Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fresh air and innocence are good if you don’t take too much of them, but I always remember that most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
At The Pacif ic Union Club in San Francisco the kitchen staff scours all the coins brought into the building by members tainted with the commerce of the streets. Only after the coins have been thoroughly polished do the waiters presume to offer them as change on silver trays.
Rituals similarly devout obtain in every quarter of American society—not only in the better banks, where the tellers always present new currency, but also in every financial institution subtle enough to disguise the provenance of the numbers so primly arranged on balance sheets and computer screens. The laundering of money is a large and profitable industry, employing hundreds of thousands of workers (accountants, lawyers, investment managers) who, like their colleagues in the criminal trades, send millions of dollars every day to the purifying baths in Switzerland, Grand Cayman and the Bahamas.
I cannot think of any other people as obsessive as Americans about the ritual washing of money. It is as if we know, somewhere in the attic of our Puritan memory, that money is a vile substance—ungodly and depraved. To an Italian, as to a Czech or Brazilian, the fine distinctions between clean money and dirty money belong to the chemistries of the absurd. Money is money, and there’s an end on it.
Americans worry about money’s deportment because not only do we believe one’s money is one’s self but we also believe that an American is by definition always and forever innocent. The Puritans arriving in Massachusetts Bay thought they had regained the states of innocence lost to Satan by generations of corrupt and inattentive Europeans. Their heirs and assigns still hold to that presumption. Foreigners commit crimes against humanity. Americans make well-intentioned mistakes. Foreigners incite wars, manufacture cocaine, sponsor terrorists and welcome Communism. Americans cleanse the world of its impurities.58
True, our corporations occasionally might prosper because of our talents for price-fixing, theft, loan-sharking and fraud, but such crimes, being American and therefore subject to our special arrangement with Providence, can be understood as temporary breakdowns in the otherwise flawless machinery of the American soul. The fault is never one of character or motive.
So extraordinary a dream of innocence condemns us to the ceaseless rituals of purification that set the terms of the national political debate, shape the contours of the language and define most of what passes for American literature and education. If the laundering of money is the most conspicuous of the nation’s rituals, it is the practice of philanthropy that most vividly expresses the American genius for the arts of ablution. Having granted ourselves the power to purify the world, we further assume that by our works and good intentions we can change even money into a detergent. Our generosity is both legendary and undeniable. None other among the world’s peoples gives so much to their fellow men. A good part of the contribution, conceivably the bulk of it, undoubtedly meets the standards of purity set forth by the metaphysical equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration. But a considerable sum of the largesse serves to clothe the criminal nakedness of the donor in robes of virtue.
On advice of public relations counsel, John D. Rockefeller, in the early years of the twentieth century, undertook a program of large-minded philanthropy in order to revise his image as a small-minded scoundrel. Generations of speculators in the issues of immortality have imitated his example. Without their continuing enthusiasm the country would be hard put to maintain its schools, museums or concert halls. Even so recent a Croesus as Ivan Boesky used a fraction of the money acquired in rigged stock deals to bestow gifts on Harvard University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. When he was indicted for fraud, his money once again was seen to be soiled, and Boesky felt obliged to resign from the seminary’s board of trustees and to ask that the bronze letters of his name be removed from the wall of its library.
In its refined state money becomes, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase, “beautiful as roses.” Still, it is never wise to take too many chances with its dark and terrible enchantments. We prefer to handle money in the purified form of a credit card—that is, something decorously abstract that doesn’t arouse the suspicion of hotel clerks who might look with disdain on any prospective guest so vulgar as to offer cash.
Given the belief that one’s money is one’s self, it is no wonder that Americans should be obsessed with the cleanliness of their persons. The nation spends as recklessly on soap and cosmetics as it does on weapons, the object of both expenditures being the protection of the American body politic against the contamination of foreign substances.
Every drugstore in the country stocks hundreds of sprays, perfumes, disinfectants, creams, fresheners, lotions and scents—all intended to preserve a specific part of the anatomy in a state of sweet-smelling innocence. American food comes wrapped in plastic, supposedly cured of its impurities and often decorated with artificial colorings that disguise the baseness of its origin.
Among the well-to-do, especially the Protestant well-to-do, too close an acquaintance with money, or too much of a concern about its comings and goings, cast on one’s character the shadow of unseemly doubt. The late Nelson Rockefeller never carried cash on his person. He traveled on his own planes, and he owned houses in most of the places he had reasons to visit. His credit was sufficient to any emergent occasion in a store, and if he unexpectedly had need of some trifling sum (for a newspaper or cup of coffee), he borrowed the money from somebody following along in his retinue. Nor did he bother to make indecent inquiries about the extent of his holdings. During his campaign for the presidency in 1968 I remember him making a speech to a crowd of Puerto Rican steelworkers in a slum near Cleveland, Ohio. Exuding his familiar optimism, his arms raised in a gesture of brotherhood, Rockefeller addressed the crowd in well-meaning Spanish, promising that if he was elected President of the United States he would do everything in his power to distribute justice, fiscal responsibility and pieces of the American pie. The crowd cheered him with shouts of “Arriba, Arriba,“ never knowing, as the candidate himself didn’t know, that Rockefeller owned the steel mill. He didn’t own it outright, of course, in the way that a man owns a house or a dog, but through a series of intermediate interests that obscured the low-caste nature of its function.
I have known quite a few people who think it demeaning to look at a bill or to ask, when buying razor blades or a fur coat, what the item happens to cost. One of my uncles in California took pride in saying that he never looked at his disbursements. During the first week of January every year he signed in blank all the checks in three large checkbooks, allowing his secretary to fill in the numbers as the bills came due.
“I never know how much I’ve got,” he often said. “I let the tax guys subtract what I owe the government every month, and I tell them to give me whatever it is that I can spend.”
Transferred into the political arena, the doctrines of social sanitation oblige all candidates for public office to feign the clean-limbed idealism of college sophomores. Even the meanest of politicians has no choice but to present himself as one who would remove the stains from capitalism’s bloody clothes and wash the sheets of the American conscience. The pose of innocence is as mandatory as the ability to eat banquet food and endure the scourging of the press. No candidate can say, with Talleyrand, that he is in it for the money, or that it is the business of politicians to add to the wealth of their handlers.59 The system in place is always assumed to be corrupt, and the electorate expects its once and future Presidents to tell wholesome lies—to present themselves as honest and good-natured fellows (not too dissimilar from high school football coaches) who know little or nothing of murder, ambition, lust, selfishness, cowardice or greed. The more daring members of the troupe might go so far as to admit having read about such awful things in the newspapers. But the incidents in question invariably have to do with a foreign country or with somebody belonging to the other political party.
