On July 10, 1979, alone and off-camera, Jo Roman, a New York artist, killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. It was not an impulsive act. As early as 1975, she had made up her mind that she would end her life on her own terms, purposefully and “rationally.” Several years later, when she learned that she had breast cancer, she moved up the date. She would do it within a year, she decided, and proceeded to tell friends, family and a TV film crew. Thus began a drama that culminated in a sensational front-page story in the New York Times and a harrowing one-hour documentary entitled Choosing Suicide that aired June 16 on PBS.
The documentary is a faithful record of the gatherings Jo held during that year to prepare for her great deed. It records the deliberations of a Greek chorus of chosen literati and hapless family relations drawn into her web as co-conspirators, spectators and participants. At these meetings, all sit in the obligatory circle. Jo, the queen bee, presides. She is quiet, controlled, in command. She is experiencing no pain or disability, but her mind is made up. No one can change her resolve, but all “acknowledge” and “respect” her feelings. There is much touching, hugging, crying and stroking. No one seems distracted by the bobbing microphones and clanking camera stands.
All the while, I am trying to figure out why they are all there. The film crew, I suppose, thinks that if she delivers they’ve got a hot property and, if it is done with taste, maybe an Emmy. Friends and family must feel the weight of the contemporary obligation to “be there” and share the experience. And how do you turn down an invitation to a suicide?
But what’s in it for Jo? Perhaps, like Tom Sawyer, she simply wants to live the fantasy of attending, indeed directing, her own wake. Jo herself invokes loftier motives with more decidedly romantic pretensions: She considers this act a work of art, “the final brush stroke on the canvas of my life.” It is a claim taken with utmost seriousness by her friends, who seem to believe that art is anything that artists do (and then proceed to frame). “This is the greatest creative act of your life,” gushes one friend. An unkind reviewer, taking note of Jo’s paintings and sculptures strewn around the apartment, might concur with this judgment. And because it is art, Jo Roman’s son can assure her that rational suicide is not something he would recommend for the masses. He has told his friends and co-workers of Jo’s plans, he says, but they are all into apple pie, baseball and religion, and they don’t understand.
The masses, I infer, could begin to understand the angry crash into the highway abutment, the impulsive leap from the apartment window. They could begin to understand the everyday anguished acts of self-destruction full of killing and pain and suffering. What they would find difficult to understand is the bloodless, careless, motiveless, meaningless art of Jo Roman’s rational suicide. Jo’s friends, however, are awed by her innovation. After all, one friend comments, we need something more dignified than sidewalk splatter (as passé as action painting, I suppose). And Jo, in a burst of creativity, has given them the ultimate soufflé, the stylish alternative to such crude gaucheries, the artistic way to end it all. She has produced the last word in sophistication: the meticulously orchestrated, thoroughly psychoanalyzed, faithfully filmed, yearlong death watch.
Jo has other reasons for suicide besides art. She and her flock coo responsively about how all this has brought them closer together, put them in touch with their own feelings, given them a profound “learning experience.” In an interview taped 12 days after Jo’s death, husband Mel, looking grave and lost, reflects on how the whole year leading up to Jo’s death caused him great pain and suffering. But it has been worthwhile, he says, because he has learned a lot about himself. I found this a particularly sad sight: a grown man in his bereavement seeking solace in the shallowest cliché of adolescent solipsism—the world as an instrument of one’s own education. It marked the moment in the show when the banality finally transcended the pathos.
Jo herself occasionally gropes for some deeper philosophic justification for her act. She proclaims suicide as the enricher and clarifier of life. Her friends stroke her hand and nod sagely in the classic group therapy mode, but I have no idea what she meant. Another group favorite was the idea that Jo is “taking control of her own life,” taking responsibility for herself, finishing a job she started. They congratulate Jo for preempting God or cancer and taking her own life. In their preoccupation with the agency of her act, however, they avoid the question of its consequences. And the documentary shows us just what these consequences are: feelings of acute loss for her friends, pain and suffering for her loved ones, bewilderment and self-doubt for her husband. When one of the pernicious seeds of her act begins to flower before her eyes—when her daughter, who also has had cancer, begins to contemplate her own suicide—Jo sees not horror but raised consciousness.
