Sunday, December 30, 2012

Rousseau's Confessions

From Damrosch:

At the very time
that he struck observers as sadly lacking in self-knowledge, he was
achieving a profoundly original self-analysis whose influence has been
enormous. The Confessions are at once the record of a life, a recreation
of its meaning, and an imaginative space in which the author found re-
lief by recovering what it felt like to be his earlier self. "It's the past," he
wrote at Wootton, "that makes the present bearable."

During the years in Motiers, Rousseau had become aware that others
were discussing details of his life. He received a long anonymous letter
from Geneva that referred to his father's stay in Constantinople and ex-
ile after a street quarrel, his own time at Bossey with the Lamberciers,
his apprenticeship to "a brutal, barbarous master," his flight from Ge-
neva and refuge with la folie de Varrens in Annecy, and his ostentatious
display of feeding "numerous schools of fishes" during his visit in 1754·
Later The Sentiment of the Citizens gave its viciously slanted account of
Rousseau's recent life. He assumed that the information in it came from
Mme d'Epinay (some of it undoubtedly did), and he vowed to clear his
name as well as to exact revenge by giving his own recollections of her
and other ex-friends. Like Augustine, from whom he borrowed his title
(though he never mentions the earlier Confessions), he would acknowl-
edge his sins, but unlike Augustine he would also prove his essential
goodness.

The influence of the Confessions has been so pervasive that it is hard
today to appreciate how original the book really was. To trace formative
experiences, and in particular to take childhood experience seriously,
was virtually unheard-of in Rousseau's day. A few earlier writers had
recounted occasional anecdotes of childhood, but compared with the
Confessions these were thin and unrevealing. When Voltaire drafted an
autobiographical sketch at the end of his long life, he dismissed his early
years with the comment, "Nothing is more insipid than the details of in-
fancy and the time spent at school." As for Diderot, his biographer says
that he was "almost intentionally inscrutable" about his first thirty years
and that he pitied the state of childhood for its helplessness and igno-
rance. When he did mention his early days, it was to congratulate him-
self on precocious brilliance, not to disclose errors and humiliations.
"One of the sweetest moments of my life - it happened more than
thirty years ago and I remember it as though it were yesterday - was
when my father saw me coming home from school with my arms full of
prizes I had won and my shoulders loaded with crowns they had given
me that were too big for my brow and had slipped down over my head
... From the farthest distance that he saw me, he dropped his work,
came to the door, and burst into tears."

Rousseau was well aware that the story of a working-class boy strug-
gling to find himself was in itself unusual. "Many readers will be pre-
vented from continuing by this sole idea. They can't conceive that a
man who needs bread could be worthy of their acquaintance." But that
was the whole point: it was his unusual history that had allowed him to
develop into a challenging and original thinker. However, his outsider
role also explained why people found it so hard to understand him even
after he acquired fame. He had always had a sense of being misunder-
stood, even as a child, and becoming a writer was at first a way of com-
pensating for it. "The course I have chosen," he acknowledged in the
Confessions, "to write and to conceal myself, is precisely the one that has
suited me." But the concealment was all too successful, and he was dis-
covering just how deeply his self-image was threatened by other peo-
ple's perceptions. George Eliot asks, "Who can know how much of his
most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to
have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened by ruin?"
Rousseau's English disaster was a classic illustration of that. So now he
proposed to reveal everything. "I must keep myself constantly before
the reader's eyes, so that he can follow me in all the aberrations of my
heart and all the recesses of my life."

By addressing the reading public rather than the deity, as Augustine
had done, Rousseau was inaugurating a modern confessional mode in
which private secrets are exposed to the largest possible audience. At the
very beginning of the Confessions, indeed, he exclaims with ringing elo-
quence that he is certain God will forgive him:

Let the trumpet of the Last Judgment sound when it likes; 1 will
present myself with this book in hand before the sovereign judge ...
Eternal Being, assemble around me the numberless throng of my
semblables; let them hear my confessions, let them groan at my dis-
graceful actions, let them blush at my wretchedness. But let each of
them reveal his heart with the same sincerity at the foot of your
throne, and then let a single one say, if he dares, "I was better than
that man."
The throng are the readers who had bought Rousseau's books and pre-
sumed to stand in judgment, and he demands that they follow his ex-
ample in telling the truth about their own faults.

It might well seem that such a procedure was no confession at all.