Generations of reformers—whether liberal or neoliberal, conservative or neoconservative—come forward with plans to remove the politics (i.e., the sordid bargaining) from what they prefer to describe (as if the abstract phrase were a kind of bathroom scent) as “the political process.” They campaign on the preposterous notion that if only all the smoke-filled rooms in Washington could be thoroughly aired and fumigated, then all the deals could be done on public television by civic-minded officials appointed to presidential commissions and shuffling their papers with white gloves.
The country’s domestic politics oscillate between different theories of what constitutes a proper detergent. Within recent memory the antipodes of this dialectic have been well and fairly represented by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In the election of 1980 President Carter cast his politics in the form of a coroner’s report. Presenting himself as an innocent betrayed by circumstance, he spoke of poisoned seas and dwindling stores of light, of blacks and Jews doomed to rage at one another in second-class hotels, of Russians armed with invincible weapons. He proposed to redeem the country, not to govern it, and he offered the faithful his own example of having been twice born, thus renewing his innocence with the spiritual equivalent of a second mortgage.
Against Carter’s melancholy divinations, Reagan presented himself as the candidate bringing hope, faith, freedom and prosperity to an audience desperately wishing to hear tales of paradise regained. He held out the promise of an illusory future, but it was a lot better than the prayerful silence in the loser’s locker room. As required by the conventions of the American political theater, Reagan also played on the themes of innocence—but in a major instead of a minor key. The sweetness of his actor’s voice confirmed the palpable sincerity of his belief. Somehow he had persuaded himself that all the dreams come true and that the script of every American life is written by the kindly mythographers at Warner Brothers. Like his most enthusiastic supporters. Reagan had no wish to see or govern an America that didn’t confirm the press releases put out by a studio publicity department.
His training in Warner Brothers movies of the 1940s and 1950s fortified Reagan with ideal qualities for the political theater of the 1980s. The Hollywood of Jack Warner’s day insisted on a fairly narrow range of permissible behavior, and our movies, unlike those of any other country, upheld the social and political conventions of the America pictured in the postcards. Women couldn’t be seen in bed with men; nobody could admit to having heard of Freud or the unconscious mind; the heroes and the villains were cast as unalloyed images, and it wasn’t proper to suggest that in most human beings the elements of good and evil were so evenly mixed that a man’s life could be portrayed as a deadly combat within the wilderness of the self.
Reagan carried his repertoire of golden commonplaces from one microphone to another. He couldn’t make a mistake with his lines even if, as often happened, he neglected to read the script and observed that to see one redwood tree is to see them all, or that the slums of Los Angeles would be improved by an epidemic of botulism. The failure of his own imagination corresponded to the failure of the public imagination. Not that he is an unkind or unsympathetic man. He wouldn’t harm anybody—not a Chicano or black or Arab, not even a Russian. He counts Sammy Davis, Jr., among his closest friends, and he wept when the Polish ambassador told him the story of his escape from the Communist golem. Every now and then Reagan’s aides would usher into his presence a delegate from the anonymous community of the weak, the sick and the poor. Reagan responded with a genuine surge of emotion, amazed to discover what the poor woman had suffered, astounded by her tale of misery and injustice. But once the apparition had been removed from his sight, she vanished as mysteriously and as suddenly as she came, withdrawn into the void from whence hideous images (of Buchenwald or a little Vietnamese girl blazing with the light of napalm) sometimes escape from captivity and float across the screen of the news.60
Reagan was elected precisely because he couldn’t see the other side of the postcards, because he wished to know as little as possible about an America in which illiterate children commit murder for the price of a secondhand radio, in which, contrary to the publicity appearing in Fortune and Vogue, most business ventures end in debt and failure, in which hospitals resemble prisons, and the prisons have become as crowded as resort hotels—a nation inhabited not by smiling faces on the postcards, but by people so frightened or intimidated that they have no choice but to sell, in a falling market, what little remains to them of their dignity and self-respect, and who, to their sorrow, all too easily find a buyer in a corporation, police official or pimp.61
During the momentary alarm about the high incidence of drug addiction among the American people in fall 1986, President and Mrs. Reagan set the standard of virtuoso performance in the art of ritual expiation. They appeared in concert on network television to announce “a national crusade” against the use of drugs. Reagan said, “Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.” Mrs. Reagan, with whom the president was holding hands, said, “There is no moral middle ground. Indifference is not an option.”
If their concern hadn’t been so unctuous, and their voices not quite so false, their announcement might have seemed less like the scattering of incense and the tinkling of tiny bells.
A few months later the President asked the Congress to reduce the budget appropriation for the drug program that he himself had proclaimed, thus demonstrating the ritual nature of his concern. In New York Mayor Koch asked for troops to defend the city’s perimeters, but stationed patrol boats in the harbor for only seven days. Elsewhere in the country the voices of pious incantation recommended shooting suspected drug dealers on sight. An eleven-year-old girl in Los Angeles reported her parents to the police when she found a marijuana plant in her family’s garden. An editor highly placed at The New York Times was heard to remark that it might not be a bad idea if somebody’s Christian air force bombed the coca plantations in Colombia.
In the midst of the singing of psalms nobody had the bad manners to ask why it is that Americans have become so fond of drugs. Nor did anybody embarrass the choir by pointing out that:
The simplest arithmetic demonstrates the lack of honest intent. New York City currently assigns six judges to hear 20,000 narcotics cases a year, which means that roughly 19,400 cases become matters for plea bargain, and the average length of time spent in jail as a result of a drug arrest amounts to seven days. The city obviously hasn’t got the money to hire enough judges, deploy enough police spies and build enough jails. The same arithmetic pertains everywhere else in the country. If Congress or the Reagans meant what they said, they would be obliged to amass a defense fund on the order of $50 billion to $70 billion a year, almost all of it directed toward education and the manufacture of antidotes. But they don’t mean what they say, and almost everybody with any experience of drugs knows they don’t mean what they say. Every district attorney understands that the laws cannot be enforced; so does every judge, detective, addict, literary agent and brothel-keeper. Marijuana is now one of the principal American cash crops, comparable to corn or wheat or soybeans. (Pursued to its logical end, the realpolitik suggested by the editor of The New York Times would entail the bombing of California.) The number of people addicted to drugs of all description reflects the prevalence of fear and unhappiness through all ranks of American society. Like the hiring of additional customs agents, or the launching of more heavily armed Coast Guard boats, the making of vindictive laws inflates the price of drugs and increases the profit margins in the smuggling trades.
