A MEDITATION ON BEING A WRITER

As I have several times reported, the four volume collection of my published and unpublished papers is nearing completion.  As soon as some covers are designed and a few permissions are wrapped up, each volume will be available on Amazon.com as an e-book.  This project, combined with the prospect of my eightieth birthday in the not too distant future, has moved me to reflect, not for the first time, but with a heightened interest, in what an odd thing it is to be a writer -- to define oneself principally through the words one puts on a page and offers to the world.

Being a writer is not really very much like maintaining a blog, despite their apparent similarity.  As a blogger, I write to the moment, and my words, like disappearing ink, evanesce almost as soon as they are composed.  Not even lemon juice or a candle can bring them back.  But as a writer, I compose sub specie aeternitatis.  I write in the hope, with the intention, that my words will live after me and will be read even by those as yet unborn.  Of course, this hope is fanciful, at least for all but a tiny handful of writers, but the act of writing necessarily embodies and gives expression to the hope.  Just as no one sets out to be a bad poet or a mediocre painter, so no one writes with the expectation that the words will die on the page, although all too often they do.

Which makes especially poignant and strange the case of the writer who achieves a succès d'estime early in life and writes little or nothing thereafter.  The most famous example is J. D. Salinger, of course, but Ralph Ellison is also a case in point, and so is Joseph Heller.  I often wonder what it is like, early in life, to write a book that captures universal attention.  At first, one must be delighted by the success, thrilled by the attention, happy to sign one's autograph on napkins held out by strangers at restaurants. One reads the reviews, monitors the sales, lunches with editors offering contracts for the next book.  But though new generations of readers keep discovering the book with delight, time passes, one grows older, and after a while the éclat must fade, the savor evaporate.  Two, three, ten years later, when one gets out of bed in the morning, how satisfying can it be to reflect, "I am the author of Catcher in the Rye"?

In a very tiny way, I had something like this experience.  At the age of thirty-one, I wrote an extended essay that five years later saw the light as In Defense of Anarchism.  I wrote it, if the truth be told, for the $500 advance, which I needed to pay my analyst bills, but by a combination of accidents, it had a totally unexpected success.  It was hardly a succès d'estime, to be sure, inasmuch as everyone who read it thought and said that it was dead wrong.  But it sold a lot of copies, and became something of a staple in advanced college courses on political theory.  In the year after it appeared, I received a hundred speaking invitations.

That was 1970, and forty-three years have passed since then.  Each year, I receive email messages from young people in Australia or Croatia or Hungary or Peru who have come upon my little book in one of its many translations and want to ask me, as though I had just written it, what my response would be to this or that argument that it has provoked in them.  I am unfailingly courteous and do my best to respond, but the truth is that the arguments of that slender volume -- all of which, of course, I consider irrefutably true, hem hem -- have long since fallen out of my active consciousness.  Nevertheless, I feel obligated to defend them, because not to do so would be to break faith with my readers.

[I am reminded of a wonderful story from the time when I was teaching at Harvard, in 1960 and '61.  In those days, there was a very famous literary critic at Harvard named I. A. Richards who, among other things, taught part of an immensely popular General Education course.  A bright undergraduate wrote his Honors Thesis in the English Department on the literary theories of Richards, and the Department, in what I have always thought was an act of gratuitous cruelty, put Richards himself on the committee.  At the oral defense, the student reiterated one of the arguments in the thesis designed to show that Richards was wrong about something or other.  Richards objected, "I didn't say that."  The student, who had come prepared, took out one of Richards' books and quoted from it directly, demonstrating that Richards had said exactly what the student claimed he had said.  "Well," Richards replied with a dismissive wave of his hand, "I don't believe that any more," leaving the student gasping for air.]

Here is something to turn over in your mind.  Most of us think of Salinger, in some obscure way, as a failed writer because he never wrote much of anything after the very early books.  But suppose he had written little or nothing as a young man and then, in his sixties or seventies, had produced Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.  Wouldn't we consider his career to have been a brilliant success?

WHEREOF ONE CANNOT SPEAK ...

You may have noticed that I have not commented on events in Egypt.  It is not that I am uninterested.  Quite the contrary.  Like everyone else, I am riveted by what is going on.  But I am totally ignorant of the events there.  I have never visited Egypt.  I speak none of the local languages.  I am completely at the mercy of the media reports.  I think it is best not to write about what I know nothing about.  I do not even know how I hope it turns out.

DESPERATE TIMES CALL FOR DESPERATE MEASURES

Susie and I are inveterate movie goers, and the summer season ought to see a flood of seeable movies.  But this year has been a disaster.  Despicable Me 2?  I mean seriously.  So yesterday we went to see The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp [as Tonto, needless to say].

