The Way We Live Now

Anthony Trollope's remarkable novel, The Way We Live Now, is 825 pages in my 1950 Alfred A. Knopf edition. I might mention that my book smells slightly old, and slightly damp. I found it, of course, on a shelf in a basement of a second hand store and when I saw it I realized that I had wanted to read it for many years and now had my chance.

To get the most obvious question out of the way first, the answer is yes, that in so many ways this book, which was published in parts in an American magazine beginning in 1874, is very much up to date and describes much of the way we live now. He is said to have written the book in response to the several large financial scandals of the 1870s. I presume they somewhat parallel the scandals of the first decade of our own century.

Trollope curiously includes a character, Mrs. Carbury who resembles his own scribbling mother, a woman author who does not get much encouragement from the publishing fellows in her immediate society. The problems of publication are quite different today, but the fright of trying to make a living as a writer is doubtless much the same if we go by Mrs. Carbury's experience.

But most striking for our time is the intense emphasis on money throughout the book. At its center is Augustus Melmotte, a master financial wizard who takes London by storm, is reckoned to be the wealthiest man in town, but who is suspected of being a rogue on the run from the continent. Melmotte has no manners whatever, and his bluntness is a blight on his immediate circle. He actually manages to be elected to Parliament from Westminster by virtue of plowing cash in the appropriate circles. . . does this ring a contemporary bell? And in Parliament he speaks to members as if they were waiters, and they do not approve.

Naturally, he turns out to be a con man of the dimension of our modern Mr. Madoff, wrecking the lives of many, losing a fortune, and unlike modern con men, commits suicide with prussic acid, not a pleasant way to go. But before he goes, he takes in a number of upper class but impecunious gentlemen and lords with his scheme for a Mexican railway to Vera Cruz. He sells shares at a high rate, and might have continued to flourish if it had not been for his hasty dealings with a piece of property whose bill of sale he casually forged. Once that was out he was out.

There are several romantic subplots, with Hetta Carbury refusing her cousin and preferring his friend, whose own situation is questionable. Marie Melmotte who, it turns out, has her own money, is refused by several adventurers hoping for her fortune but who assumed once Melmotte was dead that there was none. She, as a last resort, heads to America.  Even Mrs. Carbury ends the novel with the hope of a happy relationship with the editor of a local paper.

I have not seen the TV special that was done in 2001, but I think I will make an effort. I found the novel most interesting and assume the televised version, with David Suchet as Melmotte, would be quite worth seeing.

THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA

Visiting the Great Wall has been a tourist “must” for centuries, and it has to be admitted that the experience is unforgettable. Apart from the fact that the wall can be seen from deep space and that it is possibly the most massive thing built by man, it has in its way a kind of beauty that grows on one.



Seeing it recently right after the heaviest snow that Beijing had seen in sixty years, we found it especially beautiful. The snow intensified its massiveness and outlined it against its background of mountains stretching on for miles. On the wall itself, where we all tried to walk uphill, the snow was treacherous enough to make us wish for ropes to hold on to or boots that dug deeply into the crust. Yet everywhere we looked, the scenery exalted the vision of the wall winding toward the horizon.


Several things impressed us. First, the wall was filled with tourists, but not primarily western tourists. Far and away the largest number of tourists was local or consisting of groups of workers, all wearing red baseball hats, or groups of citizens with their families and their children. We were amazed when some of them came and photographed us, then placed their wives next to us for another photograph. They placed their children between us and took our photograph. Then I began taking their photograph and giving them my camera to have them photograph us with their wives and children, usually with their arms around us or holding hands. Young couples insisted on having their photographs taken with us and then older couples came and followed suit. I don't remember anything like this happening in an American tourist spot.

We shook hands with many people who simply smiled and spoke a few words. Almost none were in English. But I had the impression that there was genuine good feeling between the Chinese tourists and us American tourists. Everywhere I looked there were smiles and good cheer. It was encouraging on many levels.  For some reason it made me think of Samuel Johnson.  In his home in London there is a large brick supposedly taken from the Great Wall and given to him as a remembrance.  I suppose a good photograph is something like a good brick.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

This month and last I spent an agreeable time reading the entirety of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (Penguin, tr. Gerald E. Bevan, 860 pp.).

Naturally, I had read segments in abbreviated editions, but this was the first time I had read the entire book from beginning to end. The experience was enormously rewarding. His understanding of the effect of equality in a new nation was profound, and he saw in the death of the old aristocracy the wave of the future. He also found it difficult to fully understand the nature of government in America, since it seemed to him that there was little or none. He saw that people were independent, free, and beholden to no one. He saw that the primary impulse in America was the love of money, and thus that individualism (he is among the first to use the term) was a power to reckon with. This was in 1830, and clearly little has changed.