If either the government or the society were serious in the desire to reduce crime and human suffering supported by the drug trades, the Congress, at very little cost, could transform narcotics into substances as legal as alcohol, pornography or tobacco. Deprived of its romance as well as of its profit, the drug business might follow the steel and textile businesses into bankruptcy. Fewer people would commit fewer crimes, and the courts could take up more difficult questions of justice.
But the Reagan administration, like the vast majority of the American people, preferred the purity of its illusions. The society chooses to believe that the world’s evil doesn’t reside in men but exists, like the air, in the space between them. To the extent that drug addiction can be defined as a foreign conspiracy—a consequence not of ancient human predicament but of new export strategies in Bogotá—Americans can take comfort in their righteousness. Like the late Howard Hughes hiding on a roof of a Las Vegas hotel from the armies of invading bacteria, the innocent nation affects a sensibility grown too refined for the world.
The media cater to the affliction by their incessant dwelling on the fear of disease, crime, foreigners (chiefly immigrants and Russians), drugs, toxins (in earth, air, fire and water), poverty and death. Urgent bulletins about these seven deadly contagions constitute most of what passes for the news. During the spring and early summer of 1987 the media promoted the fear of the AIDS virus into a near panic. The best evidence seems to suggest that in the United States the virus seldom accompanies the act of heterosexual love. Between 1981 and 1987 no more than 18,000 people had died of the virus (as opposed to 90,000 people who die annually from tuberculosis), and of the dead, all but a tiny fraction (.012 percent) were homosexual, intravenous drug users or persons infected by blood products. The media nevertheless insisted on an epidemic certain to affect the general population.
The concern with pollutants of all kinds—in the atmosphere, the sea, the slums, the Third World—also governs the shaping of American diplomacy. If a foreign country doesn’t look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed. The inhabitants of any alien landscape—whether drug addicts standing on a street corner in Harlem or a crowd shouting slogans in a Latin American plaza—acquire the unreality of apparitions in a tale told by Steven Spielberg. To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.
During the whole of the twentieth century the continental United States fortunately has escaped the ravages of war, and so it is easy enough for heirs to the American fortune to believe they have been anointed by Providence. In their eager innocence they make of foreign policy a game of transcendental poker in which the ruthless self-interest of a commercial democracy (cf. the American policy toward the Plains Indians and the Mexicans) gets mixed up with dreams, sermons and the transmigration of souls. In Europe people may not know very much about foreign affairs, but at least they can recognize the subjects under discussion. They know enough to understand that the dealing between nations is a dull and sluggish business, unyielding in the financial details and encumbered by the usual displays of pride, greed, nastiness and spite. But the Americans, like Woodrow Wilson talking to David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau in Paris in the spring of 1919, prefer to imagine themselves playing cards with the Devil.
The will toward innocence requires the Americans to make even of war a bloodless enterprise. Napoleon often warned his generals against the stupidity of such a sleight of hand, reminding them that in the conduct of war the cardinal sin—to be avoided at all costs and on pain of certain defeat—was the habit of “making pictures.” Officers who chose to see what they wished to see, as opposed to what might be taking place on the field of events, marched their armies into the enfilading fire of oblivion.
But the man who has inherited a great fortune does nothing else except make pictures. Unlike the poor man, who must study other people’s motives and desires if he hopes to gain from them, the rich man can afford to look only at what amuses or comforts him. He believes what he is told because he has no reason not to. What difference does it make? If everything is make-believe, then everything is as plausible as everything else. Asian dictators can promise to go among their peasants and instruct them in the mechanics of constitutional self-government; the Shah of Iran can say he means to make a democratic state among people who believe that they have won the blessing of Allah by burning to death 400 schoolchildren in a movie theater. The rich man applauds, admires the native costumes and sends a gift of weapons. He believes that, once inspired by the American example, the repentant Asian despot will feel himself inwardly changed and seek to imitate the model of behavior established by Henry Cabot Lodge. Dictators don’t really want to be dictators; they were raised in an unhealthy social environment. If given enough tractors and a little moral encouragement, they will renounce the pleasures of sodomy and murder.
The absurd political presentations that have found favor in Washington over the past thirty years resemble the farfetched rationalizations with which New York art dealers sell the latest school of modern painting to the nouveau riche. Assuming that the world is so much painted scenery, the patrons in Washington assign all the parts and write all the last acts. Other people make exits and entrances. Thus President Carter, on the last night of 1977, offered a toast to the Shah of Iran in which he described the Shah as his “great friend” and Iran as an “island of stability” in the Middle East.62 A year later Iran was in the midst of revolt and Washington was advising the Shah to abdicate in favor of any government, civil or military, that could restore production in the southern oil fields. In 1941 the Soviet Union appeared on the stage in the role of brave friend and courageous ally; six years later, the script was rewritten and the Soviet Union appeared as the villainous éminence grise, subverting the free world with the drug of Communism. China remained an implacable enemy of human freedom for the better part of thirty years, but in 1972 President Nixon announced the advent of democracy, and in 1978 President Carter proclaimed the miracle of redemption. Following the example set by the wall posters in Peking, the American press blossomed with praise for a regime previously celebrated for its brutality. The stage-hands of the media took down the sets left over from the production of Darkness at Noon and replaced them with tableaux of happy Chinese workers eager to buy farm implements, military aircraft, and Coca-Cola.