Grimm rather snidely remarked, "If Monsieur Rousseau were ever to
become pope, he would delete penitence from the list of the seven sacra-
ments," and another writer saw even the most shaming revelations as
self-serving: "He seems to have formed the plan of depicting himself in
the mire in order to show that he escaped from it. There is a kind of
vanity in saying, 'I was nothing and 1 became famous; 1 was a liar and I
chose the motto vitam impendere vero.'" As Blake trenchantly put it long
afterward, "The book written by Rousseau called his Confessions is an
apology and cloak for his sin and not a confession." But even if Rous-
seau denied other people's right to judge him, he never stopped judg-
ing himself. Un appeasable guilt for actions long past - the abandoned
children, the stolen ribbon -lay at the heart of the Confessions. Rous-
seau got rid of original sin and held that man is naturally good, but
much of his own behavior remained bafflingly bad, and when he set out
to penetrate the inner darkness he invented modern autobiography. He
probably believed at first that by reviewing his life he could explain
clearly who he was and why. But the more he probed his recollections,
the more he was brought to a halt by incidents that made no sense and
yet seemed profoundly significant. And although he was convinced that
he possessed an essential integrity to which he must be true, he was
forced to acknowledge, as he says when narrating his encounter with
Mme de Larnage during the journey to Montpellier, "There are times
when 1 seem so little like myself that one would take me for another
man of completely opposite character."

Montaigne, Rousseau's great predecessor in self-analysis, pursued an
intellectual quest, with a genial skepticism and the motto Que sais-je,
"What do I know?" Rousseau's quest was more visceral, as Trousson
says: "the anguished and contradictory 'Who am I?' of modern con-
sciousness." Pondering the strange vicissitudes of his life, Rousseau
came to believe that he was most himself when he was acting most
unpredictably. He repeatedly tells of moments that he describes with
words like "caprice," "intoxication," "extravagance," "delirium," and
"madness," moments that are pressure points in what Marcel Raymond
calls "a psychology of rupture and discontinuity." Instead of singling
out typical episodes, he focuses on atypical ones, strange and unsettling
occasions when he seemed to act totally out of character and yet was
profoundly himself. It is as if his true and deepest self is released by
these ruptures, like volcanic vents.

There is a double perspective throughout the Confessions, and the
tension between the two angles of vision gives it a kind of stereoscopic
depth. On the one hand, Rousseau never abandoned his conviction of a
fundamental core of self. But on the other hand, he understood that the
self is profoundly shaped by life experiences. To probe the ones that
seemed most hauntingly peculiar became his method for finding out
who he was, and in seeking to detect hidden patterns in them he was
starting out on a path that would lead eventually to psychoanalysis.

From Julian by Gore Vidal

Admittedly their worship of corpses did not appeal to
him, but he was later to find manifestations of "the One'
in even odder places. Had Julian been what he thought b
was-a philosopher in the tradition of Plato-One might haw
understood his dislike of the Christian nonsense. He would
have been like you and me. But Julian was concerned
finally, with the idea of personal immortality, the one obsession
Christians share with those who are drawn to the old mystery cults.

Despite everything Julian wrote on the subject, I have never
understood precisely why he turned against the religion of
his family. After all, Christianity offered him nearly everything
he needed. If he wanted to partake symbolically of the bod
of a god, why not remain with the Christians and eat their
bread and drink their wine instead of reverting to the bread
and wine of Mithras? It is not as if there was anything lacking
in Christianity. The Christians have slyly incorporated mos
of the popular elements of Mithras and Demeter and Dionysos'
into their own rites. Modem Christianity is an encyclopedi
of traditional superstition.
I suspect the origin of Julian's disaffection is in his family.

Constantius was a passionate Christian, absorbed by doctrinal
disputes. With, good reason, Julian' hated Constantius.
Therefore, he hated Christianity. This puts the matter f
too simply, yet I always tend to the obvious view of things since
it is usually the correct one, though of course one can never,
get to the bottom of anything so mysterious as another man's
character, and there is a mystery here.

