Eric The Blue

Dubliners: "Grace"

There are fifteen stories in Dubliners.  To me, the first eleven make one set, the next three make a second, and the fifteenth, "The Dead," one of the very best things in the world's literature, stands alone and apart.  In the first eleven, there is a central character who keeps getting older:  the first stories feature young children, we come eventually to stories about young adults, and then onward to the work-a-day world of the middle-aged, their troubled marriages and unsensational frustrations.  These first eleven are incidents from private life that nonetheless show pretty plainly Joyce's view of his native city, circa 1900.  The next three stories address themselves to public life in Dublin, its politics ("Ivy Day in the Committe Room"), its cultural life ("A Mother"), and, in "Grace," its religion, which of course is Roman Catholicism.

There are three parts to "Grace" and they may be called "In the Saloon," "In the Sick Room," and "In Church"--or, as has been pointed out by more than one critic, the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso of The Divine Comedy.  In the great effort that Joyce was about to embark on, the composition of Ulysses,  the wanderings of the main character are modeled, mock heroically, on The Odyssey.  But the long section in the sick room will remind most readers, I think, not of Homer or Dante but of Joyce's own "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," wherein the slack conversation of men not above the average is carefully recorded.  Here is a sample of the theologizing in "Grace":

Mr Kernan seemed to be troubled in mind.  He made an effort to recall the Protestant theology on some thorny points and in the end addressed Mr Cunningham. 

--Tell me, Martin, he said.  Weren't some of the popes--of course, not our present man, or his predecessor, but some of the old popes--not exactly . . . you know . . . up to the knocker?

There was a silence.  Mr Cunningham said:

--O, of course, there were some bad lots . . . But the astonishing thing is this.  Not one of them, not the biggest drunkard, not the most . . . out-and-out ruffian, not one of them ever preached ex cathedra a word of false doctrine.  Now isn't that an astonishing thing?

--That is, said Mr Kernan. 

--Yes, because when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, Mr Fogarty explained, he is infallible.

--Yes, said Mr Cunningham.

--O, I know about the infallibility of the Pope.  I remember I was younger then . . . Or was it that--?

Mr Fogarty interrupted.  He took up the bottle and helped the others to a little more.  Mr M'Coy, seeing that there was not enough to go around, pleaded that he had not finished his first measure.  The others accepted under protest.  The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

The story ends, in the brief Paradise section, with a sermon by a Father Purdon.  It seems to be his point that the businessmen in attendance at the retreat need fear no judgment from Christ, who "was not a hard taskmaster."  Mr Kernan had dreaded coming but begins to feel comfortable.  He's a relatively minor character in Ulysses, and still a drinker.  In Dublin circa 1900, Purdon was the name of a street known for its whorehouses.  There was much about Dublin of which Joyce disapproved and the Catholic Church headed the list. 

 

 

Regarding Henry

I'm coming to the end of The Education of Henry Adams and I can't say that I would put it at the head of the class.  (The Modern Library Board did.)  The segments concerning Adams's "theory of history"--even more boring than the analogous disquisitions in War and Peace, which Tolstoy may have thought the best thing about his book, though generations of stupefied readers page ahead to see when, if ever, they might be re-immersed in the world of Pierre, Andrei, Natasha, Princess Mary, Sonia, Nikolai Rostov, and the rest.