The American debacle in Vietnam followed from the picture-making habit of mind. The American commanders, both military and civilian, substituted the data bases of a preferred fiction for the texts of inconvenient fact. The end was implicit in the beginning, in the fatuous dream of innocent omnipotence to which the American equestrian classes succumbed after the victory of World War II. All the best people in all the best places believed that the United States was invulnerable. Because of its wealth and technical capacity the country was free to do as it pleased in the world. As might be expected, it was Henry Kissinger who distilled the presiding delusion into resonant nonsense. In one of his treatises on American realpolitik, Kissinger said: “A scientific revolution has, for all practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy.”
Such a comfortably materialist view of the world confirmed the working prejudices of advanced capitalism. As William Gibson painstakingly demonstrated in a book entitled The Perfect War, we set up our war factory in Vietnam as proof of our talent for “managerial science and scientific production.” Transposing the war into a currency of debits and credits, our leaders spoke of “kill ratios” and “body counts,” of “assets,” “quotas,” “lucrative targets,” “short term-dividends” and “acceptable rates of return.” Few of them knew the Vietnamese language or anything about the Vietnamese people. Nor did they care to know. They conceived of the enemy as raw material to be processed into the commodity of victory. Their factory operated on a simple formula—“If it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s VC.” What was the point of learning to talk to an object as inanimate as a bale of hemp or a barrel of oil?
The production model of war, like any other mechanism of advanced capitalism, doesn’t recognize the values of allegiance, loyalty or honor. In place of the military virtues it substitutes numbers and public relations slogans. American soldiers were carried on the books as costs of production, like flares or radios or boxes of ammunition. Artillery units bombarded abstract spaces defined as free-fire zones, their effectiveness measured not by any tactical result but by the number of rounds delivered. Aircraft dropped bombs on symbolic targets, again not for any particular military reason but to send a “bomb-o-gram” to other war managers in Moscow, Washington and Hanoi about the high-quality of American courage and resolve.
By their own lights and measurements, Americans won the war. Certainly they met their quotas of munitions exploded and ears collected. If, in the end, the world of event stubbornly refused to conform to their expectation, it was, as usual, not their fault. Even after taking casualties of 58,000 dead and 300,000 wounded, after laying waste to three countries and killing probably as many as 2 million Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese, the American techno-bureaucracy insisted on the perfection of its technique and the innocence of its motive.
Retreating under cover of euphemism, all the best authorities agreed that the war had been a well-intentioned mistake—“a quagmire,” “a morass,” “an accumulation of small but unavoidable errors of judgment,” “a swamp,” “a nightmare.” It fell to the lot of Arthur M. Schlesinger to pronounce the pious benediction. “The story of Vietnam,” he said, “is a tragedy without villains.”
The proofs of innocence coincide with the assumptions of grace habitual among people who believe themselves ennobled by the patents of property. Like a twice-born Christian, the rich man likes to believe that he exists in a state of perpetual blamelessness. When anything goes wrong, it is never money’s fault. Perhaps money makes mistakes, but these belong to the category of technical miscalculations or temporary lapses of judgment; the mistakes never have anything to do with anger, egoism, ambition or stupidity. If fault must be found, then it must have something to do with a public misunderstanding rather than an improper action.63 The equestrian class, like the innocent American republic, invariably discovers itself betrayed—by events, by parents or doctors or servants, by Russians or Afghans or Israelis, by the Japanese interfering in the credit markets or a collision of oil tankers off the coast of Peru, by terrorists and travel agents and unseen trolls manipulating the levers of history.
Over the last twenty years the American masters and commanders have noticed that otherwise profitable or patriotic acts have unpleasant or unforeseen consequences. The corporations prosper, and the arms merchants sell their goods to illiterate tyrants, but the whales languish, and somebody always gets killed or sent out to sea in a boat. This disturbs people who prefer not to have anything to do with the killing, or, to put it more precisely, who like to think that any killing done on their behalf falls to the lot of the hired help (the South Vietnamese, the Shah of Iran, the Chilean junta, the contras) or remains safely in the past—buried with the glorious dead who paid the debt to the future at Concord, Gettysburg and Guadalcanal, and who bequeathed to their descendants the trust fund of freedom.
It is no accident that environmentalism in its more militant phases is a rich man’s cause. The Club of Rome discovered the limits of growth while gathered on the terrace of a villa overlooking a vineyard that belonged to its founder. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the most diligent advocates of the movement tended to possess substantial wealth and property, and their expressions of concern about the natural world had a way of sounding like the pleasant condescensions of landowners asking tenant farmers about the goats. Their earnestness invariably reminded me of a lady who, making a show of her innocence, was nearly stabbed to death on a beach at East Hampton. From the deck of a glass house, at about noon on a Sunday in August, the lady noticed a company of fishermen dragging a heavy net through the surf. It had taken them six hours to set and haul the net, but the lady apparently wasn’t aware of their labor or their need to sell the fish for something so loathsome as money. The piteous sight of so many fish gasping on the sand moved her to politics. Arming herself with garden shears, she rushed forth to cut the net. One of the younger fishermen, not yet accustomed to the whims of intellectual fashion, had to be restrained from driving a knife into the woman’s stomach. He didn’t understand that he was watching a dramatization of the lady’s innocence. Presumably she didn’t object so much to the killing of fish (later that same evening I doubt she had much difficulty eating smoked salmon); she objected to bearing witness, and therefore becoming an accomplice, to the killing. As long as the fish were killed in cold and distant seas she could pretend they arrived on her table of their own free will. Like mine workers and cleaning women they chose their places in the universe for the sheer joy of doing what they always had wanted to do.
A similar attitude of dreamlike trance informed the American media’s response to “the energy crisis” of the early and middle 1970s. Citizens in the lower reaches of society accepted the crisis as another Washington entertainment, or they didn’t pay much attention to it one way or another. Apparently they figured that when the dark night closed down they would do whatever was necessary to stay alive. If they couldn’t afford to pay for gas and oil, they would burn wood, light candles and roast animals in the park. The letters to the editors of newspapers confirmed this impression. The correspondents didn’t drive expensive cars; they didn’t own twenty-seven household appliances, and they couldn’t remember having had enough money at one time in their lives to worry about heating a ski lodge.
But among the equestrian classes the news of the crisis carried the weight of biblical judgment. In Greenwich, Connecticut, people spoke of nothing else. At the Ford Foundation and in the pages of The New York Times the resident oracles published ominous prophecies. The degree of a man’s sensitivity to the crisis could be calibrated to the size of his income. The more prominent his place in the hierarchy, the more likely he was to talk about the crisis as if it were a plague visited upon him by the undeserving poor.