Julian was Christian in everything except his tolerance of
others. He was what the Christians would call a saint. Yet
he swung fiercely away from the one religion which suited'
him perfectly, preferring its eclectic origins, which he then
tried to systematize into a new combination quite as ridiculous
as the synthesis he had rejected. It is a strange business and
there is no satisfactory explanation for Julian's behavior. Of
course he claimed that Bishop George's partisanship disgust,
him as a boy, and that Porphyry and Plotinus opened his:
eyes to the absurdity of Christian claims. Well and good. But
then why turn to something equally absurd? Granted, no
educated man can accept the idea of a Jewish rebel as god.
But having rejected that myth, how can one then believe that
the Persian hero-god Mithras wasbom of light striking rock,
on December 25th, with shepherds watching his birth?
am told that the Christians have just added those shepherd
to the birth of Jesus.) Or that Mithras lived in a fig tree which
fed and clothed him, that he fought with the sun's first
creation, the bull, that he was dragged by it (thus symbolizing'
man's suffering) until the bull escaped; finally, at the command
of the sun god, Mithras stabs the bull with a knife and from
the beast's body come flowers, herbs, wheat; from the blood,
wine; from the seed, the first man and woman. Then Mithras
is called up to heaven, after celebrating a sacramental last
supper. Time's end will be a day of judgment when all will
rise from their graves and evil will be destroyed while
the good will live forever in the light of the sun.
Between the Mithraic story and its Christian sequel I
see no essential difference. Admittedly, the Mithraic code of
conduct is more admirable than the Christian. Mithraists
believe that right action is better than contemplation. They
favor old-fashioned virtues like courage and self-restraint.
They were the first to teach that strength is gentleness. All
of this is rather better than the Christian hysteria which
vacillates between murder of heretics on the one hand and
a cringing rejection of this world on the other. Nor can a
Mithraist be absolved of sin by a sprinkle of water. Ethically,
I find Mithras the best of all the mystery cults. But it is absurd
to say it is any more "true" than its competitors. When one
becomes absolute about myth and magic, the result can only
be madness.
Julian speaks continually of his love of Hellenism. He
honestly believed he loved Plato and reasonable discourse.
Actually, what he craved was what so many desire in this
falling time: assurance of personal immortality. He chose
to reject the Christian way for reasons which I find obscure,
while settling on an equal absurdity. Of course I am sym-
pathetic to him. He dealt the Christians some good blows and
that delighted me. But I cannot sympathize with his fear of
extinction. Why is it so important to continue after death? We
never question the demonstrable fact that before birth we did
not exist, so why should we fear becoming once more what
we were to begin with? I am in no ,hurry to depart. But I
look on nothing as just that: no thing. How can one fear no
thing?
As for the various ceremonies and trials the Mithraic initiate
must undergo, the less said the better. I understand that one
of the twelve tortures is the pulling out one by one of the pubic
hairs, a most spiritual discipline. I was told that part
of the ceremonies are conducted while everyone is roaring
drunk and trying to jump over ditches blindfolded, a symbol
no doubt of the bewildering life of the flesh. But men are
impressed by secret rites, the more gruesome and repellent the
better. How sad we are, how terrified to be men!

Libanius: It is not often one finds a philosopher so entirely
lacking in the religious sense. It is like being born unable to
perceive colors which are plain to everyone else.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

on Rousseau

what was truly original

was his claim that each person has a unique temperament that

needs freedom to flourish. His concern was not with methods of instruction

but with its purpose. Plenty of writers had criticized the

mindless memorization and brutal discipline of conventional teaching.

The historian Gibbon, for example, wrote bitterly, "A school is the cavern

of fear and sorrow. The mobility of the captive youths is chained to

a book and a desk ... They labor, like the soldiers of Persia, under the

scourge." But the usual solution was only palliative, recommending reforms

whose goal was still to produce docile members of society. John

Locke in his influential Thoughts Concerning Education stressed the

malleability of young minds, which resembled "white paper or wax, to

be molded and fashioned as one pleases," and he placed heavy emphasis

on discipline. "Those that intend ever to govern their children should

begin it whilst they are very little, and look that they perfectly comply

with the will of their parents. Would you have your son obedient to you

when past a child? Be sure then to establish the authority of a father as

soon as he is capable of submission, and can understand in whose power

he is." Recommendations like these seemed self-evidently correct not

just to conservatives but to progressive thinkers too, including Mme

d'Epinay, who wrote a didactic treatise of her own called Letters to My

Son, in which she argued for rigorous discipline.

In Rousseau's view it was a disastrous mistake to teach children to

fear authority. He held that the only power they should face was brute

necessity, the obstacles to freedom that are inherent in the very nature of

things. They would then choose their actions because they understood

what needed to be done, not to please adults or to escape punishment.

Locke recommended influencing children by alternating doses of "esteem

and disgrace," but Rousseau wanted to protect his imaginary child

from the pressure of other people's expectations. His intention was to

show how a person might prepare for life in society without sacrificing

integrity, "seeing with his own eyes, feeling with his own heart, and

governed by no authority except his own reason." In another formulation,

"He is a savage made to live in cities"; or again, "He is not the man

of man but the man of nature."

As for the usual content of education, Rousseau held that it was

worth having but was not an end in itself, and he challenged conventional

pedagogy with insights that have been renewed and forgotten by

every subsequent educational estabiishment. Like Socrates, he believed

that true knowledge flowed from asking questions, not from memorizing

answers. "I am teaching my pupil an art that is very long, very painful,

and assuredly not what your pupils have, the art of being ignorant

... You impart knowledge, well and good; I am concerned with the

means of acquiring it." Underlying the entire work was the insight that

had burst upon Rousseau on the road to Vincennes. As he ringingly declared

at the beginning of Emile - all of his books are remarkable for

memorable opening sentences - "Everything is good as it comes from

the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands

of man."

