A Sense of the Passed

Our first text for tonight comes from Lionel Trilling’s “Manners, Morals, and the Novel”, delivered in 1947 at Kenyon College and available in your local copy of The Liberal Imagination. The great man had been instructed to inform about ‘manners in relation to the novel’. Here he indicates the proportions of his subject, making points that have all been made before, no doubt, but making them exceedingly well and elegantly:

“Somewhere below all the explicit statements that a people make through its art, religion, architecture, legislation, there is a dim mental region of intention of which it is very difficult to become aware. We now and then get a strong sense of its existence when we deal with the past, not by reason of its presence in the past by by reason of its absence. As we read the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that we are reading them without the accompaniment of something that always goes along with the formulated monuments of the present. The voice of multifarious intention and activity is stilled, all the buzz of implication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels, in slang and humor and popular songs, in the way children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer.

Some of the charm of the past consists of the quiet – the great distracting buzz of implication has stopped and we are left only with what has been fully phrased and precisely stated. And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace – we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it. From letters and diaries, from the remote unconscious corners of the great works themselves, we try to guess what the sound of the great works themselves, we try to guess what the sound of the multifarious implication was and what it meant.

Or when we read the conclusions that are drawn about our own culture by some gifted foreign critic – or by some stupid native one – who is equipped only with a knowledge of our books, when we try in vain to say what is wrong, when in despair we say that he has read the books “out of context,” then we are aware of the matter I have been asked to speak about tonight.”

This sets me up for what I want to talk about. I just reread Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, by Anatole Broyard.

Broyard, you may know, was a critic, columnist and editor for the NYT for many years. This memoir, published in 1993, is about coming home from the war and reading books and having sex in Greenwich Village in 1947. Our year for the night. And Broyard hung out with all those Partisan Review & etc. types. He told tales of Spanish Harlem to Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald and Clem Greenberg. A man tries to sneak into a club without paying his 75 cents, then draws a switchblade on the ticket taker. When the cry goes up that Pablito is dead, the clubbers take their revenge:

“I watched from above as they knocked him down and began to kick and stomp him. It went on for quite a while and I could hear the wet sound as they kicked him. When it was all over, they pulled out handkerchiefs and wiped the blood off their trousers and shoes. By the time the police arrived there was nothing left of the stranger but a suit of clothes and a shapeless mass. The police were philosophical and no charges were pressed.”

Then it turns out Pablito was only nicked. He emerges with a bandaid on his head. And the band, the Happy Boys, all embrace and kiss him.

“The thing about that scene, I told them, was the economy of it. A man who stabs another man over a seventy-five cent ticket isn’t worth even a shudder of compassion, not even a spasm of revulsion. I didn’t feel any pity at all for him. I didn’t even think of him as a man. Of course, those were days when violence was uncommon, when it could stil be seen as dramatic or moral. What I had seen was an act of tribal solidarity, and it was satisfying in its way to see how much the Happy Boys cared – how they laughed and kissed Pablito.”

Clem and Dwight wanted to know whether it was true about the handkerchiefs. “They wanted to see Spanish Harlem. They wanted to visit the primitive, see it in the flesh.”

Broyard – perhaps you didn’t know – is allegedly the model for the ficitional protagonist of Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain. You know, the Anthony Hopkins movie about the black guy passing as white? (It’s not supposed to be good and, no, I didn’t see it either.) Anyway, Broyard was black, passing as white. And in the one picture I’ve seen of him he looks very slightly like Hopkins. Very slightly. Henry Louis Gates has a pretty interesting essay online (full of lots of typos), “The Passing of Anatole Broyard”.

Nothing about how Broyard’s black – or passing as white – in his memoir. Nothing about how he abandoned his wife and daughter, for that matter. (I strongly disapprove of that behavior, may I say. The abandonment, I mean. You can pretend to be whatever race you want in my book.) There is something strangely slick and a bit clinical about the whole presentation. A bit like a too-calculated Hollywood movie about Greenwich Village in 1947. Gritty and sexy and all. But sort of staged, and basically clean under a layer of stage dirt. Always sort of sneaking an anxious glance at you, to make sure you are happy with what the man is saying. It’s sort of sweet, like a nice movie that would have Tobey Maguire in it (but not as Spider-Man). When Broyard does something anxious or weird, his parents say ‘it’s because you’re a veteran’, as though that explains anything. Broyard’s friends say everything is ‘Kafkaesque’, as though that explains anything. It’s cute. Gates says that Broyard had neocon tendencies, among other tendencies – like having a jockey on his lawn – and this sort of attitude shows through at odd moments and puzzled me until I read Gate’s essay and things sort of fell into place. I like Gates’ comparison of Broyard to Gatsby. That feels right on the money (and we still have our nice Gatsby cover shots up at John & Belle, if you want to go take a look at the high-bouncing, gold-hatted loverboy.)

So what does this have to do with Trilling? Two things?

First, Broyard has this amusing recollection of a course taken at the New School:

“I took a course in the psychology of American culture, given by Erich Fromm. Though he had just arrived, he knew America better than we did, because it impinged on him … Sitting on a platform, behind a desk, like a judge in a criminal court, he passed his remorseless judgment on us. We were unwilling, he said, to accept the anguish of freedom. According to him, we feared freedom, saw it as madness, epistomology run amok. In the name of freedom, we accepted everything he said. We accepted it because we liked the sound of it – no one knew then that we would turn out to be right in trying to escape from freedom. [What’s with that last line, eh?]