Even so, despite what can be said for the whales and the Third World, it is in the arenas of big-time sports that the acts of ritual purification achieve their highest and most visible expression. The American public chooses to look upon sports as a form of civic religion, and the ceremonial scrubbings-out of sin that attend any athlete’s fall from Heaven surpass in their pomp and solemnity the comparable acts of contrition imposed on lapsed financiers or politicians.
First the repentant sinner—mumbling inaudibly into the television cameras, apologizing to his mother and his coach, saying what he is told to say about how he didn’t mean to desecrate the name of so noble a sport. Secondly, the alarmed commissioner—Peter Ueberroth or somebody equally wholesome—imposing a fine and a penance, which, if the player knows what’s good for him, he gratefully and promptly accepts. Finally, the choir of owners and sportswriters—proclaiming in pious unison the next generation’s need of exemplary heroes, explaining that once again and thanks to the courage and high character of all concerned, the game has been restored to a state of grace.
Big-time sports is a big business—more precisely, the entertainment business. The numbers on the bottom line, like the numbers on the bottom line of most other businesses, have little to do with ethics or morality. But, unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that fans pay to see—not the game or match or bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capitol Hill or the vaults at Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron—and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track and the ring—embody the American dream of Eden.
On the other side of the left-field wall the agents of death and time go about their dismal work. Wars fester and explode; the family business fails, and somebody’s boyfriend wrecks the car; widows and orphans fall prey to lying insurance salesmen; banks foreclose on farm mortgages, and children die of bone cancer. But inside the park the world is as it was at the beginning. The grass is as green as it was in everybody’s lost childhood. Nobody grows old, and if only the game could last another three innings, or maybe forever, nobody would ever die.
If the wisdom of the rich consists in what the rich want to hear and think about themselves, it is not surprising that a rich nation confers its richest rewards on those writers who can preserve the illusions of innocence. Like the bureaucrats who formulate government policy, the artisans of the media make elaborate and cosmetic use of euphemism. They have a talent for blurring and softening the meaning of words, for not calling things by their right names, and the best of them can change even the plainest words into face powder.
As a child I learned from listening to the conversation of my elders that it was permissible to use plain words only when speaking about foreigners and members of the lower social orders. About one’s friends and peers it was necessary to speak less bluntly. The drunkenness of longshoremen (i.e., people whom one didn’t know) could be described as “stinking” or “degenerate.” Although given to the same habits, one’s friends were said “to be having a little trouble with booze.” Of an acquaintance conducting a sexual liaison with somebody else’s wife it was proper to say that he was “having a little thing with Ginny.” Gossip columnists who printed rumors of scandal involving one’s friends were denounced as notorious liars, wretched hirelings of the yellow press. But if the same rumors were brought against a politician or a movie actress, then one was free to talk about the sordidness of their illicit lust. The photographs published in the papers (preferably of the women in tears and the men with hats pulled down over their faces) offered examples of the wickedness into which the country might sink unless something was done to correct the public morals. Among the poor and socially remote, the discovery of sin provided occasions for uplifting sermons.
Always it was important to remember that about oneself and one’s friends it was never correct to use the words “rich” and “poor.” Both words were too emotional and therefore in bad taste. The people one knew were “affluent” or “comfortably fixed.” Other people might be said to be “rich,” but always in a tone of disparagement indicating that they were so base and unrefined as to be “interested in money.” To say that somebody was “poor” implied an attitude of pity or contempt.
Later in life, making the rounds of the several spheres of society open to the curiosity of the press, I learned to recognize the equivalent desire for vagueness in the languages of government and law, of business and diplomacy and the academic professions. The discussion of money itself took place in the antiseptic vocabulary of “nonperforming assets,” “comparative advantage” and “negative returns.” The Central Intelligence Agency never asked its operatives to commit murder, it issued requests for “terminations with extreme prejudice.” The deadliest street drugs went by the names of angel dust and snow. When American troops in Vietnam killed every man, woman and child in an undefended village, their commanders called the process pacification. Doctors spoke in code, and the War Department preferred to go by the name of the Defense Department, which, in 1984, defined the act of war as “violence processing.” The jargons of advertising, sociology and economics were so elaborate as to require the use of phrasebooks.64
Under any circumstances it was important to refrain from indulging the impulse toward wit or direct statement. The country that had taken upon itself the persona of a rich man didn’t like to hear people making jokes that threatened the pomposity of its newfound magnificence. Matthew Troy, a New York politician convicted in the middle 1970s of accepting bribes from his public-spirited constituents, paused to answer a reporter’s question outside the courtroom in which he had been sentenced to three years in jail.
“What is politics?” said Councilman Troy. “I’ll tell you what politics is. Politics is men who kiss ass for money and women who fuck for it.”
The newspapers thoughtfully omitted the remark in the next day’s editions, possibly because it was too vulgar, more likely because it was too insulting to their self-esteem. If this was what politics were about, what would become of their Sunday commentary? Of the people’s right to know?
So many people have written books and treatises about the weakening of the American language since the end of the Second World War that it would be superfluous to recite the customary list of examples. The reader can refer to the morning newspaper, to almost any public speech, government document or recently published textbook. Despite the profusion of pornographic images in movies and magazines, our language becomes increasingly timid and antiseptic. The newspapers publish never-ending accounts of crimes and misdemeanors, which allow editorial writers to rise to the daily occasions of moral indignation. But if the investigations seldom seem to get anywhere, it is because the indignation is largely ceremonial. The media perform the rites of purification, rehearsing the formal cries of protest in order to assure their audiences that the crimes under review represent an aberration from the norm of innocence. The impulse to smother and correct, to smooth out the edges of experience and tell wholesome and well-groomed lies, shows up in all genres of American writing.
With the approach of a presidential election, the cadences of American political speech and writing become indistinguishable from those of the Puritan sermon. The candidates use the press conference and the photo opportunity to teach abbreviated lessons on the reclamation of the American purpose and the redemption of the American soul. Newspaper editorialists exhort their congregations to acts of repentance and reform. Television celebrities renounce the comforts of Beverly Hills to endure the mortifications of the flesh in Kansas City shopping malls. The dinner conversation in New York and Washington turns on points of doctrine as obscure and as furiously dissected as the medieval ranking of the saints.
