The Great Gatsby – a tale that continues to be uncomfortably relevant…

 Great Gatsby, psychoanalysis, psychology, Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio, F. Scott Fitzgerald, meaning, narrative, fantasy/phantasy, book, movie versions.

I know that I have read The Great Gatsby before.  I think I may have read it twice, but reading it now – and because I sometimes get obsessed with such things, watching both Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio play the part, I am certain that I did not get it when I read it before – probably as an adolescent – and even as a young adult.  I have been told that Shakespeare is wasted on young people (with Romeo and Juliet as a possible exception).  Well, for this guy, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wasted on me (despite the romance that is central to the plot).

The fragment of memory that I had going into the book was that Jay Gatsby killed Daisy by driving too recklessly – and somehow this was a metaphor for the recklessness of the very wealthy and the indulgences that go along with that.  Well, there was a car crash – Daisy was driving that car, not Gatsby – and someone was killed – Daisy’s husband’s lover, and the wealthy are portrayed as reckless, but Gatsby, reckless as he may be, is not reckless because he is wealthy (Tom, Daisy’s husband, is) but wealthy because he is reckless, including reckless in his love for Daisy.

So, to try to clear things up, Gatsby grows up Jay Gatz, living with parents who don’t appreciate what a genius he is.  His parents are dirt poor farmers out west and he yearns to be something greater.  At this point I get confused.  You see, the two movie versions that, in my geeking out, the reluctant wife and I watched – the Robert Redford version (no one looks better in a pink linen suit) and the Leonardo DiCaprio version – have muddled my sense of what information came from which source.  The DiCaprio version was, in our shared opinion, more true to the essence of the book – even though the wealth and the music was depicted anachronistically (and Leonardo’s failure to fill out a suit like Redford did may actually have suited the role of Gatsby, the guy who appeared to glamorous from a distance but who, as we get to know him, is anxious because he is pretending to belong to a social class that he wasn’t born into).

There are actually five movie versions: 1926, 1949, 1974 (Redford), 2000, and 2013 (DiCaprio).  The 1926 silent film is lost – not as surprising as it might sound.  The book was published in 1925 and it was a dud.  No one bought it.  There are promos for the 1926 film, but no print of the film itself.  The book was reissued as a pulp novel and given to servicemen during the Second World War and they came home raving about it, at which point it started its climb towards being the great American Novel.  The 1949 Alan Ladd version is the favorite of NPR film critic Maureen Corrigan’s because it emphasizes Gatsby as a bootlegger and downplays the romance.  I didn’t want to make my wife any more reluctant, so I didn’t push a third movie on her, and I was fine with the romantic angle in the 2013 film.

I am starting my review with the main character, but the book waits to introduce him as long as possible.  He becomes a more and more mysterious person as we wait for his arrival.  Did he kill a man?  He has enormous wealth, but where does it come from?  How does he know the producers and actors and glitterati that constantly appearing at his home?  He is a man of mystery and so this is part of why it makes sense that I was confused about him and his origins as I tried to reconstruct the novel in my mind. 

The DiCaprio movie provides a backstory that is more cogent than the Redford movie and maybe than the book.  Gatz ran away from home, rescued a wealthy, self-absorbed man who was about to drown in a storm in his yacht; the man took him under his wing and Gatz became Gatsby under his tutelage; learning how to call other people old sport and, certainly in the movies, in part because of his good looks, he began to run with a swifter crowd.

At some point, Gatsby joins the military – as an officer, not an enlisted man (presumably because of the manners he has learned from his mentor) and, before shipping off to the First World War, he is briefly stationed in Lexington where, as a dashing young officer, he woos the most desirable blue book woman in town, Daisy.  He falls for her, and she for him.  After becoming a war hero, he returns stateside to build a fortune that will allow him to join the elite ranks so that he can finally win the love of his life who, in the meantime, has fallen for a very, very old money rich fellow who has swooped in from Chicago, married her, and installed her in his opulent mansion in East Egg, Long Island.  Gatsby, by now having (very swiftly) made his immense fortune, buys an even gaudier mansion across the bay in the nouveau riche town of West Egg.

The story, as I have straightforwardly laid it out, does not unfold that way in either of the movies we watched nor in the book itself.  The story is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, Daisy’s cousin.  A would-be writer and Yale classmate of Daisy’s husband Tom, he is selling bonds and living a decidedly middle-class life, renting a carriage house in the shadow of Gatsby’s manse.  He ends up being the fifth business in this story that allows the love triangle to emerge and to play out.

I like the device used in the DiCaprio version where Nick is in a Sanatorium and his psychiatrist is urging him to write about his experience as a means of recovering from his madness.  This introduction encourages us to wonder what it is about Gatsby, and being in a relationship with him, that would cause somebody to go mad.  This is, I think, an important question to ponder.  That movie suggests that there is a goodness about Gatsby that is not reflected in Nick’s peers from the upper echelon.  But there is, certainly in Dowd’s favorite (1949) version, a fair amount of fault as well.  Gatsby’s character – his ability to act, even if in shady ways, is a contrast to the constricted life that Nick leads, especially as portrayed in the DiCaprio version.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the mystery surrounding Gatsby creates a space for us to fantasize about who Gatsby is or might be.  Another way of saying this is that Gatsby becomes a transference figure – someone to whom we transfer the experiences (or fantasies) we have had of someone like this from our past.  In other words, just as the people who are going to Gatsby’s imagine who it is that he is, so, too, does the reader/viewer.