Fromm was short and plump. His jaws were broader than his forehead and he reminded me of a brooding hen. Yet, like everyone else, I sat spellbound through his lectures. I’ll never forget the night he described a typical American family going for a pointless drive on a Sunday afternoon, joylessly eating ice cream at a roadhouse on the highway and then driving heavily home.”

Can you see the conservative twinkle of disdain in Broyard’s eye? I can. On the other hand, Fromm really has always struck me as one of those ‘gifted foreign critics’ who hasn’t got a damn clue about America, so his gifts are wasted until he gives it a rest and talks about what he actually understands. (Cf. the case of Adorno, whose not inconsiderable influence on American cultural studies is and remains a source of dumb wonder to me. Like if you started a school of rock criticism based on that chapter from Allan Bloom. The very notion.) Always with the made-up philosophical explanations of why it’s deep to despise those who like ice cream on a Sunday afternoon, or jazz, or movies, or rock, or whatever bug has gotten in somebody’s European ear. At best, witnessing this sort of condescending sulk can give you a Barton Fink feeling, calling forth a superior and savage: “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” And all that jazz.

(For the record, I quite enjoy Adorno’s Minima Moralia. His total refusal to lighten up. Ever. Just becomes endearing. And it isn’t like he wasn’t a smart and learned man, who knew a lot about Hegel. Just as Allan Bloom knew a lot about Plato, without thereby being the least bit qualified to expound on how Mick Jagger is causing relativism.)

On the other hand, what the hell do I know about what it was like to live in America, and go for a Sunday drive, in 1947. Maybe it was invariably a desperate and pathetic flight from freedom. I sort of have my doubts. But it’s not like I was there.

Here is Broyard on sex in 1947, more than 20 years before it was discovered in 1969 (or whenever Larkin says):

“To someone who hasn’t lived through it, it’s almost impossible to describe the sexual atmosphere of 1947. To look back at it from today is like visiting a medieval town in France or Italy and trying to visualize the life of its inhabitants in the thirteenth century. You can see the houses and the cathedral, the twisting streets, you can read about the kind of work they did, the food they ate, or about their religion, but you can’t imagine how they felt; you can’t grasp the actual terms of their consciousness. The mood or atmosphere, the tangibility of their lives, eludes you because we don’t have the same frame of reference. It’s as if the human brain and the five senses were at an earlier stage of development.

In 1947, American life had not yet been split open. It was still all of a piece, intact, bounded on every side, and, above all, regulated. Actions we now regard as commonplace were forbidden by law and by custom. While all kinds of things were censored, we hadn’t even learned to think in terms of censorship, because we were so used to it. The social history of the world is, in some ways, a history of censorship.”

That is nicely said. Here is a bit of supporting evidence. Another case of someone having some difficulty – er, passing – so that you really don’t know what to think about what is implied by what’s going on:

“The saddest part of sex in those days was the silence. Men and women hadn’t yet learned to talk to one another in a natural way. Girls were trained to listen. They were waiting for history to give them permission to speak. They led waiting lives – waiting for men to ask them out, for them to have an orgasm, to marry or leave them. Their silence was another form of virginity …

There was another kind of silence: the silence of the body, not only in sex but in its other functions. I’ve known girls who never, even if they stayed a week at my apartment, had a bowel movement. If orgasm was difficult, excretion was impossible. And so these poor girls would be twice constipated, would have a double bellyache. In my small apartment, the toilet was too near, like the nearness of shame. I could see the evidence of this withholding in their clouded eyes, their fading complexions, even their speech patterns. Their faces would get puffy, their bellies would be distended, their bodies knotted. Their sentences would clot as they longed to get away, to let go of it all.”

I suppose Leon Kass is probably hrumphing, ‘and rightly so! The Wisdom of Repugnance!‘

Meanwhile, back on planet 2004, if you are like me you are probably chortling in memory of that scene from “Secrets of a Successful Marriage” (season 5). Reverend Lovejoy is counselling Marge about why divorcing Homer is OK: “Oh, Marge. Everything is a sin. Have you ever actually sat down and read this thing? Technically, we aren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom.”

Maybe Fromm was right after all, for all I know. I guess the moral of the story is: if you were reading a novel about life in Greenwich Village in 1947, and there was a girl staying in the guy’s apartment, you wouldn’t naturally infer that she was possibly severely, voluntarily constipated. As Matthew Yglesias might say tomorrow, since he has before: in the crazy hook-up culture of today, that sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Everyone just does everything with everyone, more or less. The kids these days don’t even think oral sex is sex (so I’m told.) So what are the odds that going to the bathroom is sex? I’ll bet even Leon Kass doesn’t think it’s sex. So how are you supposed to read and understand novels if major characters might be seriously constipated, and you would never know?

So how much else from the world of manners of a time and a place as recent and close as Greenwich Village, NY are we just missing when we read not so old novels?

I realize that was a lot of straining just for a potty joke, basically.