During the first hundred fifty years of the American settlement, the sermon, especially the jeremiad, served as the principal means of literary expression among a people who enjoyed the favor of Providence. To write was to preach. Colonial stationers printed in devout quantity the texts of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards; booksellers stocked their shelves with travelers’ guides to perdition. As long ago as 1670, in New England towns that through the glass of time seem as virtuous as postcards, the resident divines already were bemoaning the degeneracy of the age. When ascending the pulpit they affected the gesture of rubbing hideous sights from their eyes, as if they couldn’t believe the extent of the folly and wickedness to which, reluctantly, they bore witness.65 By 1780 Hannah More could say, speaking of the polite table talk acceptable in Salem, that it was always “the fashion to make the most lamentable Jeremiads on the badness of times.”
Throughout the nineteenth century the American genius for lamentation showed up in the essays of Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the novels of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Walt Whitman’s poems, in the speeches of John Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. No matter what the victories on the temporal frontiers, the badness of the times could always be seen along the spiritual sectors of the front, and it was incumbent on the writer of sensibility to despair of the state of the union between God and his chosen apostles. The world was not the world unless it was coming rapidly to an end.
The twentieth century took up the theme with the speeches of Woodrow Wilson, the writings of the Progressive movement, the social criticism of the 1930s and the homilies of Jimmy Carter. Even now, toward the end of a century supposedly secular, in an industrial state pleased to style itself modern, no newspaper would deem itself respectable without an editorial page that could be sung by a church choir. The bookstores wallow in commercial visions of the Apocalypse—environmental, moral, thermonuclear, chemical, economic, social and political. The season’s best-selling tracts, whether Bob Woodward’s biography of John Belushi or Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s meditation on the Kennedy family, invariably tell the popular folktale of Satan coming to seize prideful souls made corrupt and vainglorious in Sodom. Any author worth his weight in tears tries for a title in which the prefix “The Last” modifies “Day,” “Waltz,” “Train to Paris,” “Exit to Brooklyn,” “Convertible,” “Hurrah,” “Gentleman” or “Unicorn.”
The procedures of social hygiene require the authors of orthodox economic treatises to resolve a set of primary contradictions. How is it possible for a man to be both a good Christian and a successful capitalist? How does a man join the necessity of pitiless self-seeking with the obligation of meekly turning the other cheek? How is it possible to hold the simultaneous beliefs that what is moral doesn’t pay, but what pays is, by definition, moral?
The founders of the American republic seemed to have had less difficulty with the questions than the heirs to the enterprise. Being Christians, the patriots assembled in Philadelphia in 1787 still believed men were by nature predatory creatures, rapacious and sly, obedient to their appetites. They identified the economic cause as the primum mobile of the world’s secular sequences, and stipulated a scheme of things in which a man’s economic interest always preceded his political, artistic or sexual interest. Being merchants, they understood that merchants left to their own devices tend invariably to the comforts of monopoly and the economies of crime.66 In the writing of the Constitution they sought to pit interest against interest, ambition against ambition, vice against vice; by so doing they hoped to establish a set of rules that yoked the plurality of base impulses into the harness of the higher good. Accepting the Hobbesian dynamic of unceasing combat between implacable factions of selfishness, they wished men to be as free as possible to engage in that combat. Because they were clear about the mechanics of the marketplace, they had little use either for a theology of money or the ceremonies of innocence. They could afford their clarity of mind because they enjoyed at least three advantages no longer available to the current generation of heirs.
First, they could rely on the bulwark of religion. Like most of their countrymen in the late eighteenth century, the Founders took seriously the injunctions of Christianity, and they rendered unto Caesar the things that belonged to Caesar without pretending that they also belonged to God. Secondly, the population of the thirteen colonies was small enough to permit the unity of coherent discourse among the still smaller unity of the monied and educated classes. The gentlemen gathered in Philadelphia spoke much the same language and had read more or less the same authorities. Thirdly, the Founders could count upon the emptiness of the frontier. The citizens likely to cause trouble could leave for points west, carrying their disappointment, their bankruptcy and their sedition through the gaps in the Alleghenies and down the broad reaches of the Ohio River.
Given these hedges against domestic discontent, the Founders didn’t need the unctuous piety that became increasingly urgent as the eighteenth century passed through the industrial transformations of the nineteenth century into the postindustrial combinations of the twentieth. Andrew Jackson still could afford to be clear on the topic of money; so could Nicholas Biddle and Collis Huntington. Speaking to a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia in 1833, Biddle, in the midst of his quarrel with Jackson about the charter of the National Bank, observed: “I can remove all the Constitutional Scruples in the District of Columbia [with] half a dozen presidencies, a dozen cashierships, fifty clerkships, 100 directorships to worthy friends who have no character and no money.” Fifty years later, in another era but the same moral venue, Huntington kept a meticulous record of the bribes paid to congressmen to forward the interests of his Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1876 Huntington remarked to a friend that the members of the Senate divided into three classes—“the clean” (those who did as they were told without asking for favors), “the commercial” (who were paid) and “the communists” (who resisted both logic and money). Certainly John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was clear about the ruthlessness necessary to the success of financial enterprise. He may not have been especially interested in the magical properties of money, but he had a passion for his grand design, and if he had to dynamite a few trains or hire a few thugs to discourage his competitors, well, that was what free markets were all about. To a congressional committee in 1887 he explained that business was like growing roses and that the gardener who wished to raise a perfect American beauty rose had no choice but to crush the buds of the lesser roses intruding on its light. A few years later, to another committee investigating another rumor of monopoly, Rockefeller, becoming irritated by the tedious line of questioning, said, testily: “The Lord gave me my money.”