He also thought that the real power in America was in the individual states and not in the federal government. Even with Andrew Jackson, a potential "tyrant," in position of president–the man Tocqueville says, "is supposed to be working for the institution of a dictatorship in the United States" (461) has actually very little power to force any state, especially South Carolina, to his will. He has little regard for Jackson ("a man of a violent disposition and mediocre ability" [324]), and he deduces that the federal government's power will probably never soon compete with the power of the 24 confederated states of the union.

He has much to say about the possibility of civil war in the democracy of the United States, and concludes that it is virtually unthinkable. And he concludes this after the 1830sTariff incident in which South Carolina armed its militia in a threat to leave the union over perceived damages to its economy. Jackson backed down and the militia returned home. Twenty five years later the brutal Civil War was begun, Lincoln prevailed, and federalism became the power that forced the states to adhere to law.

De Tocqueville's is one of the most important books in American political history, so, for me, reading it was a really important experience, especially in light of the 2010 State of the Union speech by president Obama. Unlike many politicians he did not quote from de Tocqueville, but he was aware of some of the same stresses in political opinion as are expressed in Democracy in America.

In a moment of intense irony, the Governor of Virginia gave the rebuttal for the Republican party. He stood in the Capitol rotunda of Richmond, the center of the Confederacy where Jefferson Davis spoke, in a building designed by Jefferson and built by slaves--a truly symbolic act on his part--and what he did, by quoting Jefferson's comment that local government was the best government, was to reopen the dispute between strong federal government and strong states rights governments, the very things that de Tocqueville focuses on for more than 500 pages. I was amazed.

The Governor ignored the Civil War and the result of Lincoln's decisions to make the federal government strong enough to enforce laws in rebel states. The ignorance of the governor appalled me. But I know he was following an ideology that insists that the federal government be reigned in. Of course, that ideology also forgets that in the 1960s, a hundred years after Fort Sumter, we had to send our young people south to enforce federal rules regarding segregation. If we go back to the states rights version of government, we'll have subtle Jim Crow laws and much other undemocratic legislation designed to restrict abortion, gay rights, and free speech. If that happens, Alexis de Tocqueville would surely recognize the nation he saw in 1830 and feel that his prophecy of a possible tyranny of the majority could come true.

Negotiating With the Dead

Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing is a hymn to literature itself. This is not a self-help book, or a how-to book, but a smart introduction to the meditations that absorb every serious writer. And the word "serious" there implies only that the writer must be serious about his or herself because writers are, as Atwood makes very clear, in a complex relationship with the past and with the dead writers who have established the terrain and clarified the game of writing.

She covers everything one might expect, including the important question of who the writer's audience must be. She almost comes close to saying that the dead may be among the writer's audience, but of course she holds back and reflects upon the possibility that the writer may have only an audience of one--in which case there may be some difficulties. The book is after all the messenger that communicates the message. It is not the writer who does so. Once the book is gone from the writer's hand time moves on and the writer is no longer the person who wrote the book.

These are the Empson lectures at Cambridge and they allude indirectly to the ambiguities that are central to Empson's most famous book, Seven Types of Ambiguity. In one fascinating chapter she addresses the ambiguity implied in the multiple identities of the writer writing. One identity is as a person, another as the poet. The poet is most unpoetical as a person, and that alone creates a curious situation for our contemplation.

In general, this book sweeps through literature from Gilgamesh to Yeats, Delillo, and beyond, and while something short of a book of literary criticism, it is a book of literary discussion and literary communion. So many writers, famous and obscure, are addressed and quoted in these pages that one soon realizes there is a sub-text here that cannot be ignored. Writers must be readers. Such a simple observation may seem unnecssary to the "serious" writer, but the facts are very simple. Many people who think they are going to be writers neglect the most important thing of all: a literary education. Even James Patterson reads Joyce (except for Finnegans Wake). What Atwood does here is create a hymn for the love of literature.

THE PEKING OPERA

Even in winter, China was at times a vibrant place. I spent three weeks this November in China, during the coldest winter since 1949, the year of Mao's Long March. In general, I have to say that China was gray and sometimes grim because of the weather–no sun, considerable cold, dampness, and eventually lots of snow. It surprised the natives, but as a New Englander, we were prepared. The Peking Opera was a nice surprise. Not only was there an interesting and socially significant libretto, but the visuals were often stunning. The opera was a welcome contrast to the out of doors in several ways. For one, the warmth and colors were lovely and delightful. But the contrast with the outdoor vendors, most of whom were hard working and serious about their business, but who were also desperate and obviously poor, was considerable. China is amazing in many ways, and one of the most remarkable is in the contrasts one sees all around the major cities.

