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Welcome to a very special vacation edition of Reading, Watching! What makes it so special, you ask? Well, nothing except I’ve been reading a lot.
Here’s what I brought with me:
The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
The Girl with Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac
M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati
Here’s what I got at the used bookstore here:
The Jugurthine War/The Catiline Conspiracy by Sallust
Money by Martin Amis
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
What I’ve been reading on PDF:
Lukacs and Heidegger by Lucien Goldmann
“Choosing a Hero: Heidegger’s Conception of Authentic Life in Relation to Early Christianity” by Dermot Moran
Let’s see if we can find a theme that connects them all.
As a reminder, I’m doing an event at Rizzoli Bookstore on Friday, September 5th, 6:30 PM, for Joe Wright’s television adaptation of Antonio Scurati’s M: Son of the Century, an epic novel of Mussolini’s rise to power. Each chapter is capped with quotations from contemporary documents. This one from Antonio Gramsci struck me:
We were it must be said swept away by events, we were, reluctantly, a part of the general dissolution of Italian society; we had one consolation, to which we clung tenaciously, that no one would be spared, that we could claim to have systematically predicted the cataclysm.
I’ve slowly been making my way through The Education of Henry Adams. Henry Brooks Adams was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams; his father, Charles Francis Adams, was prominent in anti-slavery politics as one of the founders of the Free Soil Whigs and an early Republican. The Education is his memoir, first published privately in 1907 and then released after he died in 1918. Adams comes from one of the most prominent and distinguished families in early America, but finds the country changing so rapidly—technologically, socially, and culturally—that this advantage of birth gives him very little preparation for what the world is becoming. In a recent essay, Arthur Goldhammer describes it as “a classic of the literature of disappointment and despair, embellished by an elegant style and camouflaged by mordant irony.” He is much more eloquent on the subject than I am, but I think I was drawn to the book for similar reasons:
Like Adams, however, I held good cards, not in the form of a family pedigree like his but rather in certain native gifts for which I can take no credit, any more than Adams could take credit for his fortunate birth. Luck provided me, as it provided him, with an “excellent hand,” which the vagaries of social and political change have contrived in the Age of MAGA to blast away, as the Gilded Age snatched away Adams’ privileges and advantages.
Part of the blame for this loss he attributed, unjustly, to my ancestors and other latecomers to these shores, whose alien ways eroded, as he saw it, the high culture he took as his birthright and replaced it with a rapacious profiteering spirit and imperial will to power. To this discordant and perpetually disruptive “civilization of the dynamo” he preferred the “unity and harmony” he imagined he saw in Mont St.-Michel and Chartres, ignoring, or, rather, aestheticizing all the wickedness and injustice that these magnificent excrescences of feudalism's flaws concealed.
Perhaps I'm guilty of a similar aestheticization when I regret the demise of “the New Deal order,” as Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser called it,1 the “civilization” (to speak like Adams) that expanded educational opportunities for children like me with a talent for learning and a readiness to capitalize on the good fortune of our birth. Perhaps we didn't care enough for others who were not so blessed. Perhaps we're wrong to see MAGA's frontal assault on the institutions of higher education, which served us so well, as products of unmitigated malevolence and abject stupidity. Perhaps we're as reactionary as I once thought Henry Adams.
I wonder, too, sometimes, if my hankering for the past is simply reactionary. But I think that the civilization of the New Deal managed to synthesize the dynamism of the United States with a sense of stability of our national traditions; so I think what we mourn in its loss is not the loss of a world of settled certainties and old gentility, but the ideal of wisely administered progress. The spoliation of the productive and intellectual capacity of a great society to restore some notional social hierarchy seems to me what’s truly reactionary.
I’m still quite early in the book, so I haven’t arrived yet at Adams’s jaundiced old age. He’s still quite young and has just accompanied his father, who was appointed ambassador to England by Abraham Lincoln, to London, where he served as his father’s private secretary, in charge of his social engagements. The job of ambassador to the Court of St James's was, at first, extremely difficult because of the sympathy of English high society for the Confederate cause. He has very amusing reflections on British manners and character:
The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or dinner-table was that So-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of English society as well as its chief terror.
The American delighted in Thackeray as a satirist, but Thackeray quite justly maintained that he was not a satirist at all, and that his pictures of English society were exact and good-natured. The American, who could not believe it, fell back on Dickens, who, at all events, had the vice of exaggeration to extravagance, but Dickens's English audience thought the exaggeration rather in manner or style, than in types. Mr. Gladstone himself went to see Sothern act Dundreary, and laughed till his face was distorted--not because Dundreary was exaggerated, but because he was ridiculously like the types that Gladstone had seen--or might have seen--in any club in Pall Mall. Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; it contained little else.
He attributes the Rebel sympathies to the British desire to seem eccentric rather than to textile and cotton interests:
By natural affinity the social eccentrics commonly sympathized with political eccentricity. The English mind took naturally to rebellion--when foreign--and it felt particular confidence in the Southern Confederacy because of its combined attributes--foreign rebellion of English blood--which came nearer ideal eccentricity than could be reached by Poles, Hungarians, Italians or Frenchmen. All the English eccentrics rushed into the ranks of rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balanced minds to attach themselves to the cause of the Union. None of the English leaders on the Northern side were marked eccentrics.
Where I’ve left off, Adams pere et fils have successfully prevented the English from intervening on the Southern side, and young Adams is returning to the States to pursue a career in journalism; it seems the only path open to him: “Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism.” Touché.
On to another reactionary, Honoré de Balzac. Like Adams, he is preoccupied with the dissolution of all great customs and institutions, the cancerous growth of commercialism, and the domination of money over all other values; in short, the rise of capitalism. The Girl with the Golden Eyes is a short novel in the Comédie Humaine about romantic obsession. It begins with one of the author’s long sociological and philosophical disquisitions, which so captivated Marx and Engels: His description of the downtrodden existence of the Parisian proletariat sounds like their early writings. Balzac goes class by class, through the “circles of hell” of French society, explaining the disfigured physiognomy of Parisian faces by the horrors inflicted on them by the universal passion for “gold or pleasure.” The egoistic urges serve to wear out and dissipate the energies of Parisians, “girving them cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages--youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young.” He ends up with, “No emotion dominating his face, which friction has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown.”
More than a century later, Martin Amis finds a different effect on the human physiognomy of the hustle for money in Money. Where capitalism was once thought to discipline people in the pursuit of wealth, inculcating continence, thrift, and industry—the Protestant Ethic—by the 1980s, its effects cannot be said to be so slimming. The protagonist of Money is a corpulent commercial director, with no discipline, a short-sighted, weak hedonist who barely plans the day ahead of him before his appetites take hold. Money doesn’t dessicate, but corrupts abundantly, creating a fetid swamp of desire. One could probably continue down this path of decadence to its aesthetic extreme with Huysmans’s Against Nature, but I’m not reading it right now; I just bought it because I collect old Penguin Classics.
Meanwhile, Sallust, chronicler of the late Roman Republic, warns of the temptations of wealth and pleasure in his histories. The ambition for fame is laudable, but the desire for money alone is intrinsically worthless and corrupting. For Sallust, the virtuous republic becomes a victim of its own success: