The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature

Page from Syndey Flower, The Mail-Order Business (Chicago: Mclurg, 1912), 20.

Handbooks like Flower’s served as precedents for Manus’s own long-distance learning endeavors. Undeterred by the tightrope incident, he concocts one scheme after another to make his fortune, from discount volumes of Cervantes to his “Gravid Water,” a tonic that is supposed to cure rheumatoid arthritis:

THE GRAVID WATER

The miraculous specific for the

complete cure within one

month of the abominable

scourge known as Rheumatoid

Arthritis.

Dose—one t-spoonful three

times daily after meals.

Prepared at

LONDON ACADEMY LABORATORIES²⁵

Such moments insert O’Brien into a familiar tradition of novelistic parodies of “humbuggery,” in which Wells’s Tono-Bungay also belongs, with its titular sham tonic advertisement in the evening paper: “HILARITY—TONO-BUNGAY. Like Mountain Air in the Veins,” which inquires, “Are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner? Are you bored with your Wife?”26

After Manus “prescribes” gravid water for his guardian Collopy’s initially minor rheumatism, Collopy succumbs to a gruesome “premature and rapid decomposition of the body” brought about by the pernicious liquid.²⁷ It is easy enough to read The Hard Life as a simple satire of the gullible Irish reading public, but there is a deeper concern underlying O’Brien’s text, about the co-optation of the imagination such manuals performed. His works pose the question of what separates constructive from pernicious textual influence. As Musil puts it, “prophets and charlatans rely on the same phrases, except for certain subtle differences no busy man has the time to keep track of.”²⁸

Another death-by-bad-advice takes place in The Third Policeman. The book’s orphaned narrator—whose name we never learn—has devoted his life to completing a scholarly index on a made-up philosopher/scientist called de Selby. Lacking the funds to support the publication of his de Selby research, the narrator is convinced by his malevolent acquaintance Divney to help murder their wealthy neighbor Mathers in order to steal his box of cash. He relates how Divney made his case after he “read portions of my ‘de Selby index’ (or pretended to) and discussed with me afterwards the serious responsibility of any person who declined by mere reason of personal whim to give the ‘Index’ to the world.”²⁹ But when the narrator is plunged into the novel’s nightmarish fourth dimension, his de Selby specialization leaves him in the lurch.

The true crime of The Third Policeman is not Mathers’s murder but the narrator devoting his life to a writer with no good advice. As O’Brien explains, “in the Layman’s Atlas [de Selby] deals explicitly with bereavement, old age, love, sin, death and the other saliences of existence. It is true that he allows them only some six lines but this is due to his devastating assertion that they are all ‘unnecessary’.” The novel details at length the shortcomings of de Selby’s philosophy when it comes to practical insight. “Like all the greater thinkers, he has been looked to for guidance on many of the major perplexities of existence,” O’Brien relates. However, “the commentators, it is to be feared, have not succeeded in extracting from the vast store-house of his writings any consistent, cohesive, or comprehensive spiritual belief and praxis.” For example, although de Selby has developed an elaborate theory about the association between water and happiness, his account of this “hydraulic elysium” neglects to specify “whether the reader is expected to infer that a wet day is more enjoyable than a dry one or that a lengthy course of baths is a reliable method of achieving peace of mind.”30 The nightmarish impenetrability of The Third Policeman is what it looks like to live in a world of theory without praxis.

The best example of de Selby’s bad advice is conveyed in an anecdote from one of his commentators. The narrator relates the story of a lovelorn man who appeals to de Selby for advice about a woman with whom he is obsessed. De Selby has earned the reputation of town savant, counterintuitively, because of the mystique surrounding the fact that he never reads the newspaper. His eccentricity leads people to believe he must have secret knowledge or wisdom. But “instead of exorcising this solitary blot from the young man’s mind, as indeed could easily have been done, de Selby drew the young man’s attention to some fifty imponderable propositions each of which raised difficulties which spanned many eternities and dwarfed the conundrum of the young lady to nothingness.” As a result of de Selby’s intervention, the young man forgets about his love and hatches a plan to commit suicide instead. When, by a lucky accident, the suicide plan is thwarted, he settles for a life of crime and is eventually imprisoned for larceny and “offences bearing on interference with railroads.” O’Brien writes, “So much for the savant as a dispenser of advice.”³¹ As one writer observes, O’Brien’s narrator is in love with the wisdom of de Selby “the way the man on the American street might love the wisdom of, oh, say, L. Ron Hubbard.”³²

Leo Tolstoy, the nineteenth-century moralist, demanded: What good is science if it cannot teach me how to live?33 O’Brien, an author not typically associated with moral sententiousness of any kind, asks the same of de Selby. His novel opens with two epigraphs:

Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.

(de Selby)

Since the affairs of men rest still uncertain,

Let’s reason with the worst that may befall.

(Shakespeare)³⁴

As many have observed, O’Brien here places an invented author and a canonized one on the same ontological plane. The form of the epigraph itself holds a crucial place in the literary history of self-help (as recounted in my discussion in chapter 1 of the legacies of Smiles’s Hamlet epigraph in Japan). The literary politics of self-help are in many ways the politics of the epigraph: brazenly decontextualized citations for the sake of personal use (exemplified, to use another Shakespeare example, by Ulysses’s Mr. Deasy’s quoting of racist villain Iago as a prescription for financial behavior).³⁵

But these epigraphs also stage two clashing textual ethics. The first expresses a relativist disengagement from worldly anxieties. Whether the target is Berkeley’s idealism or Humean skepticism, the quote shows how intellectual specialization has come to depend upon the renunciation of common sense. As Philip Coulter puts it, “The philosopher has given the narrator, the critic, a system which cannot be readily understood and by which it is impossible to live.”³⁶

The second epigraph articulates the Stoic practice of praemeditatio malorum, the preparation for future evils. In the early modern period, this was absorbed into the Renaissance view that philosophy should be about “learning how to die.” The relevance of this second epigraph to the ensuing narrative tends to be overshadowed by de Selby’s provocation. However, it points to what we might call “negative visualization” as the nexus where stoic and modernist practice converge. The neo-stoical and neo-modernist tendencies of contemporary self-help are linked by the way their investments in negative visualization—in imagining the worst that may arise—operate as potential correctives to the industry’s affirmative tunnel vision.

But there is one place in The Third Policeman where the novel appears to productively court the reader’s desire for advice: the execution scene. We find the narrator standing on the scaffold for a crime he does not understand, in a world he does not recognize, and with a name he can’t remember, and de Selby’s paltry theories are nowhere to be found. Instead, the narrator copes with the imminence of death by turning his thoughts to the natural world, and the tone of the narration abruptly shifts. The art of gallows wisdom is unfortunately almost its own genre in Irish history; think of the rousing execution speeches of Roger Emmet and Wolfe Tone. The scaffold is not only an important site for political persuasion but also an occasion to articulate the moral legacy of a life.