Years after Emile became a success, Rousseau restated his position

more fully: "This book ... is simply a treatise on the natural goodness of

man intended to show how vice and error , are foreign to his constitution,

invade it from outside, and imperceptibly alter it." Traditional religious

teaching held that each person enters the world already infected

by sin and needs to be forcibly shaped into a moral agent. Enlightenment

theory held that each person enters the world a blank slate-

Locke's famous tabula rasa - waiting to be written on by sensory experience

and by parents and teachers. Rousseau believed that each person

enters the world with a disposition that needs to grow according to its

own nature. The child has much to learn, but only if he learns it in his

own way, and most of what usually passes for education is counterproductive.

"Dare I expound the greatest, most important, and most useful

rule in all of education? It is not to gain time but to lose it."

Most compelling of all in Emile is the deep note of sadness over the

waste in life and the insistence that education shouldn't make it worse.

"How rapidly.we pass our time on this earth!" Rousseau exclaims. "The

first quarter of life flows away before we know what to do with it, and

the last quarter after we have ceased to enjoy it. At first we don't know

how to live, soon we're no longer able to, and in the space that separates

these two useless extremes, three-quarters of our time is consumed by

sleep, labor, pain, constraint, and distress of every kind. Life is short, not

so much because it lasts such a short time as because we have almost

none of that time to enjoy it." Close to half of the children born in the

eighteenth century died before reaching adulthood, and their all too

brief existence was being poisoned by needless constraint and beatings

(a tutor in Fielding's Tom Jones is expressively named Thwackum).

"Even ifI were to suppose that this education had reasonable objectives,

how can one see without indignation the poor unfortunates subjected to

an intolerable yoke and condemned to continual labor like galley slaves,

with no assurance that so much effort will ever do them any good? The

age of gaiety goes by amidst tears, punishments, threats, and slavery."

To encourage Emile to think for himself, the tutor presents him with

a series of covertly orchestrated challenges. When he figures out how

to grow beans, he is in raptures over his achievement, but is thunderstruck

afterward when the family gardener rudely wrecks hishandiwork.

Robert, the gardener, then explains that when Emile was digging

he unknowingly ruined a crop of melons, and from this blunder he

learns the value of private property. The point is that children need to

grasp ethical principles through concrete experience, something very

different from memorizing verbal formulas. "It is easy to put into their

mouths words such as kings, empires, wars, conquests, revolutions, and

laws, but when it becomes a question of attaching distinct ideas to these

words, it will be a long distance from the conversation with Robert the

gardener to all of these explanations."

On another occasion Emile is astounded when a conjurer gets a

floating wax duck to follow a piece of bread in his hand. After he returns

home, the tutor helps him make a duck of his own and explains

the mystery by demonstrating what happens if a magnet is hidden inside.

There must have been a magnet in the duck and a piece of metal in

the bread. Swollen with pride at his own cleverness, Emile hurries back

to the conjurer, whom he publicly embarrasses by duplicating the trick

with some bread of his own that contains metal. "The boy cries out and

shivers with pleasure. The clapping and acclamation of the crowd make

him dizzy and he is beside himself." But the lesson is not over. The next

time Emile shows up, the duck inexplicably recoils from his bread, but

responds with alacrity to the conjurer's bare hand and even to the sound

of his voice. The crowd jeers, and Emile returns home baffled and humiliated.

Invited by the tutor, the conjurer drops by to explain how it

was done: he had an accomplice hidden under the table with a powerful

magnet of his own. The experience teaches Emile "how many mortifying

consequences are attracted by the first movement of vanity," and he

has thus learned two things at once, the principle of magnetism and the

principle that pride goes before a fall.

When Emile learns to reason, then, it is in the context of immediate

self-interest. Whereas writers on education normally thought of children

as rational beings, Rousseau put emotions first, suggesting that the

age of nature lasted until the age of twelve and that the age of reason

did not begin until then. Since children are necessarily self-centered,

they keep on pushing until they get what they want, and they need to

learn that limits are imposed by existence itself, not just by the arbitrary

decrees of adults. Rousseau describes another boy, more willful than

Emile, who would insist on going for walks whenever it was most inconvenient

for his tutor. The solution was to let him go off by himself,

whereupon he got lost, was jeered at by passersby, and became seriously

scared. An accomplice of the tutor's, following to make sure the boy

came to no harm, then brought him home chastened and repentant.

