world away too easily robs women of the satisfaction of earning his love. Though you may be in love with her, don’t say it before she has said it.	He was astonished by the sorrow in her eyes; it was so intense that he scarcely recognized them. He felt his strength abandoning him, so mortally painful was the act of courage he was imposing on himself. “Those eyes will soon express nothing but cold disdain,” he thought, “if I give into the joy of loving her.”
Make her jealous. Flirt with other women in front of her. Do not dissuade other women from flirting with you. Women will never admit this but jealousy excites them. The thought of you turning on another woman will arouse her sexually. No girl wants a man that no other woman wants.	“Answer me at least,” she said at length in a supplicating tone of voice, but without daring to look at him. …”So Madame de Fervaques has stolen your heart from me…Has she made for you all the sacrifices to which my fatal love led me?” A gloomy silence was Julien’s only answer.
Give your woman 2/3 of everything she gives you… Give her two displays of affection and stop until she has answered with three more. When she speaks, you reply with fewer words. When she emotes, you emote less… Refraining from reciprocating everything she does for you in equal measure instills in her the proper attitude of belief in your higher status. In her deepest loins it is what she truly wants.	Julien abandoned himself to his great happiness only at times when Mathilde could not read it in his eyes. He scrupulously performed the duty of addressing a few harsh words to her from time to time. Whenever her sweetness, which he observed with astonishment, and her unquestioning devotion to him were about to rob him of all his self-control, he had the courage to leave her abruptly.
Keep her guessing. True to their inscrutable natures, women ask questions they don’t really want direct answers to. Woe be the man who plays it straight – his fate is the suffering of the beta. Evade, tease, obfuscate. She thrives when she has to imagine what you’re thinking about her, and withers when she knows exactly how you feel.	He knew very well that the next morning, by eight o’clock, Mathilde would be in the library; he did not go there until nine o’clock, burning with love, but with his head dominating his heart. Not one minute went by, perhaps, without his repeating to himself, “I must keep her constantly occupied with this great doubt: ‘Does he love me?’ Her brilliant position, and the flattery of everyone who speaks to her, make her a little too sure of herself.”
You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority… Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out.	His mind was preoccupied; he responded only halfheartedly to her expressions of ardent tenderness. He remained taciturn and somber. Never before had he appeared so great, so adorable to her… [W]hat explanation could there be for Julien’s air of severity? She did not dare to question him. She did not dare! She, Mathilde! From then on, there was something vague, mysterious, almost terrifying in her feeling for Julien.

Terrifying indeed. My biggest objection to “game” is that I fear it might be true. Are we really just prisoners of our genes, fated to fulfil the gender roles of our chest-thumping ancestors? Are women really happier when they “subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose”?

And what about men? The problem with game is that it’s misnamed. Game is no fun. Bending a woman to your will is a hell of a lot of work, and if you want the woman to stick around, the work never ends. Like Julien, you have to disguise your feelings, keep your mistress guessing, “scrupulously [perform] the duty of addressing a few harsh words to her from time to time”. Julien himself, once he’s completed his conquest, is miserable about it. His heart truly belongs to his earlier lover, the guileless Madame de Rênal.

Roissy, in his bleaker disquisitions on the cruelty of the modern sexual marketplace, communicates despair over the gamesmanship to which men are forced. He blames it all on feminism:

[I]n a mating landscape where women work and earn almost as much as men and, consequently, have devalued the traditional currency of barter in the mating market and shrunk their dating pool, men are responding to this disincentive to bust their balls for diminished sexual reward by dropping out (omegas), doping out (video gaming and porn consuming betas), and cadding about (alphas and practitioners of game).

There’s something to that – something, but not everything. To say “This is how we’re hardwired; accept it” ignores the paradoxical essence of human nature: It’s our nature to struggle to transcend our nature.

Personally, I’d rather we keep on trying to escape the backward pull of our primate progenitors. But in order to pacify our inner chimps, we first need to understand their desires. To that end I’m grateful for Roissy and Stendhal, in somewhat different measures, for documenting the darker manifestations of the human sex drive.

M.

* A while back I described another such coincidence involving Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and an obscure London hotel destroyed in the Blitz.

Someone knocked at the door as foreigners do.

Can anyone explain this paragraph from Leo Tolstoy’s The Devil? (The translation is by Louise and Aylmer Maude.)

Someone knocked at the door as foreigners do. He knew this must be his uncle. “Come in,” he said.

The scene occurs in Eugène Irténev’s study. Eugène is the protagonist of The Devil, a conventional, basically decent guy who is consumed by guilt over his desire, never consummated, to cheat on his wife with an attractive peasant woman on his estate. Knocking on the door is an uncle, never given a name, who is staying in Eugène’s house. The uncle is a “flabby libertine and drunkard”, prone to bragging about his fictitious society friends.

Letting the uncle in, Eugène proceeds to confess his imaginary sins. The uncle fails to understand how his nephew can be so upset about a sin he hasn’t even got around to committing, and recommends that he  and his wife take a nice long vacation to the Crimea. Eugène takes up his suggestion and manages for a few months to blot out his longing for the peasant woman; but on their homecoming, his desire returns, strong as ever, triggering a rushed and unsatisfactory denouement in which he takes violent measures to put an end to his guilt. (There are two versions of the ending, both equally unsatisfactory.)

But I’m concerned with the line about knocking at the door “as foreigners do”. Is Tolstoy saying that Russians don’t knock on doors before they enter rooms? Or is he saying that there is a particular kind of knock that is characteristic of foreigners? And why does Eugène recognize this uniquely un-Russian knock as belonging to the uncle, a character who is never described by Tolstoy as having lived abroad?

Is this the product of a clumsy translation, or is this just one of those things that only a Russian reader of Tolstoy’s era would know?

M.