The narrator’s own contribution to this tradition of gallows wisdom presents some of the most beautiful writing of the entire modernist canon. The narrator is on the scaffold, about to be executed, and begins to imagine what might happen after death:

Down into the earth where dead men go I would go soon and maybe come out of it again in some healthy way, free and innocent of all human perplexity. I would perhaps be the chill of an April wind, an essential part of some indomitable river or be personally concerned in the ageless perfection of some rank mountain…. Or perhaps a smaller thing like movement in the grass on an unbearable breathless yellow day, some hidden creature going about its business—I might well be responsible for that or for some important part of it. Or even those unaccountable distinctions that make an evening recognizable from its own morning, the smells and sounds and sights of the perfected and matured essences of the day, these might not be innocent of my meddling and my abiding presence.37

Hugh Kenner called these the most “deeply felt” sentences in all of O’Brien’s work.38 In contrast to the boisterous anomie of The Third Policeman’s absurdist universe, we’re presented here with a scene of serene integration: to become part of the essence of things. Although the improvement economy obliges individuals to constantly prove themselves professionally indispensable, equanimity is here associated with transcending the necessity of self-justification. The narrator dreams of an occasion to just simply be, to exist outside of the endless loop of goals and rewards. And, significantly, in this moment he does not turn to de Selby but to Wordsworth’s account of “the light that never was, on sea or land”³⁹ for consolation. During this crisis, it is literature and not quack advice or pseudophilosophy that comes to his aid.

In contrast to the manipulations of de Selby and Manus, this passage models a nontransactional version of worldly influence. It continues, “Or perhaps I would be an influence that prevails in water, something sea-borne and far away, some certain arrangement of sun, light and water unknown and unbeheld, something far-from-usual.” Throughout the novel, O’Brien establishes a link between the spiritual ideal of ego transcendence depicted in the nature imagery and the ethos of artistry “for its own sake,” which finds expression in the policeman MacCruiskeen’s aesthetic endeavors, from his tiny, invisible chests too small for the human eye to see, to his miniature piano that plays music on vibrations that elude the human ear.⁴⁰ Against de Selby’s bombastic obfuscations, O’Brien here outlines an ethics of the autotelic.

For Kenner, these passages offer evidence of the ongoing importance of religion to O’Brien’s thought. But O’Brien’s celebration of nature as a potential key to a more sustainable form of advice not only links this moment to Catholicism but also grounds his approach in the methods of the Stoics, whom his Shakespeare epigraph invokes, and who advised individuals to learn to live in accordance with nature.41 This goal may help to explain the appeals to stoicism in so much contemporary self-help, as more fully detailed in chapter 6, which is finally recognizing the error and futility of efforts to control the natural world (a theme, as we saw, also raised by Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet). In fact, O’Brien wrote his master’s thesis on “Nature in Irish Poetry” at University College Dublin in 1934. His works indicate the extent to which neo-stoical and neo-modernist inclinations of contemporary self-help are linked, not just by their shared recognition of the limits of human agency before nature but also by their joint investment in the value of negative visualization as a potential corrective to anthropocentric hubris.

EDITH WHARTON VS. GURDJIEFF

The case of O’Brien exemplifies how textual advice becomes a new kind of problem for twentieth-century authors. Plenty of scholars have explored how the modernists resisted Victorian didacticism, but I am interested in the status of modernism’s countercounsel as a forward-looking reaction to the increasing commercialization of advice. Moreover, this problem of irresponsible advice is not just a charge that modernism slings at the self-help industry but one to which modernist authors are themselves susceptible. De Selby’s eschewal of common sense, for example, his ability to beguile his disciples, who mistake the incomprehensible for the wise, was not just a tendency of the period’s gurus but also of modernist icons like Joyce. “Your talk,” exclaims O’Brien’s protagonist, “is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”⁴² In addition to a warning against the mail-order credulity depicted in The Hard Life, it is difficult not to read O’Brien’s critique of “deselbiana” in The Third Policeman as in part a takedown of the early Joyce industry. Both novels strive to deflate and parody charismatic language by describing discipleship as a unilateral devotion that does not give back.

Like O’Brien, Edith Wharton is concerned with the public credulity that links the worship of modernist icons such as Joyce with devotion to spiritual leaders or gurus. She also draws a correspondence between modernism’s eschewal of common sense and self-help’s deployment of vague and impenetrable language. In 1927, Wharton wrote an entire novel, called Twilight Sleep, lampooning the pseudospirituality of the age.43 Wharton stood “apart from modernism,” as the title of Robin Peel’s monograph about her indicates,⁴⁴ and her joint aversion to the fads of self-help and modernism brings out these movements’ shared ambitions: to harness the processes of free association, liberate readers from the automatism of habit, and urge individuals to use their time well. Twilight Sleep centers around the oblivion of matriarch Pauline Manford, who is so busy fawning over the latest trendy self-improvement gurus—whether the mystic Mahatma, with his “School of Oriental Thought,” or, later, the “Inspirational Healer” Alvah Loft, author of Spiritual Vacuum Cleaning and Beyond God—that she fails to notice her husband falling in love with her daughter-in-law Lita under her own roof.⁴⁵ Her packed regimen is reminiscent of Jay Gatsby’s, another self-improvement fanatic.⁴⁶ As Mrs. Manford’s secretary has transcribed, “7.30 Mental uplift. 7.45 Breakfast. 8. Psycho-analysis. 8.15 See Cook. 8.30 Silent Meditation. 8.45 Facial Massage. 9. Man with Persian miniatures. 9.15 Correspondence. 9.30 Manicure. 9.45 Eurythmic exercises. 10. Hair waved. 10.15 Sit for bust. 10.30 Receive Mother’s Day deputation,” and so on. The ongoing joke of the narrative is that Mrs. Manford needs a stress reliever to unwind from her numerous relaxation therapies; she is “agitated by the incessant effort to be calm.” Indeed, “one might as well have tried to bring down one of the Pyramids by poking it with a parasol as attempt to disarrange the close mosaic of Mrs. Manford’s engagement list.”⁴⁷

One of Twilight Sleep’s most ardent admirers was Aldous Huxley, who applauded its depiction of the rather “more magical than religious” quality of modern superstition, citing the book as a precedent for Brave New World.⁴⁸ Although Huxley played his own significant role in the development of the New Age philosophy as a founder of the “Human Potential” movement and speaker at Esalen, he had little tolerance for the improvement trends that Wharton’s novel depicted:

With her customary acuteness, Edith Wharton has laid her finger on the essential fact about modern superstitions. They give results here and now; and if they don’t give results, they fail. People turn to the supernatural for some particular and immediate benefit—such as slender hips, freedom from worry, short cuts to success, improved digestions, money. They want, not truth, but power.49

Along the same lines, theorists of modernity have suggested that modern culture replaces meaning with information, value with technique.⁵⁰ However, the reconsideration of modernist secularism undertaken by Pericles Lewis and others brings into relief self-help’s status as an extension of, rather than as a substitute for, religious thinking.⁵¹ Early New Thought pamphlets read like sermons and abound with references to God, the Universal Mind, and Creation, which is why William James counted the movement among the twentieth-century’s new “varieties of religious experience.”⁵² Even today, self-help is not a rejection of religion tout court but something like secularism with benefits. Mrs. Manford’s self-improvement rituals resemble a form of meditation or prayer; with repetition, seemingly vacuous self-improvement clichés, such as Coué’s famous sentence, adopt the meaningless sonority of a Buddhist mantra, or an incantation from an ancient religious rite.

As Twilight helps us to see, both modernism and self-help were deeply invested in what Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan Goldman describe as the early twentieth-century culture of celebrity.53 The annus mirabilis of modernism—1922—marked both the international tour of the self-help guru Émile Coué, the French pioneer of the positive thinking industry, and the founding of George Gurdjieff’s New Age “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man” at Fontainebleau. Men like Gurdjieff and Coué were causes célèbres for the day’s elite, an excuse for the wealthy to rally and congregate. They were also a last resort of the desperately ill; a tubercular Katherine Mansfield died in a damp room in Gurdjieff’s institute in 1923,⁵⁴ and the modernist artist Roger Fry traveled in vain to Coué’s institute in Nancy, France, in hopes of finding a cure for his illness.⁵⁵ The qualities Wharton condemns in self-help correspond to the qualities she resists in modernism: the cultishness, the primitivism, the fetishism of obscurity and difficulty, the linguistic bravado, even the dependence of the male “genius” upon a network of enabling and supportive women.

Mrs. Manford’s devoted patronage of the gurus of the day eventually leads, through a clumsy series of events, to her daughter Nona being shot after she discovers her father and sister-in-law together in bed. Some critics have speculated that the real-life inspiration for one of the self-help gurus in the novel, the character of the Mahatma, was the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff (1872–1949).⁵⁶ Purportedly trained as both a priest and a physician, Gurdjieff founded a highly influential New Age institute in 1922 that taught students how to transcend the situation of what he called “waking sleep” (thus Wharton’s “twilight sleep”) in which most people live. Only by undertaking the “Fourth Way” of his spiritual exercises could individuals hope to break free of this automatism and realize their full potential. In Wharton’s novel, when news of a scandal erupts regarding Mrs. Manford’s daughter-in-law’s sojourn at the Mahatma’s School, including a newspaper picture of her participation in the school’s nudist tribal dances, the novel replicates contemporaneous headlines regarding the Gurdjieff institute’s sacred “gymnasium,” described by Sinclair Lewis as “a cross between a cabaret and a harem” and by Vivienne Eliot (T. S.’s first wife) as “where [Lady Rothmere] does religious naked dances with Katherine Mansfield.”⁵⁷

Gurdjieff had a transformative influence on a group of queer expatriate women authors in France, including Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the founders of the Little Review. Introduced through Djuna Barnes to Kathryn Hulme, Solita Solano, and Georgette Leblanc, they created the “Rope Group,” which was devoted to expounding his teachings.⁵⁸ Anderson and Heap were inspired by their time with Gurdjieff to terminate the Little Review; his philosophy had convinced them of modernism’s irrelevance. But his writings have more in common with those published in the Little Review’s pages than they were willing to recognize. Indeed, John Bennett’s description of Gurdjieff’s literary style could almost be a description of Joyce’s:

Many who encounter Gurdjieff for the first time in Beelzebub’s Tales are disconcerted by the strange style, and by his use of strange neologisms which often seem quite unnecessary for conveying his intention. There are several reasons why Gurdjieff decided to create his own literary style. In this first place, he was well aware that clarity and consistency in speech and writing nearly always result in the sacrifice of flexibility of expression and depth of meaning. When he spoke or lectured he paid no attention to the rules of grammar, logic, or consistency. After he learned some French and English, he mixed them indiscriminately, regardless of the linguistic limitations of his hearer.59

Editing opaque sentences, unpacking neologisms, and promoting genius, just as they had with Joyce, Eliot, and others, the Rope Group women’s work with Gurdjieff was not so different from their modernist endeavors. The same wish to shed automatism, or what Gurdjieff calls man’s “hypnotic state,” and to resurrect the “inner life,” attracted Anderson and Heap to both the misunderstood mystic and to the relatively unknown and unpublished Joyce.⁶⁰ Conversely, the same “exploration of the subliminal” that Wharton resisted in Woolf’s stream of consciousness, and that she disdained in Joyce’s “turgid welter” of “uninformed and unimportant” “sensation,” made her suspicious of figures like Gurdjieff.⁶¹

A vociferous critic of stream of consciousness and the new “slice of life” literature of Joyce and Woolf,⁶² Wharton warned the younger novelists against embracing what she viewed as a pathological inward turn, a trend she despised even in the later writings of Henry James, a friend with whom she otherwise sympathized.⁶³ She disapproved in particular of the modernists’ indiscriminate notation of every passing thought: “The mid-nineteenth century group selected; the new novelists profess to pour everything out of their bag.”⁶⁴ For Wharton, the fickleness of modernism and self-help are linked through their shared disregard for form, history, and selection. Much as Gurdjieff urged his followers toward intense “self-observation and self-remembering” (always carried out, however, under the supervision of a “Man Who Knows”),⁶⁵ modernism appears to embrace the unsorted, unfiltered, and subconscious. It is their “egoistic consciousness and self absorption” that, for Wharton, links Mrs. Manford and Stephen Dedalus.⁶⁶

Even more than with Joyce and Eliot, the discipleship with Gurdjieff instigated a significant shift in the Rope Group women’s vocations from editors to writers, from fiction to memoir, from transcribers to independent producers. Indeed, what is most remarkable is the tremendous literary output that the Rope discipleship engendered: enough to fill an entire library shelf. As one of the group’s members, Kathryn Hulme, author of The Nun’s Story (1956), later a film starring Audrey Hepburn, recounts:

In the Paris of the Thirties the great adventure of my life began, the only event in it which seems worth recording in personal narrative form—a form, incidentally, which I love to read but dread to write. The event which compels me into this book was my meeting with the celebrated mystic, teacher, and philosopher, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, whom I encountered as if by chance and came to love as if by design…. He uncovered in me a hidden longing I never knew I had—the desire for an inner life of the spirit—and taught me to work for it as one works for one’s daily bread.67

The group published a total of seventeen books.⁶⁸ As Hulme describes, Gurdjieff offered an occasion to contemplate the inner life, just as modernist stream of consciousness does. In addition to the women of the Rope Group, Gurdjieff influenced writers and artists such as Jean Toomer, Mabel Dodge Luhan (D. H. Lawrence’s patron), and Frank Lloyd Wright. In contrast, modernists such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and W. B. Yeats were dismissive of Gurdjieff’s teachings.⁶⁹