With The Education of Henry Adams, there is only Henry Adams for relief.  The supporting cast--his father and brothers and all their other famous relatives, Charles Sumner, Presidents Grant and Cleveland and McKinley and TR, Henry Cabot Lodge (and his wife), John Hay, Clarence King--have their parts but are not vivid characters. Adams's wife, who committed suicide in 1885, when he was 47, is not mentioned.  Nor is Elizabeth Sherman Cameron, the unhappily married woman (to a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania) with whom he platonically cavorted for years, starting before his wife's death.  One gets the idea that, for Adams, this may have been a perfect arrangement.  He was free to travel the world, write his books, advance his theories, pursue his "education," without domestic entanglement or emotional isolation. Born in 1838, he avoided service in the Civil War, not by hiring a substitute but by accompanying his father, Lincoln's ambassador to Great Britain, as "private secretary." He had a dim, mordant view of, it seems, almost everything.  An epigram for his years teaching at Harvard might be: "The lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was worse"--from the chapter in the Education entitled "Failure," his own.  When a cabinet official told him that Congressmen were "hogs," Adams asked him what, in that case, he called a Senator.  The disapproval extends to himself.  The underlying theme of the book concerns Henry Adams, referred to in the third person, grandson of one President and great-grandson of another, Harvard educated, trying to comprehend the rapid scientific and technological advances changing the country in the period between the Civil and Great Wars.  It seems he would have been in a better place than almost anyone to do so, but that's not what he thought, and the figure of this very connected citizen going about his business, which was not business but self-education, is compensation for the tedious parts. 

"The Dynamo and the Virgin!"  What is he even talking about? 

Dubliners: "A Mother"

In honor of Bloomsday, I'm going to take another step in my formerly steady march through Dubliners, Joyce's collection of fifteen short stories that first brought him to the attention of the literary world (and of censors).  I left off by giving a poor notice to "Ivy Day in the Committee Room."  (Just had to show that I'm not intimidated by Joyce's reputation.)  Next up, then, would be the thirteenth story, "A Mother," which is open to a similar charge: there is a fight, and both sides are right about what ails the other.  Another sneer.

I have remarked before about how Joyce's language in these stories seems calculated to augment  the effect of the drab  Dublin he describes.  But then there will be a sentence that stands out from the gray, and in "A Mother" I think it is one describing a "journalist," Mr O'Madden Burke, who has come to cover the concert and finds "by instinct" the room where the liquor is kept.  "His magniloquent western name," Joyce writes, "was the moral umbrella upon which he balanced the fine problem of his finances."  He gets the last word, too.  When the confrontation is over, and the reader may be trying to decide whose side to take, Mr O'Madden Burke, "poised upon his umbrella in approval," assures Mr Holohan that he (Holohan) did the right thing, and the story ends.

"A Mother" is usually thought of as Joyce's take on the Irish Revival.  Along this line, it's worth noting another detail relating to O'Madden Burke.  He had shown up with a colleague who could not, however, stay for the concert of Irish national music on account of having to "report the lecture which an American priest was giving in the Mansion House."  But he will of course make sure that O'Madden Burke's favorable notice gets into the paper. 

Rs rock on

I had on recently one of those political gasbag shows when I heard one of the participant journalists ask another (paraphrasing), "Do you thing we've been over-reacting to the defeat of Eric Cantor, R-VA, the sitting Majority Leader, in Tuesday's Republican primary?"  The answer was very long and did not include the word "Yes." I think it'd be fun to hear the case for the press having missed this big story.

David Brat, the giant slayer, went to high school a few miles from me (and a few years later) in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.  He's an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College who also holds the M Div degree from Princeton Theological Seminary.  "I measured my intellect against the Ivy elites," he has boasted.  At the Rate My Professor site, he gets generally favorable comments, especially from the co-eds.  And, speaking of "eye candy," how about his wife?  I guess he was raised Dutch Reform but now attends Mass with her.  The reformed Dutch couldn't compete with the blonde charms of Roman Catholicism. 

Not everyone is enamored of the newest David Goliath Killer.  Andy Borowitz imagines Eric Cantor's interior dialogue when the votes were half counted:

Should  I have cut more school lunch programs for poor children?  Perhaps.  Should I have cast more votes to screw over disaster victims?  Definitely.  Should I have not said the thing about treating children of immigrants like human beings?  Man, do I wish I could take that one back.