Our usual response to a victim of suicide is, as Pasternak says, to “bow compassionately before [his] suffering” because “what finally makes him kill himself is not the firmness of his resolve but the unbearable quality of his anguish.” Jo Roman, however, denies us our compassion because she denies herself her anguish. She opens the film looking into the camera and calmly proclaiming that her suicide, unlike others, does not involve killing and hurting, but is a reasoned response to her life. But her very coldness persuades us that we are watching not a suicide but a murder. This is why we experience not sorrow but emptiness, why we feel not pity but anger.
The anger is directed both at the murderer and at her mesmerized accomplices. A protesting voice is difficult to find. One friend says to her “I can’t understand you. If someone say at age 75 said to me ‘I have arthritis and I can’t type’—O.K. I can understand that, but you….” Can’t type! What next? Suicide as the answer to a lost backhand? To a clogged Cuisinart? The anger turns to bewilderment. What happens when these people are threatened by something worse than pain or age or travail? What happens when their children or their values are threatened? Is their reward for sophistication a capacity for self-delusion so prodigious as to turn cowardice into courage, death into creativity and suicide into art?
Not that voluntary death is either new or necessarily eccentric. History contains many acts of voluntary death from Socrates and Christ to the mother who gives up her seat on the lifeboat for her child. But they died for truth or salvation or love. They died for more than a dose of good feelings or artistic conceit. What is most pathetic about Jo Roman’s death is that, in her enervated and alienated circle, she died for the illusion that her death would express some transcendent reality. Like the Dadaists, she believed that her life and death were art. But at least the Dadaists were under no illusion. They considered both equally worthless.
Choosing Suicide is disturbing because it leaves us with the feeling that the Dadaists were right after all. For all its voguish psychobabble and pseudophilosophic paradoxes, this documentary leaves us with one conviction: that on the altar of her savage household gods—art, growth, feeling, control, creativity—Jo Roman died for nothing.
The New Republic, July 5, 1980
August is holiday time. France heads for the beach, Congress for home and psychiatry for the asylum of Truro on Cape Cod. What makes for a holiday? Not time off from work. That happens on weekends, and no one calls that a holiday. Nor merely leaving home. That happens on business trips. Ask Willy Loman. On holiday one escapes more than work or home. One leaves oneself behind. The idea of holiday is a change of person, the remaking of oneself in one’s own image. The baseball camp for adults where the bulky stockbroker, facing an aged Whitey Ford, can imagine himself the slugger he never was: That’s a holiday.
On holiday one seeks to be what one is not. The accountant turns into a woodsman, the farmer into a city slicker. And when they all go overseas, they insist that their tourist spot be tourist-free, the better to experience the simulated authenticity of another way of life. To holiday is to go native, to be native—temporarily, of course.
Reversibility is crucial. One wants to be native only for a time. The true holiday requires metamorphosis, but, even more important, return to normality. Return is what distinguishes excursion from exile. If the change of persona becomes irreversible—if the Mardi Gras mask becomes permanently, grotesquely stuck—holiday turns to horror. One must be able to go home.
And there are many ways, besides a Cook’s tour, to leave home. One cheap, popular alternative these days is the psychic holiday: the cosmos on $5 a day. The preferred mode of travel is drugs, the destination lotus land. Madness is exotic. True, it is no longer celebrated, as it was in the heyday of R.D. Laing and the “politics of experience,” as the only real sanity in this world of (nuclear, capitalist, fill-in-the-blanks) insanity. But it retains a mystique, a reputation for authenticity and depth of vision. We all know that the mentally ill inhabit a terrible place, literally a place of terrors. But that makes madness, like its two-dimensional facsimile, the horror film, all the more titillating.
For some, therefore, the ideal is to go there on a visit, a trip. The most widely used drugs, in fact, promise to re-create the experience of a major mental illness. Marijuana lets you circumnavigate the land of schizophrenia; LSD parachutes you in for the day. Quaaludes and downers promise a languid overnight stay in the Lethean land of depression, cocaine in the energized hothouse of mania.
As in any holiday, however, there must be an exit. For a drug to be widely popular it must be thought to be nonaddictive. That was cocaine’s early, and false, claim to fame: the perfect high, it gets you there and back. (It is only those living in utter despair who choose a drug like heroin that takes you there for good: They are seeking not to holiday, but to emigrate.) The spirit of the psychic holiday was uncannily captured by Steven Spielberg, when he called Michael Jackson’s peculiar child fantasy world (Disney dolls, cartoons, asexuality) a place where “I wish we could all spend some time.” Living there, like living in New York, being another matter altogether.
For others there is the thrill of the political holiday, which offers not personal but social upheaval. It is a favorite recreation of what V. S. Naipaul calls the “return-ticket revolutionary,” the comfortable Westerner who craves a whiff of social chaos and will travel to find it. First we had the Venceremos Brigade, eager to swing a Cuban sickle at people’s cane. Now we have the European and American kids who hang around Managua wearing combat boots and T-shirts that read NICARAGUA LIBRE. In the ’70s it was Gale Benson, the bored white English divorcee who followed the cult of Black Power Militant Michael X to Trinidad to play at a revolution. Now it is the carpenter from South Shields, England, wearing a kaffiyeh and an AK-47, who is evacuated from Tripoli after five weeks with the PLO, and tells a reporter aboard his Yemen-bound ship that he plans to fight Israel for a year or two more, then go home to England.
They will always be with us, these political truants, and you shall know them by the return tickets in their pockets. Strife, preferably war, is for them fun, or at least a relief from the boredom of civilization. And for them, though not for the natives they patronize, when things get hot there will always be England.
Foreign correspondents, who commute to war by day, then return for drinks at the Hilton, know something of the thrill the traveling revolutionary seeks. “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” said Winston Churchill, himself a war correspondent. Journalists, however, remain observers. They do not pretend to have remade themselves from a gringo into a Sandino, precisely the conceit of the return-ticket revolutionary.
Finally, there is the cheapest vacation of all: the moral holiday, when the rules are suspended and one is transformed into anything one wants. There are two ways to achieve this happy condition. One is to stay home and wait for an official suspension of the rules, an official “letting go” (that is what the Russian word for vacation means: like the Fasching in Germany or Mardi Gras in the Americas).
The other way is to travel to a place where one can make up one’s own rules. Some go to Club Med to shed pinstripes for swim trunks, a billfold for beads and a metropolitan persona for any laid-back one they choose to invent. Some, like Billy Graham or the latest tour from the National Council of Churches, go to the Soviet Union and make up entirely new meanings for words like freedom. “We believe they are free,” said NCC Tour Leader Bruce Rigdon of the McCormick Theological Seminary, referring to Soviet demonstrators thrown out of Moscow’s Baptist Church.
And some go to the Middle East, on which they pronounce solemn, chin-tugging judgment full of right and wrong and anguished ambivalence, to make up rules—for others. There are so many of these travelers that the Middle East has become, in Saul Bellow’s words, the “moral resort area” of the West: “What Switzerland is to winter holidays and the Dalmatian coast to summer tourists, Israel and the Palestinians are to the West’s need for justice.” The West Bank alone offers the moral tourist a sandbox full of paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities too neat, and cheap, to refuse. For the Israeli these are questions of life and death; for the traveling moralist, they are an occasion for indignation and advice, the consequences of which are to be observed safely from overseas.
In the end, it is the two-way ticket that makes the holiday of whatever type at once so safe, so pleasurable, and, literally, so irresponsible. It is a walk on the wild side, but a walking tour only; a desire to see and feel and even judge, and then leave. To stay—i.e., to be serious—is to miss the point. “A perpetual holiday,” said George Bernard Shaw, “is a good working definition of hell.” Getting home isn’t half the fun. It’s all of it.
Time, August 27, 1984
Early this century, on New York’s Lower East Side, where the Yiddish theater thrived and Shakespeare was an audience favorite, the playbill for a famous Second Avenue production read: “Hamlet, bei William Shakespeare, fartaytch un farbessert”—Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, translated and improved.
The urge to translate and improve upon the master turns out, unfortunately, not to be the exclusive property of recent immigrants. It is by now the norm. One citadel of translation and improvement is Washington’s renowned Shakespeare Theatre. (“The nation’s foremost Shakespeare company”—the Wall Street Journal.)