When I was a boy, my sister and I were tasked with doing the dishes each evening after dinner in the tiny kitchen of our tiny house.  I would wash and Barbara would dry.  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as we worked, we would turn on the tiny radio by the sink and listen, between seven and seven-thirty, to The Lone Ranger.  The catchphrases and music of that show are burned into my brain, and it was with considerable trepidation that I ate my nachos and cheese [no jalapenos] and waited to see what Depp and done to my childhood.

The good news is that the movie is as campy, as bizarre, as over the top as Pirates of the Caribbean.  One reviewer suggested that the real star was Silver [the Lone Ranger's horse, for the one or two readers who do not know].  The bad news is that the movie, at two and a half hours, is about an hour too long.  But it has several memorable lines, including the very last line of the story within the story, uttered, of course, by Depp as Tonto.

My nachos barely made it through the Previews of Coming Attractions.

A DELIGHTFUL WASTE OF TIME

Surfing the web aimlessly and pointlessly, I came on this list of high brow jokes.  I think some of them are hilarious.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-many-surrealists-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-light-bulb-a-fish-the-most-highbrow-jokes-in-the-world-8691191.html

RDW, RPW, RFD, RIP, AND SUCH

Rick Wolff and I were colleagues for many years at UMass, and I learned a great deal from him.  He is a bright and learned man, and also a very charming fellow.  I have not kept up with what he has been writing, so I do not want to try at all to comment on his views, but I would like to suggest why Rick, or anyone else steeped in Marx's economic theories [like me, for example] might want to try to separate judgments about the personal moral character of capitalists from an analysis of capitalism as an economic system.

Marx's central thesis, with which I wholly agree [and with which I imagine Rick also agrees, whether he thinks it is Marx's central thesis or not] is that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class, an exploitation that is built into the structure of capitalism and is quite independent of the knowledge, intentions, or motivations of the individuals who function in that system as the owners or managers of capital.

Marx spends a good deal of time in Volume I of Capital explaining where profit comes from.  It is, he says, the money form of the surplus labor extracted from  the workers in the production process.  [See my lengthy tutorial on the Thought of Karl Marx, or my various books and articles, for my analysis and partial reconstruction of this claim.]  He goes to great lengths to rebut any suggestion that the capitalists make a profit only by greedily extracting more labor time from the workers than they have contracted for.  In the great Tenth Chapter, On the Working Day, he cites numerous examples of capitalists who go so far as to fiddle with the clocks in their factories in an attempt to wring a few extra minutes of labor time from the workers, but he insists -- quite correctly in my view -- that even if the capitalists were pillars of Puritan rectitude and kept their bargains with the workers to the last jot and tittle, they would still exploit the workers.  Even those storied capitalists, much beloved by modern apologists, who befriend their workers and give them Christmas turkeys and ask after their workers' children, exploit their workers.  That is to say, they extract more value from the labor of their workers than is embodied in what they pay their workers.  This is a structural fact about capitalism.  No moral education or religious uplift for the capitalists can eliminate exploitation from capitalism, because capitalism rests necessarily on that exploitation.  No exploitation, no profit.

Now, the case of racism is quite different.  Capitalism is not inherently racist, nor is it inherently sexist, nor is it inherently homophobic.  Indeed, capitalism is a liberalizing forced in the modern world.  The reason is quite simple, Marx thinks [and, with a great many historical complications and caveats and qualifications, he is right, in my judgment.]  Capital seeks labor at the lowest price it can get it for, and any non-economic, hence irrational, prejudices -- against African-Americans or against women or against gay men and women or against non-Christians -- will have the effect of distorting the labor market and driving labor prices up.  Capitalism does not depend structurally on prejudice; quite the contrary.

So my wry observation, a few days ago, that an enormous number of Americans are just hateful bloody-minded bigots, is not at all meant to suggest that the personal beliefs and attitudes of capitalists are somehow the cause of the exploitation of workers.  This last election cycle has been quite useful in revealing the stupid and despicable beliefs of many capitalists and their defenders.  Mitt Romney did us all an enormous favor by blurting out, over and over again, his true beliefs -- beliefs that any prudent candidate would have kept under wraps.  Romney behaved like someone whose deepest ambition was to appear on the public stage as an Edward Arnoldesque bloated capitalist.  There were times when I thought he might appear in the old Thomas Nast cartoon garb as The Capitalist with top hat and a dollar sign on his vest.