Such a scenario is obviously manipulative, especially when Rousseau

adds that the neighbors had all been coached to play their parts. At

times the tutor's satisfaction at his power almost deserves to be called sadism;

Starobinski does call it that. But manipulativeness is the point.

Growing up in society, no one can possibly live as a natural man, and

the tutor's role is to create artificial situations in which Emile will develop

properly without realizing it, just as the servants at Clarens believe

they are following their own wishes when they carry out Wolmar's.

Sunday, October 14, 2012

The Sot-Weed Factor

Sunday, September 23, 2012

The Razor's Edge

“I have found myself in the course of my life in many strange situations… I have ridden a pony through Central Asia along the road that Marco Polo took to reach the fabulous lands of Cathay; I have drunk a glass of Russian tea in a prim parlour in Petrograd while a soft-spoken little man in a black coat and striped trousers told me how he had assassinated a grand duke. I have sat in a drawing room in Westminster and listened to the serene geniality of a piano trio of Haydn’s while the bombs were crashing without; but I do not think I have ever found myself in a stranger situation than when I sat on the red-plush seats of that garish restaurant for hour after hour while Larry talked of God and eternity, of the Absolute and the weary wheel of endless becoming.”

“I suppose it was the end of the world for her when her husband and her baby were killed. I suppose she didn't care what became of her and flung herself into the horrible degradation of drink and promiscuous copulation to get even with life that had treated her so cruelly. She'd lived in heaven and when she lost it she couldn't put up with the common earth of common men, but in despair plunged headlong into hell. I can imagine that if she couldn't drink the nectar of the gods any more she thought she might as well drink bathroom gin.'

That's the sort of thing you say in novels. It's nonsense and you know it's nonsense. Sophie wallows in the gutter because she likes it. Other women have lost their husbands and children. It wasn't that that made her evil. Evil doesn't spring from good. The evil was there always. When that motor accident broke her defences it set her free to be herself. Don't waste your pity on her, she's now what at heart she always was.”

***

“It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them.”

***

“When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?”

***

“Refecting on the high divorce rate in America as contrasted with England "American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers”

****

“Just as the embryo recapitulates in brief the evolution of the species, so did Suzanne recapitulate all the styles of her lovers.

Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford

“When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.”

From Gibbon

The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.
Of the people.
The superstition of the people was not embittered by any mixture of theological rancour; nor was it confined by the chains of any speculative system. The devout polytheist, though fondly attached to his national rites, admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth. (3) Fear, gratitude, and curiosity, a dream or an omen, a singular disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed him to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors. The thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not discordant materials. As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes, who had lived, or who had died for the benefit of their country, were exalted to a state of power and immortality, it was universally confessed that they deserved if not the adoration, at least the reverence of all mankind. The deities of a thousand groves and a thousand streams possessed, in peace, their local and respective influence; nor could the Roman who deprecated the wrath of the Tiber, deride the Egyptian who presented his offering to the beneficent genius of the Nile. The visible powers of Nature, the planets, and the elements, were the same throughout the universe. The invisible governors of the moral world were inevitably cast in a similar mould of fiction and allegory. Every virtue, and even vice, acquired its divine representative; every art and profession its patron, whose attributes, in the most distant ages and countries, were uniformly derived from the character of their peculiar votaries. A republic of gods of such opposite tempers and interest required, in every system, the moderating hand of a supreme magistrate, who, by the progress of knowledge and flattery, was gradually invested with the sublime perfections of an Eternal Parent, and an Omnipotent Monarch. (4) Such was the mild spirit of antiquity, that the nations were less attentive to the difference than to the resemblance of their religious worship. The Greek, the Roman, and the Barbarian, as they met before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves, that under various names, and with various ceremonies, they adored the same deities. The elegant mythology of Homer gave a beautiful, and almost a regular form, to the polytheism of the ancient world. (5)
Of philosophers.
The philosophers of Greece deduced their morals from the nature of man, rather than from that of God. They meditated, however, on the Divine Nature, as a very curious and important speculation; and in the profound inquiry, they displayed the strength and weakness of the human understanding (6). Of the four most celebrated schools, the Stoics and the Platonists endeavoured to reconcile the jarring interests of reason and piety. They have left us the most sublime proofs of the existence and perfections of the first cause; but, as it was impossible for them to conceive the creation of matter, the workman in the Stoic philosophy was not sufficiently distinguished from the work; whilst, on the contrary, the spiritual God of Plato and his disciples resembled an idea rather than a substance. The opinions of the Academics and Epicureans were of a less religious cast; but whilst the modest science of the former induced them to doubt, the positive ignorance of the latter urged them to deny, the providence of a Supreme Ruler. The spirit of inquiry, prompted by emulation, and supported by freedom, had divided the public teachers of philosophy into a variety of contending sects; but the ingenuous youth who, from every part, resorted to Athens, and the other seats of learning in the Roman empire, were alike instructed in every school to reject and to despise the religion of the multitude. How, indeed, was it possible, that a philosopher should accept, as divine truths, the idle tales of the poets, and the incoherent traditions of antiquity; or, that he should adore, as gods, those imperfect beings whom he must have despised, as men ! Against such unworthy adversaries, Cicero condescended to employ the arms of reason and eloquence; but the satire of Lucian was a much more adequate, as well as more efficacious weapon. We may be well assured, that a writer conversant with the world would never have ventured to expose the gods of his country to public ridicule, had they not already been the objects of secret contempt among the polished and enlightened orders of society. (7) Notwithstanding the fashionable irreligion which prevailed in the age of the Antonines, both the interests of the priests and the credulity of the people were sufficiently respected. In their writings and conversation, the philosophers of antiquity asserted the independent dignity of reason; but they resigned their actions to the commands of law and of custom. Viewing, with a smile of pity and indulgence, the various errors of the vulgar, they diligently practised the ceremonies of their fathers, devoutly frequented the temples of the gods; and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, they concealed the sentiments of an Atheist under the sacerdotal robes. Reasoners of such a temper were scarcely inclined to wrangle about their respective modes of faith, or of worship. It was indifferent to them what shape the folly of the multitude might choose to assume; and they approached, with the same inward contempt, and the same external reverence, the altars of the Libyan, the Olympian, or the Capitoline Jupiter. (8)
Of the magistrate.