Perhaps the divinity scholar will take a harder line, but we may never know, for the swaying media lantern will soon shine elsewhere--maybe on the Mississippi Republican runoff for US Senate, where another "Tea Party insurgent," Chris McDaniel, finished in a 49-49 tie with six-term incumbent Thad Cochran in the Republican primary a few weeks ago.  In that race, the horrors of Obamacare were temporarily superseded by trespassing charges after a pro-McDaniel blogger took pictures of Cochran's wife, who has dementia, as she lay abed in her nursing home.  The idea there seemed to be that you cannot trust a man whose wife is in such a state, even if he appears to hate Obama as much as you do.  Then, on the night of the primary, a couple of McDaniel officials were apprehended behind the locked doors of a courthouse where ballots from the neck-and-neck race were being stored.  This caused the jaded Amy Davidson to observe that two instances of illegal entry seems like it would be sufficient even for a general election campaign.

You cannot say that the Republicans are boring.  I wish they didn't hold so many seats in the Congress, however. They're less entertaining when casting votes against cloture.  It's apt to get worse before it gets better.

 

 

Views of the 18th president

I see that my current coffee-break companion, The Education of Henry Adams, heads the Modern Library Board's list of the top hundred works of nonfiction.  But the real eye-opener is "the reader's list," which, being largely an Ayn Rand tribute, shares few data points with that of the board.  For "readers," the counterpart to Adams's Education is Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. Two books not by Rand but about her also make it into the readers' top ten, along with Economics in One Lesson (#8) and More Guns, Less Crime (#10).  Perhaps the wing-nuts are too busy voting in online polls to have time for more than one economics lesson.

I just finished the chapter on President Grant in Adams's Education.  Grant is also the subject of a chapter in Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War.  The divergent views of our eighteenth president displayed in these two books would make for a predictable compare-and-contrast essay question for a college course on, say, American Literature: 1860-1920.  The only problem is that the task has already been admirably performed by Wilson himself.  His thesis is that Grant's life was made of alternating periods of dissipation and intense concentration.  After graduating from West Point, he served in the Mexican War, of which he disapproved, and then drank himself out of the army after it had ended.  In the 1850s he failed at selling real estate, at working in a custom house, and in a run for county engineer.  When the Civil War began, he immediately volunteered for service.  It's not real surprising that he should have done so as he was at the time working as a clerk in a leather goods store in Galena, Illinois.  The store was run by two of his younger brothers.  The history of his performance in the war and his steady rise to the top command of the Union Army is well known and also the reason that, in 1868, the former unsuccessful candidate for county engineer was elected to the Presidency.  His two terms in office are widely regarded as a failure--it seems that being president at the start of the first Gilded Age did not qualify as a crisis of sufficient magnitude to activate his concentration.  "Let us have peace," he said, to the derision of Henry Adams.  By 1884, he was broke, the victim of one of the financial swindles that had plagued his Administrations. Also, he was suffering from throat cancer.  To raise funds for his family, he undertook the composition of his Personal Memoirs, which he completed in eleven months.  A week later, he died.  The memoirs, which were praised for their literary qualities by Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain (and by Edmund Wilson too), sold 300,000 copies in the first two years after publication and earned for Grant's family close to a half million dollars. 

Given these protracted slumps punctuated by high achievement, estimations of Grant can swing wildly to and fro, depending  upon how the estimator knew him.  Henry Adams spent the years of the Civil War in London helping his father, Lincoln's minister to the British government, keep England from recognizing the Confederacy.  Having  returned home after the war, he was cruelly disappointed when President Grant showed himself to be unfit for the challenges of the 1870s.  His brother, however, had served under Grant in the war, and revered him.  Wilson quotes the almost humorously opposite assessments of the two brothers.  The difference, of course, was that Henry knew Grant best during one of his slumps, whereas his brother observed him at the helm of the Union Army, succeeding brilliantly in a role that several predecessors with better resumes could not manage.

Here is a portion of Arnold's review of Grant's Personal Memoirs:

. . . .  I found a man of sterling good-sense as well as of the firmest resolution; a man, withal, humane, simple, modest; from all restless self-consciousness and desire for display perfectly free. . . .  I found a language straightforward, nervous, firm, possessing in general the high merit of saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression.

One of Wilson's points is that the characteristics of Grant the writer are the selfsame ones cited by those, such as Henry's brother, who lauded the leadership qualities of General Grant.  Arnold in his review seems to have caught both strains.