As with de Selby (and Joyce), Gurdjieff forces us to confront the uncomfortable proximity between wisdom and humbug. As Geoffrey Hartman notes: “What we appreciate as exemplary in art, we admire and fear as ‘charismatic’ in public life. If it is hard enough to tell charlatan from genius in art, it often seems impossible to distinguish between creative and destructive portions of the spirit in a significant politician or religious leader.”70 According to Tobin Siebers, in response to this “dilemma of charisma” Hartman “recommends a healthy dose of skepticism and negative thinking about art.” As Siebers sees it, beyond Hartman alone, the “argument for the self-destructive text, with its celebration of literary strangeness, hesitancy, and stuttering,” stems from a desire to defeat “the monolith of charismatic power.” Although he is specifically referring to Cold War criticism, Siebers’s point also applies to the modernism from whence so much postwar, deconstructive criticism emerged. Both modernists authors and Cold War critics posit “learning how to read”⁷¹ as a means of defending oneself against the dangers of charismatic persuasion, all the while deploying their own charismatic personalities and methods. It is not difficult to see how this skeptical legacy has resulted in the tradition of “suspicious,” “critical, and negative” hermeneutics that has recently come under attack by proponents of “surface” reading and “post-critique.”⁷² As Siebers notes, in a sentiment many have recently echoed, “to be skeptical about skepticism is either the most reactionary of philosophies or the most radical. But how are we to tell which?”⁷³

HENRY JAMES VS. WILLIAM JAMES

Twilight pokes fun at the period’s charismatic gurus, but “The Jolly Corner” (1908), by Wharton’s friend Henry James, offers a more somber assessment. Henry’s reservations toward the industry are inextricable from his brother William’s endorsement of it at a time when few intellectuals would deign to give self-help serious consideration. William James’s discussions of the power of habit and will inspired countless early self-help handbooks, such as Frank Channing Haddock’s The Power of Will, Annie Payson Call’s Nerves and Common Sense, and Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, to name a few.74 In light of this significant influence on the self-help literature to come, William’s explicit and implicit debates with his brother over the genre’s merits have a great deal of contemporary consequence. Self-help today increasingly mediates between William’s motivational account of human potential and Henry’s skeptical perspective on the interminable process of self-betterment. New antihandbooks such as Burkeman’s The Antidote and Neel Burton’s The Art of Failure: The Anti-Self-Help Guide suggest that, after reaching an affirmative apex, the self-help tide may be turning toward Henry’s position.⁷⁵

Scholars have long suggested that Henry may have provided the model for the “sick soul” described by his brother William James as the “nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.”⁷⁶ But little work has been undertaken on the reciprocal question of how William’s promotion of the early self-help philosophy of mind-cure inspired Henry’s critique of popular strategies of self-realization. When William lamented the “mustiness” of The Golden Bowl in a letter on October 22, 1905, it provoked Henry’s irked response, in what can only be a reference to William’s endorsement of self-help across America during these years: “Let me say, dear William, that I shall be greatly humiliated if you do like it, & thereby lump it, in your affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you express admiration for & that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written.”⁷⁷As Henry wrote in a letter to Grace Norton, and which applies to William’s prescriptions as well, “don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much … remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.”⁷⁸

More than one hundred magazines and newspapers were dedicated to the New Thought phenomenon by the time Henry composed “The Jolly Corner.”⁷⁹ The story describes Spencer Brydon’s trip from Europe back to America to inherit his childhood home. Seeing his old house inspires in Brydon a taste for remodeling, which starts him thinking about what would have happened if he had stayed in America to be a businessman or an architect, and if he had married his childhood sweetheart Alice Staverton, rather than emigrating to Europe to pursue his “selfish frivolous scandalous life” in the arts. Henry writes, “He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and ‘turned out,’ if he had not so, at the outset, given it up.”⁸⁰

This theme of lost potentiality was preoccupying William as well during this same period, when he was advocating the benefits of mind-cure at universities across the country. In his popular treatise The Energies of Men, William describes how he was inspired by the everyday phenomenon of the “second wind” to examine the individual’s overlooked energy reserves.81 He observes, “Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.” And he exhorts, “the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.”⁸² Carnegie quotes this line from James some thirty years later in his introduction to How to Win Friends and Influence People, in which he exclaims, “Those powers which you ‘habitually fail to use’! The sole purpose of this book is to help you discover, develop, and profit by those dormant and unused assets.”⁸³ The most successful self-help book ever written, then, is but a gloss on William James; and the controversy over modernism’s ontological authority continues, via the legacy of William’s refutation of Henry’s representational strategies to obliquely inform self-help’s trajectory.

Decontextualized, William’s quotation reads like a motivational speech, but his observation about human potential originally occurs in a chapter with the downbeat title “Failure to Do All That We Can.” In its original setting, the passage quickly shifts from a tone of inspiration to one of rebuke. Unlike the “hysteric,” William says, who at least has an excuse for his narrow and “contracted” vision of his own potential, the rest of us have no one to blame for our failures but ourselves. In his 1914 preface to The Energies of Men, William had to exasperatedly defend the work from charges that its “gospel of overstrain” encourages individuals “to drive themselves at all times beyond the limits of ordinary endurance” and to “use … alcohol and opium as stimulants.”⁸⁴

Although his work often overlapped with the self-help discourse he analyzed, William was well aware of the movement’s limitations. He lamented how “the mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the ‘Gospel of Relaxation,’ of the ‘Don’t Worry Movement,’ of people who repeat to themselves, ‘Youth, health, vigor!’ when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day.”85 But unlike other philosophers, from Theodor Adorno to Michel Foucault, whose contempt for cliché distracts them from self-help’s potential political or palliative social function, William argued that its reductionism should not dissuade us from taking the benefits of mind-power seriously.⁸⁶ Rather, he argued, in part because of its “crudity,” New Thought might be destined “to play a part almost as great in the evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier [religious] movements in their day.”⁸⁷

Casting a backward glance at the discoveries of the New Thought method in 1917, Orison Swett Marden, one of the movement’s most prolific authors, explained that “the finding of the larger possibilities of man, the unused part, the undiscovered part, is the function of the New Philosophy.” He urged his readers to shake out the “possible man” inside: “It is the man you are capable of making, not the man you have become, that is most important to you…. Try to bring out that possible man…. Why don’t you use him … why don’t you call him out, why don’t you stir him up?”88 “The Jolly Corner” tells us why. While the New Thought literature was lamenting the individual’s quotidian estrangement from his innermost potential, Henry’s story intimates that such estrangement might be preferable. Spencer Brydon is tormented by the specter of surplus potentiality that self-help dangles before its readers. As Brydon puts it, “it’s only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I mayn’t have missed.”⁸⁹ And this dormant possibility is manifest in Brydon’s imagination in the form of his billionaire alter ego who stayed in New York to accumulate capital rather than moving to Europe to pursue a life in the arts. Brydon’s equation of money with potential reflects the trends of his time; as McGee notes, the first definition of success as wealth occurred in the 1891 New Century Dictionary.⁹⁰ Brydon’s refrain rings throughout Henry’s story: “What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know!” This pounding anaphora of the counterfactual motif is conspicuous:

If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the sky-scraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a goldmine.⁹¹

Brydon’s thought patterns demonstrate the consequences of internalizing the ideology of unlimited potentiality. As Bruce MacLelland’s 1907 Prosperity Through Thought Force declared, “you make your own misery; you make your own unhappiness,” and further, “anyone can make of himself whatever he chooses.”⁹² “You are the architect of your own career,” similarly urges Haddock in The Power of Will, also published in 1907, which makes copious use of William James’s Habit and purports to teach both “supreme personal wellbeing and Actual Financial Betterment” through self-direction. Haddock advises, “You can so develop your [power of] will that it will command the luxuries, the accomplishments, the marked successes, which potentially lie dormant in every human being.”⁹³

With its screeds against wasted potential, mind-cure’s “gospel of relaxation” transforms leisure into a new kind of work and invites a fresh reading of modernist interiority as representing the immaterial labor of compulsory self-betterment. The visualization techniques advocated by mind-cure guru Henry Wood exemplify the after-hours commitment New Thought demanded of its practitioners. Henry James encountered Wood’s handbook through his 1902 reading of his brother’s Varieties, which quotes Wood at length.⁹⁴ His protagonist Brydon’s practice of “project[ing] himself all day, in thoughts … into the other, the real, the waiting life” strikingly evokes the visualization techniques Wood advocated, to the extent that Wood’s leading mind-cure handbook, Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography, A Restorative System for Home and Private Use (1893), almost furnishes a blueprint for Henry’s fictional text.

Wood recommends that his reader retire each night alone to a corner of his house to stare at select suggestions printed in block letters at the end of his book:

PRACTICAL DIRECTIONS FOR IDEAL SUGGESTION

Instructions for the use of the Suggested Ideals [contained in the following pages]:

FIRST.—Retire each day to a quiet apartment, and be alone IN THE SILENCE.

SECOND.—Assume the most restful position possible, in an easy-chair, or otherwise….

THIRD.—Bar the door of thought against the external world….

FOURTH.—Rivet the mind upon the “meditation” … and by careful and repeated reading absorb its truth…. Do not merely look upon it, but wholly GIVE YOURSELF UP TO IT….

Ideals will be actualized in due season.95

As Steven Starker comments, “The after-images produced by all that staring must have been startling, even convincing to some.”96 Such after-images go a long way toward explaining the climax of “The Jolly Corner,” which takes place when, after a great deal of meditation and repetition, Brydon’s “ideal” is finally “actualized,” and he comes face-to-face with the apparition of the person he could have been if he had never left America. Brydon’s conjuring of the “black stranger”—that “mental photograph” of himself, to use Wood’s term—is the result of nights of concentrated practice: “He had known fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards dropped; he had fifty times gasped to himself ‘There!’ under some fond brief hallucination.” Finally, one night, Brydon feels the “central vagueness diminish,” and he conjures his wretched “other self,” the negative-image of the “triumphant life.”⁹⁷ But instead of mind-cure’s “possible man,” brimming with dormant potential, Brydon’s deformed, greedy alter ego bears a closer resemblance to Freud’s unsightly id. “Thoughts are things,” noted New Thought proponent Prentice Mulford in 1899; Brydon’s hallucination is a mind-cure meditation gone awry.⁹⁸

Although premised on the dramatic opposition between aesthetic and entrepreneurial ambition, “The Jolly Corner” also draws attention to the wishful thinking that unites both types of endeavor. As Freud argues, all creative writing springs from unsatisfied wishes, including that class of “ambitious wishes, serving to exalt the person creating them.” According to him, aesthetic form is essentially an alibi for the author’s enactment of the conflicting desires of “His Majesty the Ego.”⁹⁹ Put differently, narrative may be merely the author’s circuitous, devious form of self-help.¹⁰⁰ But if “The Jolly Corner” is Henry’s form of oblique personal self-help, for example, as the persuasive queer readings of the story by Eve Sedgwick and Eric Savoy indirectly suggest, this is not self-help in the form of New Thought’s consolatory mantras but about using the alternate reality of fiction as a forum for confronting difficult personal questions.¹⁰¹ In this way, reading Henry’s story for its self-help subtext is not incompatible with the interpretations influentially advanced by these queer theorists. After all, part of Henry’s resistance to self-help is his aversion to its normalizing, domesticating discourse, whether in terms of aesthetics, sexuality, or politics. In contrast to what he saw as his brother’s Procrustean typologies, (Henry) Jamesian self-help does not reduce or simplify difficult truths but is closer to Philip Weinstein’s view of modernist knowledge as an unraveling of the Enlightenment conceit of a coherent subject and stable world.¹⁰²

“The Jolly Corner” culminates in a loss of agency rather than in glorious self-realization, and in so doing it undermines not only mind-cure’s promise of self-control but also the broader American myth of self-fashioning. New Thought had important international allies, influences, and affiliates such as Coué, Charles F. Haanal, Annie Besant, and Thomas Troward (the inspiration for Australian author Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret), but it found an ideal habitat on American soil due, in part, to the foundation-laying works of Phineas Quimby, a clockmaker whose early witnessing of French mesmerism in his home town in southern Maine inspired him to help found the movement.103 Henry’s engagement with New Thought philosophy probably reflects the impact of his 1904 visit to the United States, which inspired many of the works belonging to this late phase of his career. He said that he returned to his native land in order “to make myself a notion of how, and where, and even what, I was.”¹⁰⁴ But if Henry did “make himself” during his voyage to America, the self he made is defined by its rejection of American improvement discourse. Henry tellingly relates his retort to American industry and urbanization, “the great monotonous rumble of which seems forever to say to you: ‘See what I’m making of all this—see what I’m making, what I’m making!’” To which he responds, “I see what you are not making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not; and how can I help it if I am subject to that lucidity?—which appears never so welcome to you, for its measure of truth, as it ought to be!”¹⁰⁵ With their digressive indirection and complexity, Henry’s works strive to articulate precisely what is left out of American improvement rhetoric.