The American public in the late nineteenth century was inclined to take him at his word, acknowledging without rancor the truth in the observation that behind every great fortune stands the brooding presence of a great crime. The grand predators of the Gilded Age, among them James Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould as well as Rockefeller, basked in the adulation of a newspaper audience that followed their exploits with the avidity it now bestows on the newly rich entrepreneurs celebrated in the pages of Fortune and Manhattan, Inc. Then as now, the gentlemen in question might be cheats and swindlers, but as long as their stratagems were successful, the audience remained free to imitate or envy their opulence.67 During the panic of 1894, at a time when people literally were killing one another in the streets outside the New York Stock Exchange, the press sent a delegation of reporters to receive a statement from E.H. Harriman and J.P. Morgan. The reporters waited for three hours in the anteroom, their hats balanced politely on their knees. A secretary eventually brought them a single sheet of paper bearing the message, “The United States is a great and growing country,” and then, below the signatures, the further advisory, “This is not for attribution.” The reporters accepted the news with the humility becoming their station, much in the manner of Heine’s stockbroker bowing to Baron Rothschild’s chamber pot. Finding their ways back to their offices through crowds rioting in the streets, the reporters reassured their readers that prosperity was at hand.
With the advent of the twentieth century, the fiction of the innocent millionaire became somewhat more troublesome to sustain. The frontier closed down; the expanding crowd of immigrants embraced a babel of languages and moral systems; the Christian religion softened into Sunday school irrelevance. Clearly it was true that capitalism promoted ambition, encouraged hope, inspired invention and provided the rewards of fortune. Unfortunately, it was also true that unless harnessed to principles of moral restraint, capitalism yielded bountiful fruits of greed, fraud and crime. It was this darker side of the American moon that had to be denied. What was needed was some kind of theology adjusted to the plutocratic circumstance, a means of changing the faith in money into the coin of a secular faith. Possessors of great wealth found it prudent to acquire newspapers and public relations counsel. A choir of authors and journalists outbid one another in their eagerness to compose hymns to Mammon and sing odes to the personifications of cash. If some of the older magnates didn’t have the patience to sit for flattering portraits, their heirs and assigns (whether constituted as blood relations or corporate boards of directors) commissioned a gallery of hagiographies in which the ancient highwayman appeared in the ennobling light of philanthropist, art collector, humanist, saint. What once had been honestly seen as a pit began to be transformed into the disembodied and vaguely benign “free market.”
The current generation of choristers stands in the long line of profitable succession that began with the cupbearers hired by Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. Their books fall into one of two classes—the tract, in which the author teaches the reader how to get rich; and the fairy tale, in which the author explains the divine and blameless origin of the American economic miracle.68 The second genre is more difficult, possibly because the practice of American capitalism so seldom conforms to cherished theories of individualism, open markets and boundless opportunity. Obliged to preach the virtues of thrift and hard work to a congregation that lives off its rents and dividends, the writer has to make up in poetic fervor for very small businesses—for rock singers and professional athletes as well as the owners of pizza franchises. In its larger movements—the federal government, broadcasting networks, companies listed among the Fortune 500—the national economy depends on systematic price-fixing, monopoly, noncompetitive bidding and a sophisticated degree of state planning.69 That this is so should be obvious to anybody who takes the trouble to think about the American military budget (currently $350 billion per annum) or ask a few elementary questions as to why American workmanship is so poor or why so many American products cannot be sold in the world market.
How, for instance, could the defense industries stay in business, much less employ a substantial fraction of the population, without the assurance of contracts over long periods of time and unless their products were exempt from the proverbial test of utility?70 In a society supposedly distinguished by its individualism and diversity, why do all the hotels and office buildings and suburbs look the same? Why does so much of the food taste the same, and so much of the television news sound as if it had been written by the same committee of ten? Why has the vast expenditure for public education over the last twenty-five years resulted in a declining standard of literacy? Why has the easing of government regulation driven into bankruptcy so many of the smaller and presumably “innovative” enterprises that the new rules were meant to encourage and sustain? Why has the legislation intended to provide health care to more people at lower cost yielded precisely the opposite result?
The answers to most of these questions can be traced to the preference for the beauty of dogmatic belief over the nuisance of unsightly fact. John Kenneth Galbraith was at some pains to point out the disparities as long ago as 1965 in The New Industrial State. In an essay published at the end of 1985 Galbraith observed that the Reagan administration had raised the power of rhetoric to the degree of mystical faith. Supported by a claque of sophists (among them George Gilder, who defines capitalism as another word for altruism, and by Michael Novak, who equates the indifference of the market to the redeeming purity of Christian love), Reagan and his friends proclaimed their uncompromising commitment to free enterprise and their steadfast determination to get the government off the public back. The events of the Reagan era betray the ritual phrases. The government has been used almost exclusively to the benefit of the equestrian classes—intervening in the steel industry, subsidizing American exporters through the Export-Import Bank, rescuing the Chrysler Corporation as well as hundreds of banks (most notably Continental Illinois), guaranteeing farm prices and farm credit institutions, approving the inside trading preliminary to corporate mergers and takeovers, sustaining the defense industries and protecting the insurance companies.
Throughout the whole lexicon of American political journalism since 1945, the apologists on all sides of all arguments tend to agree on a division between good and evil that can be reduced to the following schema:
|
GOOD |
EVIL |
|
private the self feeling simplicity expression the country innocence |
public the world thought complexity art the city experience |
By and large this same system of value defines the cosmology of recent American literature, which, with few notable exceptions, constitutes another of the American rituals of innocence. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the country’s better writers (among them Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Thorstein Veblen, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker) still could discuss the mechanics of money. The sardonic spirit was never dominant, but prior to 1945 it still could reflect the temperament of a people who didn’t take themselves too seriously, who could afford to laugh at their own absurdity. After the war, and more obviously through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, the voices became muffled in abstraction and overlaid with the gloss of metaphor.
Like any other crowd of arrivistes, the newly rich society wished to put as much distance as possible between its place of residence and its place of business. Polite opinion became too solemn to tolerate affronts to its dignity, and it was as impolite to discuss money in “serious fiction” as it was to mention the subject in the drawing room. Among writers applying for membership in the company of immortals a well-bred lack of knowledge about money, or anything else that stunk of the marketplace, served as proof of a refined sensibility.