Friday, May 04, 2012

About Lillian Hellman's works

The debate about Hellman's place as a playwright would go
on for the rest of her life and well after it. Any attempt at evalua-
tion, however, must start with an acknowledgment of how few
prominent playwrights outlive their own period. Of the hundreds
of authors of successful plays in the 350 years since Shakespeare,
only a relatively small number are recognizable to us today and
even fewer of their plays are ever performed. From the last one
hundred years alone, there are scores of poets and novelists who
are known and read today, but only a few playwrights who are
regularly revived: Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw-and
even those turn up only sporadically. Of all the literary forms,
playwriting seems to be the most rooted in its own period, the
most transitory.

During Hellman's years of greatest strength, the 1930s, she was highly

regarded but by no means preeminent. She was certainly outranked by

Eugene O'Neill, as well as Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Clifford

Odets, Elmer Rice, William Sa royan and Thornton Wilder.

Except for O'Neill, these playwrights

have all but disappeared from American stages, and Hellman,
while never considered in O'Neill's class as an artist, can approach
his record for revivals.

It is perhaps Hellman's refusal to go the way of a good second-
rate playwright that irks her critics more than anything else. A
partial explanation of her staying power may be found in the
formidable personality of the woman herself, a possibility that
became stronger after the publication of her highly successful
memoirs with their resounding evocations of her battles, adven-
tures and brushes with history. But the advent of the television
talk show obviated interesting personality as a motive for explor-
ing an author's work when, by switching the dial, you could have
the personality itself. The reason for the modest endurance of
Hellman's plays must lie in the work.

When he was drama critic for The New York Times, Clive
Barnes had an interesting theory about why Hellman incites a
number of critics to mayhem. He felt that the well-madeness of
her plays was its own worst enemy in that it tempted the audi-
ence of a Hellman play to "accept and analyze it on the highest
level." But the plays do not reward such an effort, which, Barnes
inferred, left playgoers feeling duped and therefore hostile. His
subtle analysis seems off in one respect: it can't be the well-
madeness of Hellman's plays that invites criticism at the highest
level-Blithe Spirit and Angel Street are well made-it is more
likely her unrelenting seriousness. What Hellman stumbled on-
as Edward Albee did in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-was
that the dark side of the human condition, if presented with en-
ergy, intelligence and brio, can be entertainment of a high order.

We are excruciated by such plays, and we are exhilarated as
on a drive in a fast car. To a large degree we are made to reflect,
in part to satisfy ourselves that some lofty and recondite message
is not at hand, and in part on the nature and origins of the human
foibles that are being so vividly portrayed. But once aroused to
reflection, we are reluctant to settle for pat conclusions like "the
world has villains," so we burrow on to find more specific mean-
ings, such as "the Hubbards are an indictment of the capitalist
system." After being so brilliantly stimulated, we refuse to accept
the absence of a brilliant message.