As for Spencer Brydon, the reader is left with the suspicion that no amount of feminine caress will permanently quash his beleaguered refrain: “Do you believe then—too dreadfully!—that I am as good as I ever might have been?”¹⁰⁶ The modernist inheritance of this burden of self-determinism can be seen in Leopold Bloom’s endless reveries about alternate professions (farmer! mayor! Zionist!), in the indecision of Beckett’s characters, in the subjunctive musings of Woolf’s married pairs. In this way, mind-cure and modernism represent two different methods of coping with the frustrating, tantalizing proximity of success and fulfillment in modern middle-class life. As they both show, to different ends, self-help ideology is lived as misplaced guilt for failing to inhabit life’s seemingly infinite possibilities.

WOOLF VS. BENNETT

Perhaps the most striking example of the enmity between “high” literature and self-help positions concerns a famous literary debate of the modernist period: the feud between Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett. Considered a crucial moment of modernism’s self-formation, ongoing assessments of this dispute have largely failed to address the subtext of Bennett’s work with self-help and the role of self-help in shaping both his and Woolf’s aesthetic strategies.

Today Bennett is mainly known for his realist novels set in his home district of the Potteries, an industrial area that was a center for English ceramics production in the eighteenth century. But as Robert Squillace observes, “No writer of any period even a fraction so highly regarded as Bennett wrote a single self-help book, let alone the six or eight Bennett produced.”107 Bennett published several tremendously popular self-help guides, or “pocket philosophies” as he described them, including How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day; Literary Taste: How to Form It; Mental Efficiency; The Human Machine; Self and Self-Management; and How to Make the Best of Life.¹⁰⁸ His texts advance less scientific versions of the argument for mental discipline espoused by William James, and it is surprising that the two contemporaries had so little to say about each other’s work. Both writers advised readers to cultivate good habits, to minimize time wastage, and to forge their ideal character through minor acts of will. Bennett’s writings were “at once a reproof and an inspiration,” as the Bristol Daily Mercury noted, a descriptor that, as we have seen, applies to William’s works as well.¹⁰⁹

The similarities between the two authors may be partly attributable to the fact that they were both influenced by the same timeworn classical wisdom on the art of life.¹¹⁰ Bennett described his pocket guides in a letter as “nothing but Marcus Aurelius & Christ assimilated & excreted by me in suitable form.”¹¹¹ However, his account of his Philosophy of Living series was not always so flippant:

When I proposed to republish them in book form I was most strongly urged not to do so, and terrible prophecies were made to me of the sinister consequences to my reputation if I did. I republished them. “How to live on twenty-four hours a day” sold very well from the start; it still has a steady sale, and it has brought me more letters of appreciation than all my other books put together. I followed it up with a dozen or more books in a similar vein. And I do not suppose that my reputation would have been any less dreadful than it is if I had never published a line for plain people about the management of daily existence.112

His self-help guides achieved such monumental success that Henry Ford is reputed to have passed out five hundred copies of How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day to his employees.¹¹³ Even before the recent resurgence of his literary reputation, e-readers have been repackaging and popularizing Bennett’s time-management tips for overtaxed contemporary readers.

Bennett explains the book’s premise:

Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum…. I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carleton hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.¹¹⁴

For Bennett, social inequalities are neutralized by temporality’s inherent democracy (rather than exacerbated by workday discrepancies). His handbook boasts that it can help readers save seven extra hours per week by convincing them that time is more of a commodity than money. However, Bennett’s egalitarian premise is belied by his first order of business; he provides detailed instructions on how to set up one’s tea and biscuits each night so that one can rise two hours before the servants: “These details may seem trivial to the foolish, but to the thoughtful they will not seem trivial.” He continues, “The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.”¹¹⁵

Bennett promised to make his reader a “millionaire of minutes,” and William James similarly invoked the economic terminology of “energy-budgets” and “efficiency-equilibriums” to advance his potentiality doctrine.116 These practical treatises fully internalize the Protestant ethic’s equation of good living with good budget-balancing. In turn, their modernist critics respond by dramatizing what Weber described as the “iron cage” of individual responsibility that this capitalist ideology engenders.¹¹⁷ The Protestant ethic of industrious asceticism was all the more troubling to novelists because it entailed intolerance for fiction. Just as William had little patience for Henry’s narrative digressions, Bennett’s time-management philosophy bleeds into annoyance at the profligacy of modernist prose. It “beat me. I could not finish it,” he admitted of Mrs Dalloway, and remarked that Joyce turned novel reading into a form of “penal servitude.”¹¹⁸ Bennett’s essays on the art of living mount a challenge against modernism’s disdain for the crude utilitarianism of public taste. Deriding aesthetic contemplation without action, he observed that “the man who pores over a manual of carpentry and does naught else is a fool. But every book is a manual of carpentry, and every man who pores over any book whatever and does naught else with it is deserving of an abusive epithet.”¹¹⁹ Imagine how Flaubert—the grandfather of high-modernist aestheticism—would have received such a pronouncement!

Bennett’s ostracized status among the modernists was cemented by Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (delivered 1923, published 1924), a text that lays bare self-help’s role in modernism’s ethnogenesis. Woolf’s denunciation of Bennett’s materialism coincides with her proclamation of modernism’s arrival; novelists need new representational strategies because “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.”120 Tellingly, the definition of novelistic character that Woolf advances in this essay is explicitly formulated against the “skill of character reading” demanded by the “practical business of life.” “Character” was, of course, a loaded term in the self-help lexicon of the time. Samuel Smiles published an entire volume on the subject, and both James and Bennett discuss character as a product of habit, and therefore malleable to change.¹²¹ The strategic approach to character advanced by their advice manuals is for Woolf the very antithesis of the aesthetic: “Novelists differ from the rest of the world because they do not cease to be interested in character when they have learnt enough about it for practical purposes.” In short, it is precisely that attention which exceeds instrumentalism, surpassing the needs of “happiness, comfort, or income” (precisely the province of self-help) that, for Woolf, defines the novelistic gaze.¹²²

The context of self-help calls for a reappraisal of Woolf’s style, defined, in part, by its inspired rebuttal of Bennett’s practical philosophies. Although she renounces his moralizing impulse, Bennett’s writings bring into relief the contours of a Woolfian counterpedagogy premised upon enactment rather than prescription, “steeping” rather than “sidling,” to use her own terms.¹²³ Essays such as A Room of One’s Own (1929) and “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925) position Woolf as a precursor of the feminist, prepolitical strain of self-help that seeks to imagine alternatives to the patriarchal status quo. Woolf’s essays to the Common Reader (1925), written during the same period as the notorious feud, can hardly be considered apart from Bennett’s directives for the “Plain Man and His Wife” (1913). Essays like her “How Should One Read a Book?” (1926) operate as concerted rewritings of Bennett’s instructional texts such as Literary Taste: How to Form It [1909]. Woolf opens her essay, “In this first place, I want to emphasize the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”¹²⁴ The difference between Bennett and Woolf is the distinction between the declarative and the interrogative; it is the difference that a question mark makes.¹²⁵