But even if all the capitalists in America were to become enlightened philanthropists, it would not change the fact that capitalism itself rests on exploitation.  By contrast, it is perfectly possible [albeit not at all likely] that Americans should shed their racist, sexist, and homophobic prejudices and work industriously to eliminate the last vestiges of institutional or structural bigotry from this great land.  At which point -- Oh Lord, let it happen before I die! -- it will still be the fact that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.

AT THE MOVIES

Idly channel-surfing the other day, I stumbled on a Turner Classic Movies screening of Let Freedom Ring, a 1939 Nelson Eddy vehicle.  Eddy plays a Harvard man who returns to his native Montana mining town where reliably wicked Edward Arnold is trying to push through a railroad that will deprive the workers of their jobs and take away the homestead of Eddy's father, crippled Lionel Barrymore.  Victor McLaglen plays a bully with a heart of gold.  Eddy does a Scarlet Pimpernel, pretending to go along with Arnold while secretly writing exposés for a crusading little newspaper, The Wasp.  While rallying the workers and foiling Arnold's plots, Eddy takes time to sing several operatic numbers, as the movie audience of those days had come to expect.

The movie is hopelessly corny, despite having been written by Ben Hecht, but it brought tears to my eyes at the end as the heroine turned the workers around by starting to sing "My Country, 'Tis Of Thee."  Now, I admit that I am, as Jude Law says to Cameron Diaz in Holiday, "a weeper."  But as I slouch along to my eighties, my heart yearns for the days when a movie would unabashedly appeal to workers and the college educated alike against barracuda capitalism.  Young people must find it hard to believe that there really was such a time in this country.

Don't get me wrong.  There is plenty to dislike about the old days -- for starters, no Black faces, and women consigned to supporting roles in any serious political story.  But at least everyone understood that the enemy was the capitalists, and that the secret to overcoming them was solidarity.  That is not s subtle message, nor is it at all original, but it is true, damn it, and that ought to count for something!

HOME AGAIN

A long plane trip is an oasis of enforced guilt-free idleness.  During much of our flight from London to Raleigh-Durham, I simply sat and thought.  I reflected sadly on the striking ugliness of contemporary American public discourse -- the hateful things said about Obama, the nakedly hysterical and despicable remarks about gay men and women, the vicious, unrelenting assault on the reproductive rights of women, the astonishingly ignorant, juvenile statements about rape, abortion, contraception, the emergence into the light of appalling beliefs and attitudes to which the catchall term "racist" hardly does justice.

I found my musings merging with the reaction I have been having to the doctoral dissertation being written by Megan Kelly Mitchell, a very promising young doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill who has worked for me on several book projects as a research assistant.  Seven weeks ago, I suggested that Ms. Mitchell start writing her dissertation with page 1, and that each day she send me one page, which I would read immediately and to which I would reply by return email.  I have just read page 46, and we are nearing the end of chapter one.  [This method -- "a page a day" -- is one I have used with other students over the past ten years or so as a way of helping them to complete their graduate studies and avoid the doldrums of the endless ABD.]  Megan plans to ramp up to two pages a day shortly, and by the end of September, she should have a complete first draft.

Megan's topic is "institutional racism," a subject much discussed these days and about which I have myself written [in my little book, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.]   Intellectuals like the concept of institutional racism [or structural this and that] because we make our living from complexity.  It is really not interesting, not challenging, to explain what goes on in the world as the result of the sheer hatefulness of so many people.  So we talk endlessly about "socially constructed categories," or explain with great sophistication that the increasing impoverishment of workers is the result of objective features of capitalism rather than a consequence of the greedy amorality of the bosses.

But from time to time, it is useful to take notice of the fact that a very large proportion of the people in this country [and others, heaven knows] are just hateful.  What is interesting, and worth reflecting on, is why all those hateful people feel so much less constrained about expressing views and attitudes that they know will be judged offensive.  The saga of Paula Deen is a case in point.  I had never heard of Paula Deen until she found herself in serious trouble for girlishly giving voice to her unreconstructed views about Black people.  Deen was apparently the star of the Cooking Network, on which, until the world fell in on her, she was the host of a very popular show about Southern cooking. 

I know, I know, I must try to understand that they feel threatened by the loss of the world they grew up in, a world in which they felt comfortable and at home.  But that was a world in which people sneered about niggers and queers and spics and took as their birthright the deference that their servants were forced to pretend they felt for them.

Perhaps I am simply suffering from moral exhaustion as I grow ever closer to my eightieth birthday, but as I read Megan's really very well done discussion of the concept of Institutional Racism, I find myself just wanting to say, "No, they are flat out bigots, structure or no structure.  They have just been keeping their mouths shut for a while."