I got hooked on the Shakespeare Theatre about four years ago, by a brilliantly staged production of Henry V. I was so impressed, I took out a subscription. But I have since paid a heavy price: so much translation, so much improvement, so much wincing, nay, recoiling.
I am not talking here about such conventional devices as abridging the text or using period costume. I am talking about the directorial flourishes that deliberately invade the text, often in pursuit of some crashingly banal political or social statement. Such as staging Othello with colors reversed, the Moor being white, Iago and Desdemona and the rest being black.
Or take this year’s The Trojan Women (the season includes one or two non-Shakespeare classics) with costume and scenery—ominous, heavy metallic architectural forms—making loud allusion to the Holocaust. And for those who don’t quite get it, there is a gratuitous opening moment before any dialogue when a woman prisoner runs naked across the stage into an open shower.
And now King Lear. They can’t really ruin Lear, can they? Prepare yourself.
I don’t object to the Edwardian period dress. But why, in God’s name, the giant birthday cake in the opening scene? Candles lit, it is brought out to Lear and then—I’m not making this up—the whole assembly of daughters and courtiers bursts into a rendition of Happy Birthday.
The trope is then reinforced when Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters by carving a map of icing on the cake. This knowing, winking anachronism (lifted from The Godfather II, in which Hyman Roth similarly carves up Cuba) can only be described as camp. It’s a joke on the play and the audience, in which the audience is supposed to join in taking ironic distance—that modern conceit—from the play itself.
Some of the other clang devices are by now routine for the Shakespeare Theatre: the minimalist staging (a flat set, Godot-like in its barrenness, barely changing whether it’s supposed to be a raging heath or a sumptuous castle), costumes as deliberately flattened as the sets (the King of France in tux) and, once again, the ever-present coarse metallic background (the clichéd Holocaust-totalitarianism motif).
But one device is not routine at all. Even after the cake, it comes as a shock—an in-your-face, look-at-me piece of directorial arrogance. When it is the turn of Cordelia, the good daughter, to speak, she does so—in sign. She is mute. As she signs, her lines are spoken to the other characters by Fool (and later, by France).
Of all the people to be robbed of speech: Cordelia. And robbed by whom? This coup of political correctness is particularly egregious because it so contradicts Shakespeare. In his dying moments, Lear says movingly of Cordelia, “her voice was ever soft, / gentle, and low, an excellent thing in a woman.”
It is one thing to take liberties with ambiguities. Or to seize upon holes in the text to drive through one’s own sensibility. But to do it in contradiction to the text is sheer willfulness.
This willfulness is, of course, in perfect synchrony with the prevailing academic notion of the critic being superior to the author. Indeed, the author must be stripped of all authority over his creation, lest we lapse into authoritarianism. He loses control of the text the minute pen leaves paper. There is no real text, only what the reader makes of it. And the reader—which in this case means the director—can make of it what he wants.
Just a few months ago, the company’s production of The Merchant of Venice totally inverted the character of Lorenzo. His every profession of love is undermined by a stage action—fingering Jessica’s jewels or throwing a knowing wink—that tells the audience that he is a knave and that every word Shakespeare put in his mouth is meant to be taken ironically.
The coup de grâce occurs when one of Portia’s suitors, the Prince of Arragon, arrives. Says Shakespeare: “with train.” Says the Shakespeare Theatre: with dwarf, racing silently about making lewd gestures. As if modern audiences cannot take Shakespeare straight without some camp conceit for comic relief.
If this were the story of just one theater (albeit one the Economist calls one of the world’s “three great Shakespearean theatres”), it would be an amusing curiosity. Unfortunately, the Shakespeare Theatre of Washington is not at all unique. Modern artists everywhere feel impelled to draw mustaches on the work of the great. It is, in part, an act of defiance. But it is more often a sign of desperation, an unwitting acknowledgment of the smallness of our time.
And yet, despite these travesties, the Bard still triumphs. We are still moved. He still speaks to us above and around and despite these febrile attempts at translation and improvement. That is the good news. The bad news is about us, plagued by a narcissism that forces even Shakespeare to struggle to be heard above our preening din.
Across town, the rival Folger Shakespeare Theatre is putting on a production of Hamlet in which the role of Hamlet is divided (within each performance) among four actors, three of whom are women in cross-dress. Says Kate Norris, one of the quarter-Hamlets, “We have so much fun on this thing.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were executed for less.