Woolf converts the “how-to” into a question, an approach that also motivates her fiction. What unforeseen events, asks Mrs Dalloway (which famously occurs within the span of twenty-four hours), might interfere with Bennett’s fantasy of mastering a single day? After all, Clarissa is just as intent on stanching the intractable flow of time with her party as Bennett is with his tea and biscuits. Modernists were just as attuned to the power of habit as were their more practical, “middlebrow” counterparts; Woolf bemoans the amount of one’s day devoted to the monotonous routines of “non-being.”126 However, to transcend habit for her requires a surrendering of the self to the sway of the moment (as when Septimus Smith senses the “exquisite beauty” of “leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body”) rather than the vehement reassertion of time-mastery that Bennett and William James recommend.¹²⁷

A character like Septimus throws a wrench into Bennett’s account of the power and reach of mental discipline. Spencer Brydon’s counterfactual alter ego is a billionaire skyscraper mogul, and Septimus could have been a Bennett acolyte if certain contingencies, such as the First World War, had not intervened:

To look at, he might have been a clerk, but of the better sort … might end with a house at Purley and a motor car, or continue renting apartments in back streets all his life; one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter.¹²⁸

Septimus could have led a perfectly deferential, semieducated life if not for the unforeseen influence of battle and illness, those bothersome impediments to even the most rational of life plans. (Actually, the First World War ushered in the term “bibliotherapy,” which acquired cultural currency through the hospital libraries in which novels stood “row upon row like phials in a pharmacy.”)129 The conveyers of moral insights in Mrs Dalloway are either villains, like Dr. Bradshaw, or suffering from PTSD, like Septimus, who fancies himself the appointed bearer of “supreme secret” signals and messages (“that trees are alive,” “there is no crime,” “There is a God,” “Change the world,” “No one kills from hatred”) and is convinced he knows “the meaning of the world” (not entirely unlike the way thinkers such as William James advertised that they knew the “meaning of truth”).¹³⁰ Such moments call to mind Lionel Trilling’s lament that modernism aligns madness with authenticity, while also pointing to the fundamental irrationality and megalomania of the practice of dispensing advice.¹³¹ (As we shall see in chapter 5, Adorno develops a similar idea in The Stars Down to Earth, his assessment of the totalitarianism underlying the Los Angeles Times advice column.) Mrs Dalloway enacts Woolf’s disillusionment with the moral authority of the text in its oft-discussed skywriting scene, where, in the place of the exigent or profound dispatch they expect, pedestrians piece together the spelling out of an ad for toffee.

Woolf lays out her resistance to philosophical dogmatism in a comment on D. H. Lawrence, which also applies here:

Its [sic] so barren; so easy; giving advice on a system. The moral is, if you want to help, never systematise—not till you’re 70: & have been supple & sympathetic & creative & tried out all your nerves & scopes…. Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful.¹³²

Woolf’s exhortation that “art is being rid of all preaching” is, of course, a performative contradiction. Like James with his insistence on the universal singularity of every life’s “terrible algebra,” the only piece of counsel Woolf will permit herself is the injunction to disregard universalizing advice. Yet for someone recommending inconclusiveness, Woolf sounds like she has art’s proper role very settled. Echoing the Flaubertian stance, she elsewhere laments that “we pin [words] down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.”133 The obsession with use drains language of its lifeblood. In the wake of Pierre Bourdieu, it is impossible to ignore the class prejudice underwriting such modernist celebrations of disinterestedness, and it is usually either through the lens of class or gender that this famous debate is discussed, with the critics focusing on the former tending to favor Bennett’s position, and those invested in the latter defending Woolf’s stance.¹³⁴ Bourdieu reminds us that only someone who has all of their necessities met can afford to champion art’s uselessness. Likewise, Bennett’s patronizing assessments of women’s writing no doubt informed his critiques of Woolf’s work and inspired her reciprocal aversion. Beyond confirming their already well-established oppositions, the subject of self-help makes visible the authors’ shared concern with how to capture and communicate life’s intensity.

Today’s critics do not have much to say about literature’s stance on “life,” at least, not without scare quotes, but it is around the nebulous question of literature’s “life-impulsion” (as F. R. Leavis termed it)—or “spirit,” “zest,” “vigor”—that the Woolf/Bennett debate pivots.¹³⁵ As Edwin J. Kenney effectively posits, the debate centered on that difficult issue of “what is real in human life and how the novelist is to represent it.”¹³⁶ Even more than “character,” “life” is what Bennett believes Woolf’s writing is missing, from as early as that incendiary review of Jacob’s Room (1922): “there is an absence of vital inspiration. Some novelists appear to have no zest; they loll through their work as though they were taking a stroll in the Park.”¹³⁷ In her turn, Woolf finds the same “vitality” absent from Bennett’s works: “Life escapes…. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off.”¹³⁸

This debate—and its self-help subtext—underscores the inextricable relation between the representational problem of how to describe life and the philosophical problem of how to live it. The authors’ reciprocal appraisals reflect what Lears describes as the pervasive “dread of unreality” and the yearning to “experience intense ‘real life’ in all its dimensions” that give rise to both the therapeutic ethos and also to modernist practice.¹³⁹ Bennett returns to the problem of “zest” in his handbooks and his novels, and even published a volume of essays called The Savour of Life, but his fiction is less confident that zest acquisition is teachable.¹⁴⁰ Although he repeatedly advises his self-help readers to sharpen their minds by reading a “little chapter of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus” a day, Bennett’s protagonist Edwin in Clayhanger undermines this counsel:

He had diligently studied both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus; he was enthusiastic, to others, about the merit of the two expert daily philosophers; but what had they done for him? Assuredly they had not enabled him to keep the one treasure of this world—zest.141

It seems that even the classics cannot solve the troublesome problem of zest retention.

In 1925, the same year Mrs Dalloway appeared, physician Abraham Myerson published a self-help book called When Life Loses Its Zest.¹⁴² Myerson helped to popularize the term “anhedonia,” which he learned from William James’s discussion of the healthy-mindedness doctrine in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).¹⁴³ Citing James as a key influence, Myerson was also, in 1935, one of the first to advocate antidepressants; he was a pioneering prescriber of the amphetamine Benzedrine for the treatment of depression, anhedonia, and simple discouragement.¹⁴⁴ The vicious circle of self-improvement, exacerbated by the pharmacological turn, which at once causes feelings of insufficiency and claims to cure them, had already reached a crisis in the character of Spencer Brydon in a way that evinces the continued relevance of modernism’s self-help revisionism to contemporary therapeutic culture. In his 1914 preface, William denied he was advocating the use of stimulants for exploiting the latent “energies of men” that his manual so persuasively outlined, but the pharmacological turn in therapeutic culture is one interpretation of his ideas about self-betterment. Already sensing this cultural consequence, both Henry James and Woolf document how easily the healthy impulse of self-improvement can morph into self-reproach.