During World War I, Wilson, feeling he could not participate in the killing, volunteered for a medical unit, and spent much of 1918 first dressing wounds near the front, then patrolling the halls of a military hospital, where his tasks included keeping crazed, wounded soldiers from jumping out of windows or otherwise harming themselves.  I mention this because his praise of Grant's Personal Memoirs is tempered by the criticism that the book excluded too much of the human cost, the unspeakable suffering, of the "campaigns."  It had never occurred to me before I typed it above, but the title and the subtitle of his book on the literature of the Civil War rhyme, and the rhyming words are:  gore-war.

Elizabeth Kolbert and the troubles of the rich

Without mentioning him, Elizabeth Kolbert (pictured), in this article, takes up one of the leading themes in the work of one of my favorite Norwegians, Thorstein Veblen, author of Theory of the Leisure Class.  Veblen's idea was that the affluent are in a perpetual contest with each other to see who can gain the most social prestige by conspicuously possessing and consuming the most stuff.  If he was right, it would help explain why people buy season tickets for Timberwolves games--the ridiculously high price, which according to classical economic theory should drive demand to zero (especially considering the poor quality of the entertainment), is actually the source of what demand there is.  Look, look, I've got so much I can throw it away on this!

But, Kolbert would ask, where is the "leisure" referred to in Theory of the Leisure Class?  Everyone is so busy, and not least the rich among us.  Drawing on the work of some of the biggest names in economics--Keynes, Stiglitz, Becker, others--she advances several theories, all interesting, concerning why everyone is so busy, even overwhelmed.  I think the best solution involves the word "perpetual"--the perpetual contest to see who can acquire the most stuff and thus the highest status.  It never ends, so, instead of getting any pleasure from the things in your life, you only are exhausted by the pursuit.  Kolbert supplies the following contemporary shopping list:

. . . laptops, microwaves, Xboxes, smartphones, smart watches, smart refrigerators, Prada totes, True Religion jeans, battery-powered meat thermometers, those gizmos you stick in the freezer and then into your beer to keep it cold as you drink it.

The problem of warm drinks could also be overcome if yuppie kvetchers would only cease nursing them.  The more difficult problem is that Kolbert's catalog is incomplete and fluid.  Every time you go shopping, you add more items to the list than you check off of it.  Two of Kolbert's economists--Gary Becker and Luis Rayo--explain that people "have reference points that adjust upwards as their circumstances improve." I think it was Carlyle who thundered, "Lower your denominator!"--meaning that, instead of trying to make your contentedness quotient one by increasing the numerator ("things possessed"), you should proceed by decreasing the denominator ("things desired"). Most of the stuff for sale is not that great anyway. 

Americans, however, seem especially determined to place the wealthy on a pedestal before trying to claw their way onto it themselves.  Is there another country in which a high net worth is regarded as a qualification for high office?  Kolbert's article ran in the New Yorker, and it happened that the very next issue included a profile of Edward St Aubyn, the novelist who, being by birth a member of the upper crust of English society, is well placed to observe their ways.  From the profile, which is by Ian Parker:

The novel that St Aubyn then began, "At Last," registers his sense of accomplishment.  Mourners gather for the funeral of Eleanor Melrose, whose American family is modelled closely on Lorna St Aubyn's family.  [Lorna is Edward's mother.]  Someone says, "What is it now?  Six generations with every single descendant, not just the eldest son, essentially idle."  As Patrick also observes, the enormous wealth of Eleanor's family was never turned into political power or cultural monuments.  Similarly, one can Google one's way across Lorna St Aubyn's family tree and find little evidence of activity beyond astrology, horse-carriage driving, and an up-market nail salon on West Broadway.  If St Aubyn's achievement is literary and psychiatric, it's also sociological: he got something done.  In his living room, he described boyhood visits to see his grandfather, an alcoholic wreck, in the Jardins du Casino, in Monaco.  "He'd be sitting in these beautiful suits which were only marred by the fact that he'd pissed himself," St Aubyn said.

So you can't fault them all for perverse over striving.  Were he American, he could have treated his lassitude by running for Congress.