In a 1960 interview with The New York Times's Seymour
Peck, Hellman said, "I don't know that I was ever very much con-
cerned, in a literary sense, with the world. I don't think play-
wrights should write about society ... I've always written about
people." Assuming that Hellman was honest in disclaiming po-
lemical motives in writing The Little Foxes, or any of her plays
except Watch on the Rhine (and even that play, she says, did not
start out as an antifascist tract), it is still no coincidence that
those who imposed a message on her came up with a political
conclusion-the rottenness of the capitalist system-that was in-
deed a belief of Hellman's.

If the immediate drama that has captured the author is pre-
sented honestly and unequivocally, it is not surprising that the
author's larger vision will emerge, whether or not it is reduced to
a motto and pinned over his or her typewriter. (Once asked if a
certain play was political, critic Kenneth Tynan replied, "When
one character asks another for a cigarette, there are political im-
plications.") A case could be made for Hellman's approach: Let
the big themes shift for themselves, and concentrate instead on
the theatricality, the logic and the sense of pacing of the story in
order to grasp the audience's attention and emotions, and hold
those emotions until the final curtain., If it turns out that the
larger themes generated by a play are indeed unconscious on the
author's part, how many demerits should he or she be docked as
a creative artist? And will such docking make any difference to
the people who decide what plays are revived? Probably not. It
is an unfair game, since we do not always have a Seymour Peck
around to extract confessions on the absence of creative premedi-
tation from our most eminent writers.

With or without the big themes and elusive messages, Hell-
man's "fast drives" through human greed, ruthlessness and self-
delusion prove that seriousness and unpleasantness don't have to
be profound to justify themselves. The people who like her plays
can always Hnd in them the deeper themes, and those who dis-
like them will continue to insist they are about nothing.

The knack of commanding involvement was, perhaps more
than anything else, Hellman's strength as a playwright. There is
clearly a mystery to that talent because such giants as Thomas
Wolfe, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot tried for
it and failed. It surely is connected with the ability to create clear-
cut characters who engage our emotions-positive or negative-
economy of dialogue and a relatively quick (by the end of the
first act) establishment of the plot: who wants what and what the
obstacles are.

Elizabeth Hardwick's complaint that Hellman in The Little
Faxes missed the opportunities for nuance and intellectual delving
that are offered by the character of Horace is perhaps a serviceable
paradigm for a major difference between a play and a novel.
(Hardwick admits her interest in the theater is primarily liter-
ary.) Unlike a play, a novel is not working against the clock; it
can be read for a while, then considered for a while, perhaps with
passages reread. The playwright must deal with audiences squirm-
ing in uncomfortable seats who can only be asked to take in so
much in one evening, identify with only so many characters, fol-
low only so many plot twists, weigh only so many moral dilem-
mas. If all of a play's characters are given dimension, hard choices,
vacillating personalities, the result would be the intellectual equiv-
alent of a Busby Berkeley finale-too much happening onstage for
the eye to take in.

Hardwick's complaint may also provide a valuable clue to
what makes a dramatist. By passing up whatever literary tempta-
tions Horace presents, Hellman may have been exercising her tal-
ent for writing plays that work. Once again it is difficult to know
whether she did this consciously or instinctively, and on that
point she offers no help. From her manuscripts at the University
of Texas it is clear that she had a compelling urge, no doubt
abetted by Hammett, to get on with the business at hand cleanly
and quickly, Every revision cuts out "fat"-excess dialogue, ex-
cess background, excess characters, excess plot complications.

There is no reason why the ability of a playwright to recog-
nize enervating superfluities must be intellectualized. In Hell-
man's case, clearly it was not. In a 1942 interview she said that
she came to feel that she had one character too many in Watch
on the Rhine-just as she had in Days to Come-but she was un-
able to figure out which character was unnecessary. Such a no-
tional approach to creation raises (or lowers) the fashioning of a
play to the mystical; it certainly takes it out of the realm of hard
analysis.

Hellman is proof that playwrights must possess, in addition
to whatever other talents they may have, a certain noncerebral
instinct that tells them when an element is "wrong," "doesn't
work," "slows down the action" -or any of the many cliches that
conceal a bafHement about why something hurts rather than helps
a creative work. The important thing is that this ruthless editorial
sense be there. Whatever it is, Hellman had that sense to a degree
shared by few others.

The business of economy and pacing that are so essential in
the theater points to another Hellman strength, rarely cited: her
dialogue. Few dramatists have shown her ability to move the ac-
tion ahead with such speed and logical thrust without seeming
forced and unnatural. Repeatedly in Hellman plays there are
scenes in which the lines do not move the action ahead in steps
but in leaps, yet never do the characters seem to be leaping-they
are merely talking.