Beyond the flowering borders of John Updike’s prose, the country recklessly abandoned itself to a frenzy of conspicuous consumption. All kinds of vulgar people went about the vulgar business of making vulgar fortunes. The booms in real estate matched or surpassed the booms in electronics, in the record and publishing industries, in television, in professional sports, in oil and arbitrage. Excited herds jostled to get into the best deal, the most prestigious resort, the most expensive store. In Washington the government joined the orgy of speculation. Through a sequence of Democratic and Republican administrations the government inflated the currency to float the bubble of prosperity. Congressmen ordered new suites of offices and assistants. President Lyndon Johnson pronounced the country rich enough to afford both the luxury of peace and the sport of war. The Defense Department approved cost overruns amounting to many billions of dollars for weapons so ornate and ineffectual as to bear comparison to the poodles kept by the plutocracy in the Newport of the 1890s. Vulgar journalists, of course, were allowed to talk about such things; such was their métier, and they were expected to provide the stuff of gossip—about deals, mergers, the gold and credit markets. So also the commercial authors who, like Harold Robbins, could talk about the so-called real world with as much license as the anonymous chroniclers at Forbes, Newsweek and The National Enquirer.
But in the spheres of writing specifically and self-consciously literary none of the acquisitive frenzy of the period intruded upon the solemn contemplation of the self. Most of the writers were themselves rich. Having been well brought up in the better universities, they had learned to repress the expression of their monetary needs and desires in much the same way their Victorian ancestors had repressed offensive sexual impulses. The paradigmatic work of fiction, taught for a quarter of a century in the nation’s schools of creative writing and published unremittingly in The New Yorker, achieved their most brilliant effects in the precious metals of symbolism. More often than not their protagonist is a sensibility, not a person.
Variations on the descent into the devouring maw of time and age account for the bulk of American literary fiction published between 1960 and 1980. The theme is so persistent that I sometimes wonder why so many writers of my generation and acquaintance regard themselves as tourists traveling in an alien wilderness. If they could be asked to fill out a passport stating their metaphysical place of origin, I suspect it wouldn’t occur to them to give their nationality as American. Probably they would identify themselves by region or degree of sensibility—as Southerners, or Catholics, or structuralists, or Marxists—but always as discerning visitors from a better world (frequently confused with childhood) passing through town on their way to Cannes or the English Department at Berkeley.71
For as long as I have been going to the levées of the New York literary salons I don’t think that I have met more than two or three people who know much about the specific weights and measures of economics, medicine, history, law, finance, physics or human anatomy. Even reading in these subjects apparently has become distasteful, as if they constitute too ominous a reminder of the world’s rigor and contingency. I once spoke to a critic who reported he had seen a child drown in a flood. The child’s death impressed him as being faintly vulgar. Not so much frightful or shocking as a transgression against the canons of good taste. He went on to explain that what has become inconceivable for both the writers and readers of “serious” fiction is the possibility of anybody becoming implicated in the realm of action. Even the smallest of actions might prove catastrophic—if not to oneself then possibly to a cousin or a newt—and so it is best to do nothing at all. The characters define themselves by virtue of their moral and aesthetic attitudes and by the mutual recognition (or, more often, nonrecognition) of states of refined feeling.
Prior to the twentieth century, the bulk of the world’s literature was written by men who had some knowledge of business or the state. I think of Sophocles and Thucydides (both military commanders) of Seneca, Cicero and Caesar (all politicians), of Montaigne, Bacon, Donne, Pascal, Fielding, Gibbon, Burke, Jefferson, Franklin, Tocqueville, Trollope, Stendhal, Lincoln, Huysmans, Marx, Bismarck, Keynes, Cavafy, De Gaulle, Malraux, Churchill and Freud. The enormous wealth of the United States had made possible the existence of a verbal class that need do nothing but produce objects of language as ornate, and often as lifeless and heavy, as the jeweled chalices and gold figurines contrived for the greater glory of medieval popes. Organized into subsidiary guilds, the members of this class talk chiefly to themselves—weapons analyst to weapons analyst, historian to historian, public relations counsel to public relations counsel, lawyer to lawyer, novelist to novelist, and so forth through the hierarchy of intelligible discourse. The guild makes a profession of reading books and forming opinions; it feeds off itself, writing about the act of writing, producing commentaries on commentaries.
Every now and then I go to one of those melancholy seminars at which, almost continuously for twenty years, the well-known authors of the moment ask each other ponderous questions about the fate of American letters. Everybody talks about the transmigration of the American novel, about the quality of truth found in journalism, about the decay of criticism. When listening to the set speeches, I ask myself who reads the novels of William Burroughs except the people who have reason to write about the novels of William Burroughs? Is it conceivable that the physicists at the Livermore laboratories look to the stories of John Updike to inform their speculations about the nature of the universe, or that George Shultz, en route to yet another disappointing exchange of views with an Islamic tyrant, rummages through the novels of John Irving in the hope of finding some hint as to the purpose of diplomacy?
The questions reduce themselves to absurdity, and the writers of the present generation, well aware of the absurdity, come to think of themselves as guests of the management. What else can a poor scribbler do but sing and dance and play with the toys of words? Joseph Heller makes bleak jokes about the inanity of Washington, D.C., because he has no choice in the matter. Knowing nothing about why or how the government functions, he makes a virtue of necessity and presents his ignorance as wit. Other writers seek to curry favor with their unseen hosts by transforming themselves into clowns or prophets, offering parodies and self-parodies, never knowing what will endear them to the audience behind the screen—an audience that, for reasons unstated, may or may not be amused. Thus the vogue for autobiographies on the part of so many writers still in their twenties or thirties. Surely the managers must also have been children once; surely they will listen to the confessions of a young girl’s youth and early sorrows. Although brought to the highest pitches of sentiment by the woman diarists, the genre also embraces the novels of middle-aged English professors. Even at the age of forty they send postcards from Europe or academia. Being observant lads, they notice sexual comings and goings in the dormitories or on the lawns, and somewhere in the drunken summer darkness they’re sure there lurks the answer to Donne’s question about who cleft the devil’s foot. But they still don’t know what Daddy does when he gets off the train in New York or Washington, or how he gets the money that pays for the divorce lawyer, the new bicycle or the library’s complete edition of Proust.
Rather than being ashamed of their ignorance, the literary guilds take a perverse and willful pride in what they regard as their spiritual cleanliness. If they remain ignorant of the evils abroad in the world (choosing to see them as symbols and abstractions instead of as specific cruelties inflicted on specific individuals for specific reasons), so also they can disclaim any responsibility for the casualty lists. None of it is their fault.