Of course, the size of the cities is overwhelming for most of us. These days almost every city is marked by a plethora of cranes high in the skyline, building condos and business landmarks everywhere. Rarely is there fewer than three to seven visible cranes in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. In the region of the Three Gorges on the Yangtze, one sees cities built for the displaced people whose homes are now below almost 300 meters of water.

People are mixed in their reactions to this gigantic project. Some naturally lament the loss of their ancestral homes, but others revel in the fact that they now have their own condo with indoor plumbing and separate bedrooms. What impresses me as an outsider is the fact that China is rebuilding itself while we are waging war and resisting serious investment in our own infrastructure.

Beijing's National Stadium, The Bird's Nest

The National Stadium, the Bird’s Nest, in Beijing is one of the most photogenic of modern buildings. It appears its best at night, like many dazzling women. It is the product of a Swiss architectural firm that employed a Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, to help them keep the project in line in terms of its indebtedness to Chinese designs. Weiwei introduced the concept of great Chinese ceramics in part because any great stadium, is in part a bowl. But the use of such dramatic steel trusses crossing everywhere throughout the building gives the impression of a bird’s nest more than that of a bowl.

The Chinese had taken to the building right away, and the dramatic photographs that circulated in the Western media made it a darling of magazines and newspapers. The reviews of the building were almost uniformly positive, and the anticipation of being within it sparked all the tourists who went to see the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics. It was a great success in providing the space for the track and field and gymnastic events as well as for the general ceremonious uses to which it was put. It pleased almost everyone.

Today, a year after the Olympics, the fate of the building is in some doubt. The plans were designed so that the building would house shopping malls and also become an 80,000 seat entertainment center. As of now, relatively few large entertainments have taken advantage of the space, and in some places, according to commentators, the building is flaking and not being well maintained.

We hope to see the Bird's Nest for ourselves in November. Perhaps we can see it at night, with its “makeup” on.

ANDREW CARNEGIE'S "GOSPEL OF WEALTH"

Written in 1889, Carnegie’s essay was immediately influential and still remains among the most quoted of his writings. The very imprimatur of the word "Gospel," which literally translates to "Good News," but which lingers in the imagination as akin to the words of God, was a bold and effective stroke lending considerable weight to his thoughts.

His essential message is that with the evolution of civilization comes the inevitable condition of some possessing great wealth and others possessing very little. Instead of condemning this situation (as did the Communists whom Carnegie reviled), he tells us that we should be delighted because it indicates the forward thrust of civilization. As he says, the Sioux had no wealthy magnates and thus their civilization is primitive. Now that civilization has progressed, we have barons of industry.

His recommendation to the wealthy is that they dispose of their wealth before they die. That wealth, he says, they hold in trust for the community. It’s nice to leave that money to others when the wealthy die, but it’s vastly better to administer it while living. That way the money gets spent doing the most good for the most people. Besides, the wealthy magnate knows best how to spend the money; the public would waste it.

One thorny point he makes is that great industrialists held down the wages of their workers on the grounds that the extra money they might have made would have been spent on gewgaws that would not have benefitted society. Whereas, Carnegie, who was passionate about keeping wages low, used all that extra money to build 2500 libraries across the country. A much better way to benefit the community. Carnegie tried to convince his readers that he knew how to satisfy the needs of the public much better than did the public.

As unpleasant as this may sound to some people, an argument could be made in his favor by examining the circumstances of the last three decades. American wealth was spent mostly not by people like Bill Gates, but by the average middle and upper-middle class citizen. That money was spent on big TVs, CDs, GameBoys, iPods, and thousands of other cheap products aimed at entertaining individuals. Nothing wrong with that, but it would have made Carnegie seem prophetic. What have the spending habits of average citizens accomplished for the community that compares with Carnegie’s libraries? And where, today, are the people who Carnegie expected to be reading in those libraries? Where are the readers at all? And where is the wealth of the nation?

CHARTRES: TRIUMPH OF HOPE

What strikes us about this figure from Chartres Cathedral, carved sometime around 1145, is its extraordinary expression of regality, its queenliness, its sense of peacefulness, its quiet power of dignity and belief. She holds the canon of hope in her hands and offers us the most human face on the central portal.

In essence, she points the way in, through the door, to the maze, to the mysteries of a belief that demands understanding, not only of stone, but also of the human implication expressed in this stone. She has withstood not only the weather, but the vagaries of history. She was spared the worst carnage of the French Revolution and all the other iconoclastic terrors of the centuries after it. That may be a result of accident, or possibly a result of respect and of hope.