One of the techniques Hellman uses to achieve such a rapid
pace is the elimination of the niceties and obfuscations that clut-
ter most conversations. It is not so much the economical use of
language, although that too is symptomatic, it is the speed of can-
dor. Her characters say precisely what they feel, and it is often
the sort of assertion for which an ordinary talker would require
five buildup lines. Hellman skips the buildup lines, leaving only
the hard sinew of the most direct sort of communication. The ef-
fect is exhilarating when it is achieved to the degree that Hellman
regularly achieved it, and it is an aspect of her better plays, as
much as their deft construction, that has earned them respect and
that keeps an audience, as more than one critic has observed,
holding its breath.

In reply to the most frequently made charge against Hell-
man's plays, other than their being melodramas-that they were
"well-made," with the pejorative implication of contrivance-the
critic Allan Lewis in a discussion of The Little Faxes came to her
defense by picking up on Hellman's own defense that fictional
writing by its very nature is contrived. "All writers rearrange life
and impose their own will on the chaos of reality," Lewis wrote.

"The test in the realistic theater is whether the characters seem
to be self-propelled. as they. do in The Little Faxes." In defending
Hellman against this familiar charge, Lewis also called attention
to another of her strengths: her characters are not just Hellman in
different disguises, but believable individuals with a life and mo-
tivational system of their Own.

In her introduction to the Chekhov letters, Hellman writes
that it still seems to surprise some people that authors inevitably
come to like all of their characters. Whether or not that is the
commonplace Hellman suggests, it loses its commonness when
coming from the mouth of the creator of such nasty pieces of
work as Regina Giddens, Ben Hubbard and Mary Tilford, among
others. But it certainly is a strong clue as to why Hellman's vil-
lains are so arresting: she betrays an underlying sympathy for
them, an ability to see things through their eyes.

As for the accusation that her plays are not about anything,
one is tempted to have recourse to the many favorable Hellman
critics who say that her plays are about "the problem of good and
evil" -but that empty analysis is tantamount to saying her plays
are about "the problem of human beings" and would tend rather
to substantiate the charge of their being devoid of subject.

There is no doubt, however, that a strong moral current runs
through all Hellman's work, as it did through so much of the seri-
ous American drama of the thirties, forties and fifties. It is the
making of charges-something is wrong here-and then spending
two or three acts finding out who or what is to blame. Talking
about the playwrights of the thirties, Malcolm Goldstein in The
Political Stage wrote: "They wished to analyze the social forces
that created killers, perjurers, slanderers and other antisocial be-
ings." In the following decades, the playwrights' list of culprits
would be broadened to include the family nexus and American
values. But the ever-present assumption was the basic assumption
of liberalism: whatever the particular horror, a cause could be
rooted out, condemned, then changed or eliminated.

The notion that the seeking out of guilt is the dominant
theme of so much contemporary theater was developed by Robert
Brustein in his brilliant essay "The Crack in the Chimney." Bru-
stein expanded the judgmental nature of mainstream American
theater to include the forties, fifties and sixties, citing in partic~-
lar such playwrights as Arthur Miller and David Rabe: Brustein
wrote about their dramas: "The event to be excavated IS still the
guilt of the (generally older generation) protagonis:s; and. the
drama retains the air of the courtroom, complete WIth arraign-
ments, investigations, condemnations, indictments, and punish-
ments."

Brustein then relegated such fault-finding plays to a second-
ary rank in the artistic hierarchy. His essay convincingly argued
that Ibsen, who is thought to be the prototype of the social-
realist dramatists like Hellman and Arthur Miller whom Brustem
finds so accusatory, had made quite the opposite point: that the
sources of guilt are not readily accessible to the inquiring mind.
Brustein said, "Great artists have traditionally understood that the
true explanations are beyond concepts of blame."

(When he wrote this essay, Brustein had already become
friends with Hellman on Martha's Vineyard, saying with pride
that he was one of few theater people admitted to her circle. His
disdain for the judgmental drama that she epitomizes may explain
why she never, according to Brustein, solicited discussions with
him about her plays, while frequently asking his opinions and ad-
vice about her prose. )

When looking over the critical evaluation of Hellman's the-
ater work as a whole, the tendency for even the most kindly tabu-
lator is to pass over the admirers, whose existence can be assured,
and get to the denigrators who are chipping away at the edifice.
If her rank as an artist is arguable, her prestige and eminence are
facts. Even before the memoirs, she was honored by as many lead-
ing universities as any American playwright; her plays are per-
formed regularly and around the world, and her position as dra-
matist is debated periodically in intellectual Journals, which IS
remarkable. Who in recent decades has argued about the work of
Sherwood or Odets?

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