RESILIENT MODERNISM

In this chapter I have traced a series of disputes between literary and self-help perspectives: O’Brien against mail-order hacks, Wharton against spiritual gurus, Henry James against the “potentiality” movement his brother William endorsed, and Virginia Woolf against Arnold Bennett. Yet rather than confirming the steadfastness of the distinction between serious literature and self-help methods, these case studies unsettle the steadfastness of their opposition.145 Perhaps the most obvious point of convergence between modernist and self-help agendas concerns their joint fascination with the resources of the unconscious.

An example can help to illustrate this overlap. In The Law of Mentalism, the Los Angeles trickster Victor Segno invited subscribers to join his success clubs, which were devoted to the mutual transmission of positive “thought waves.” The one-dollar admission fee was guaranteed to attract success. Segno explains the book’s premise:

Marconi, the inventor of Wireless Telegraphy, says that a word or its equivalent creates a vibration in the air just as a pebble thrown into a pond creates a ripple in the water, and that this vibration travels with the speed of lightening to the terminus, however distant, and makes itself known and felt by every telegraph instrument that is tuned in harmony with the sender. In the same manner a thought from the brain of one person travels on despite all resistance until it is taken up by the brain or brains that are in harmony with the mind from which it was sent.¹⁴⁶

Segno argued that other people’s thoughts change our constitution and experience. As fellow self-help author Prentice Mulford corroborated, “you are, to a certain extent, a different person through conversing an hour yesterday with A, than if you had interchanged thoughts with B. You have then grafted on you a shade of A’s nature, or quality of thought.”¹⁴⁷ One thinks of Mrs Dalloway’s “Fear no more the heat of the sun,” one of several thoughts that “travel” between Septimus and Clarissa.¹⁴⁸ As Alex Zwerdling notes, “there is an uncanny quality in Woolf’s characters that enables them to communicate telepathically.”¹⁴⁹ Along similar lines, in Ulysses, Stephen and Bloom have uncanny mental exchanges, and Norpois and Marcel share an unspoken intuitive understanding in Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.¹⁵⁰

Modernism’s investment in interiority and the individual unconscious rendered it vulnerable to charges of solipsism and individualism similar to those laid against self-help. This position was perhaps most forcefully advanced by Georg Lukács, who argued that modernism is too concerned with the individual’s mind to effect any social change.151 In their efforts to counteract the forces of industrial atomization and standardization, both modernism and self-help risk implying that the individual mind is all that exists. As Wyndham Lewis wrote, in his irascible yet perceptive fashion, like Mrs Dalloway, like Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day, “the world in which Advertisement dwells is a one-day world.” He maintains, pointing to the affinities between the seemingly polarized ideologies of self-help and modernism, that “time is money” is the hackneyed, relativist proverb that “Bergson’s durée always conceals beneath its pretentious metaphysic.”¹⁵² Yet this did not stop Lewis himself from using the tongue-in-cheek title The Art of Being Ruled for his 1926 “manual of survival in what he saw as an apocalyptic situation.”¹⁵³ In his own foray into sustainable self-help, Lewis wrote:

In such a fluid world we should by all rights be building boats not houses. But this essay is a sort of ark, or dwelling for the mind, designed to float and navigate…. For a very profound inundation is at hand. After us comes the deluge: more probably than not, however, before that and out of its epigrammatic sequence.¹⁵⁴

Lewis’s rephrasing of a situation of powerlessness as choice anticipates the many contemporary self-help manuals that take attributes largely outside of one’s control—talent, charisma, race, gender, being human—and reformulate them as instructions (How to Be a Person in the World; How to Be Black; How to Be a Woman, etcetera).¹⁵⁵ In so doing, they bring to the fore self-help’s tendency to rebrand determinism as strategy, precisely what Adorno abhorred.

Yet Adorno’s advocacy of modernist negation over self-help’s false agency elides the extent to which the two discourses overlap; for example, both estrange habit by making a problem of the mundane. What New Yorker journalist Dwight Macdonald derided as howtoism’s making a problem of the “supererogatory” or superfluous and Wharton disliked as the “slice of life” is, in modernism, called the “everyday.”156 This making a topic of the taken-for-granted finds expression in self-help’s and modernism’s joint transvaluation of the clichéd and mundane. And just as self-help is accused of privileging technique above wisdom, Lewis complained of Joyce, “What stimulates him is ways of doing things, and technical processes, and not things to be done.”¹⁵⁷ This seems to be a tendency that carried through to Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, for whom Joyce was a significant influence. As Gilbert Millstein wrote in the original New York Times review of On the Road (1957), one way to define the new generation was to say that “the absence of personal and social values … is not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. How to live seems to them much more crucial than why.”¹⁵⁸

But beyond their investment in the technical, everyday, and transhistorical, other affinities can be found between modernism and self-help. For instance, the prevalence of the micro-units of the fragment and cliché is related to the centrality of cultural appropriation to both self-help and modernist practice, a tendency particularly visible in their combining of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions (recall the link between Benjamin Franklin’s and Ezra Pound’s translations of Confucius).¹⁵⁹

This same muddying of opposition occurs at almost every level of the attempt to cleanly distinguish self-help from modernist reading protocols. Such examples suggest that the appeal of modernism to contemporary self-help is due not only to the way it counters or opposes that ideology—not merely for its irony in regard to the project of self-cultivation, in other words—but also to those places where it crosses over and takes up the problem of life management. Despite the modernist championing of “impersonality,” for Lionel Trilling, “no literature has ever been so shockingly personal—it asks us if we are content with our marriages, with our professional lives, with our friends…. It asks us if we are content with ourselves.”160 It would be worth exploring how the misprision of modernism as antiadvice has contributed, via the legacy of the New Critics, who also tend to be misread as amoral, to what some perceive as a bias in literary studies against self-cultivation, presentism, and practical use. Some of our most engrained disciplinary practices may be founded on a series of chain reactions to a version of modernism that never was. That is to say, our understanding of modernism’s utility to our contemporary social and disciplinary moment depends on our recognition of its earnest efforts not just to negate but also to rewrite popular advice.

If once, perhaps during the heyday of Horatio Alger, the value of literature appeared to lie in its fund of motivational upward mobility stories, today its appeal is often linked to the “negative visualization” scenarios it furnishes. Robert Musil, who once described literature as “teaching of living in examples,”¹⁶¹ strove in his writings to capture “a new morality capable of fitting more closely to the mobility of facts.”¹⁶² If we are being generous, we can read contemporary self-help as being engaged in a similar project. It is turning to difficult, serious literature for support in its shift away from the ideals of perfection and success and toward the more measured values of perseverance and resilience. We may need a catastrophizing imagination to counteract the reflexive and compulsory optimism that has facilitated the mass denials of our present age. In this view, negative thinking is not just an anxious tic but a strategy to prepare for the alarming mobility of facts in our uncertain circumstances.