Carved in stone, the queen is a simulacrum of flesh. She represents a spiritual presence and a spiritual future. Yet, because She is stone and formed in lifelike three dimensions, she points to a future that includes the three dimensions of flesh. Resurrection, a key belief of the Christian faith, has depended on the rising of the body from the grave, and thus a persistence of the flesh in the afterlife.

The stoniness of the queen tells us there is hope after death. But it also tells us that such hope is essentially meaningless if it means only that the spirit endures. It is essential that the flesh endures, or else our consciousness would perish with the flesh. The most powerful statement the sculptor could make is to render this figure to seem lifelike enough to convince us she is not only a symbol, but a fact. Fact and belief cohere to produce hope.

BALZAC, EUGENIE GRANDET

"A bourgeois tragedy without poison, dagger, or bloodshed"
Balzac, in "Family Sorrows"

After finishing Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, I went to see a new French film, Summer Hours. The amazing thing is that the 1833 novel is paced almost exactly like the 2009 film. The French seem to have time in novels or film to let things play out without rushing them and, given our penchant for action, the French films seem slow. Very slow.

What I liked about Eugenie Grandet was the portrait of bourgeois French life in a provincial town in which Eugenie's father becomes rich by doing the capitalist thing and double-crossing others in his village and then, with piles of gold in his house, pleads poverty. In this sense the book reveals a great deal about the opportunity for wealth created in the 1820s at the end of the Empire and the beginning of a new France, one not dominated by aristocrats, but open to the wiles of clever businessmen like Grandet, who understands, like Jeremy Bentham, that money is a commodity.

Like a good farmer, Grandet sees that money begets money. However, Grandet is not a farmer, but a cooper, and he puts his skills to work by secreting his gold in small barrels. Ironically, his clever business deals sound very much like modern deals with bonds and derivatives and I constantly expected the bubble would burst. But it did not.

Eugenie Grandet is a love story too, but of no kind that makes sense to us today. Eugenie remains faithful to her first love, her cousin Charles, a cad who eventually marries a woman for her title and her money. The irony, however, is that Eugenie inherits her father's unsuspected 17 millions and if Charles knew, he would have married her.

Eugenie herself marries on condition that Des Grassins, her husband, demand no sex. That way she can be faithful to her true love. And since her husband primarily wants her money, everyone is happy.

The French Film is about successful French upper middle class people. A sister (living in New York), a brother (in Peking) and an older brother (in Paris) inherit their mother's country house with magnificent art and antiques. One wants to keep the house for the next generation, the others need the money and realize they will never come back to the house. The next generation is interested in hip-hop music, drugs, vodka, and mild orgies, and they do not recognize the name Corot even though there have always been two splendid Corot's in the house.

There are some marvelous ironies in both works, and some lovely writing in Balzac. He was one of Proust's favorites, as well as a favorite of Henry James. Both those writers have important essays on Balzac. Flaubert also much admired Balzac and this particular novel and I suspect, as well, that Dickens found him instructive.

N. C. Wyeth: Illustration versus Art

After a recent visit to Brandywine Valley and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (for the Cezanne Show), I gave some thought to the issues of illustration and how people evaluate illustration differently from fine art. Above are two examples of N. C. Wyeth's work that offer an interesting comparison.

The painting on top is of N. C. Wyeth's wife and seems to have been painted with no intention of making it an illustration for a book. The second painting is of a pirate dueling. It is somewhat reminiscent of Goya, but it is clearly intended for a children's book on pirates. It is typical of most of N. C. Wyeth's work, while the portrait of his wife is not.

What I'm interested in knowing more about is the relationship of these two paintings. In my mind, and probably for most of those interested in fine art, the portrait is a much more revealing, sensitive, and moving painting than the duel. And the ultimate question is: Why? So much art, including oil paintings like Wyeth's, is illustration that it is not a simple thing to dismiss it as a lesser form of art. Yet, these two paintings push us to that conclusion.

This is problematic in many ways, not least of which is that some of the world's most important paintings are illustrations. I point to Leonardo's Last Supper, Michelangelo's Creation, Goya's Third of May, Paul Delaroche's Execution of Lady Jane Grey, Edgar Degas' The Dancing Class, and hundreds more--especially hundreds of crucifixions and pietas, all of which seem to command our attention not as illustrations, but as fine art.

Is it just that the kind of illustration we tend to demean is devoid of profound emotional content and simply substitutes sentiment for feeling or drama for understanding? Or is it that there are gradations in illustrations just as in fine art? Is Edward Hopper just good illustration and N. C. Wyeth not so good?

Standing in front of an N. C. Wyeth, as I did only last week in Brandywine Museum, demonstrated that Wyeth's technique is the equal of many great artists, and certainly much better than most artists. So it is not technique. What is it that distinguishes illustration from fine art?