The Weekly Standard, December 13, 1999
So the Atlanta cabby tells his fare, Professor Allan Bloom, that he has just gotten out of prison where, happily, with the help of psychotherapy, he “found his identity and learned to like himself.” Observes Bloom: “A generation earlier he would have found God and learned to despise himself.” But rebuilding life in a spirit of humility is not the American way. The indispensable element of modern rehabilitation is the acquisition of self-love.
You would think that narcissism, excessive and exclusive self-love, might qualify as a vice. In fact, in today’s America, it might be the ultimate virtue or, more accurately, the prerequisite for all virtue. It is, after all, common and endlessly repeated wisdom that one cannot begin to love others until one has come to love oneself.
In the age of Donahue, the commandment is: Love thyself, then thy neighbor. The formulation is a license for unremitting self-indulgence, since the quest for self-love is never finished and since the obligation to love others must be deferred while the search continues. No distractions please. First things first.
The ideology of self-love enjoyed currency during the ’70s as a form of psychic recreation for the Me Generation. It has now been resurrected as a cure for the social pathologies of the ’80s, for the drug and other behavioral epidemics that ravage the nation and particularly the inner cities.
The conventional wisdom is that people are acting so self-destructively because of an absence of self-worth. Until they can learn to love themselves, they will continue to damage both themselves and others. A riveting example of this kind of logic was displayed last week on Ted Koppel’s three-hour extravaganza on Washington’s drug epidemic. The last speaker, a woman named Patricia Godley, took the stage and held it with a mesmerizing confessional. She confessed variously to having been a convict, an addict and a failed parent. (A son, who grew up illiterate and disabled while she was addicted, had recently been killed in the city’s drug wars.)
She was struggling now to learn to value herself. She demanded help. Her plea to mayor and moderator and audience and anyone else who would listen was: “Make me know that I am worth fighting for….Make me feel like I can do it.” Koppel so congratulated her for “telling it like it is” that he ended the show right there, saying that there was nothing more to be said on the subject.
She had told it like it is, or at least as we would like to hear it. If the problem of the destitute is that of self-worth, then all we need is some good psychotherapy and a few “I am somebody” recitations, and we are on our way. Easier that than to seek the roots of lower-class misery in economic, social and family structures.
Senator Daniel Moynihan has pointed out recently that in the inner city there is an alarming new trend: a descent from single-parent to no-parent families as the mother is engulfed in the drug culture. We are producing a generation of orphans.
Societies have occasional success bringing up orphans, but on a large scale it is a losing proposition. The welfare state was originally called upon to supplement families. It is now called upon to substitute for them, and that is clearly impossible. The state cannot undo the devastation that comes from parental abandonment. Nor is it equipped to train parents.
Cried Patricia Godley, “What can you do to help me be something I have never been, a parent?” The answer, properly, is “almost nothing.” The state can give you day care and food stamps and supplement your income, but teaching a mother to mother is not something that the state is designed to do. The culture, the community, the family have to do it. If they don’t, it does not get done.
And when it does not get done, the harm that results is not undone by mantras about self-worth. Indeed, today’s conventional wisdom that drug abuse and alcoholism and sexual irresponsibility come from an absence of self-worth seems to me to be precisely wrong. Drugs and sex and alcohol have but one thing in common: They yield intense and immediate pleasure. That is why people do them. Indulgence in what used to be called vices is an act of excessive self-love. It requires such regard for one’s own immediate well-being as to be oblivious to any harm that indulgence might cause others, even one’s own children.
The answer to Patricia Godley is, first, that there is no way the state can make you love yourself or your child. And second, that even if there were, loving yourself certainly is not the problem. Nor is loving your child. Every mother loves her child. What is hard is to sacrifice for the child. And that requires not self-love, but its opposite, self-denial.
No one has a good answer to the pathologies that wrack the inner cities. But the latest prescription so glibly dispensed—more self-love—is an illusion. Bloom calls our attention to the modern distinction between the “inner-directed and other-directed” person. It is now believed that the former is “unqualifiedly good” and that “the healthy inner-directed person will really care for others.” Bloom’s response is admirably concise: “If you can believe that, you can believe anything.”
The Washington Post, May 5, 1989