Gatsby is certainly the creation of Fitzgerald – and in both Gatsby and Nick aspects of Fitzgerald’s own character are, I think, on display here.  But so are aspects of our own character.  We join Nick in observing and wondering about Gatsby, in being enthralled by him, but also disturbed – by his consumption, initially (we don’t yet know that these conspicuous displays of wealth through obscenely expensive parties are primarily there just to attract Daisy’s attention), but then by his connections with unseemly characters.  Though we don't learn much about the details of his shady dealings, we don't doubt that they are shady.

I think that, as a middle class high school student in the Midwest, I imagined Gatsby to be a member of the rich upper class – someone just like Tom, Daisy’s husband.  The idea of being upwardly mobile – of creating wealth – seemed as ridiculous to me as the idea that science would continue to evolve and that there was room among the pantheon of great scientists for me to make new discoveries.  So, my guess is that I missed out on the class distinctions that are at the heart of this book – because all of the characters seemed out of my league, and they always would be.  I had a static view of class and role.

Reading the book now, I am struck by that static conception of class being spelled out in the novel – something that must have been opaque to me then.  Tom cites a eugenicist psychologist, Goddard.  Eugenics is something that I was only vaguely aware of before I started teaching the history of psychology, and I was completely unaware (even though I had taken a class in graduate school that I cribbed some specific readings about eugenics from in my teaching) of the role of British, but especially American scientists in crafting the blueprint that would lead to Hitler’s final solution.  Eugenics is the idea that we should improve the human race by improving the “stock”; by selectively breeding smart people with each other and sterilizing “mental defectives”  (We sterilized over 70,000 Americans in the 1920s through the 1950s with the intent of cleaning up the gene pool).

To hear Goddard referenced, in the book and onscreen, with his blatantly racist ideas – ideas that were not just tolerated but taken (as Tom does) as scientific fact – when the studies that he did were of such poor quality and his own racism pre-determined the outcome of those studies – was amazing to hear leaping out of the novel.  That said, it speaks to still deeply ingrained beliefs that we hold (as I did as a child) that class begets class, and we are not as fluid a society as Horatio Alger and his stories would have us believe.

So, who knows what version of this story led the service men to get excited about it?  Were they dreaming of returning home and being able to become millionaires – to transcend the class barriers that are so securely erected in American society?  Were they aware that this was a story about a society that they were risking their lives to protect that would, according to the central premise of the book, never allow them access to that society?  Or were they, as I might have been, taking this simply as a fairy tale – like Romeo and Juliet – with star crossed lovers who were separated mostly by time and opportunity?  Or were they reading the more malevolent story line that I see as Fitzgerald’s intent – to clarify that we don’t belong in the upper reaches of society unless we are born there, and, that if we try to get there from here, we will fail – or more precisely, the rich will close ranks and keep us out.

I spend so much time on this because I think one reason that this book has become the Great American Novel (or one of them) is that it is a kind of dream.  And, as in all dreams, there is a tremendous amount of condensation, symbolism, and ambiguity.  In interpreting a dream with a patient, or interpreting one of my own dreams, there are generally at least three or four plausible readings of the dream.  And, as in improv, it is not this OR that, it is generally this AND that… and that and that and that.  Because of the device of letting the hero come onto the stage late in the first act, and our being encouraged think about him a lot before he does, this novel, this movie, this dream is not just his – or Nick’s – or Fitzgerald’s, but ours.  We will hold it together with our own understanding of how the world works.

To nerd out for a minute – the thesis that a narrative - a phantasy - underlies our actions in the world comes directly from the work of a British Psychoanalyst named Spillius.  She wrote a paper near the turn of the last century defending Melanie Klein’s position that phantasy (spelled intentionally with a ph) is the basis of our unconscious functioning – not, as Freud would have had it, drives (or as Solms has clarified – our feelings).  Spillius, and, more contemporarily, Thomas Ogden, maintain that we have narrative structures deeply imbedded in our minds, and these structures determine how we see the world and interpret it.  These structures can vary widely and they can be in conflict with each other.

So, for Gatsby, he can have a structure – a phantasy – a narrative, that maintains that his love for Daisy was real – it was meant to be.  He is not the child of his parents – but the golden boy whose shining beauty matches that of Daisy and they, together, are golden children destined to be soul mates.  This phantasy is powerful enough to fuel his engagement with whatever people he needs to build the image that he does of being the powerful, knowledgeable, wealthy man of the world who is externally, as well as internally Daisy’s match (Redford, by the way, seems to fit most easily into this phantasy version).

There is, though, another operative fantasy.  Gatsby also believes himself to be the son of dirt farmer’s.  Just as Nick, the writer, never felt himself to be the equal of Tom, the football hero at Yale, even though, as Daisy’s cousin, he should belong in this upper class world that Tom effortlessly inhabits with Daisy – while Tom is also slumming it with his mistress who lives with her husband in his gas station between East Egg and Manhattan – Gatsby doesn’t really feel that he belongs (DiCaprio, to my mind, more clearly articulates this underlying phantasy).  Gatsby worries about whether the flowers he buys for the meeting with Daisy will be adequate – he sweats when, having re-established his relationship with Daisy, he visits with Daisy and Tom in their home.

Deciding to drive into town, Gatsby drives Daisy in Tom’s car, while Tom takes Gatsby’s yellow Duesenberg (perhaps the sexiest car ever built by humans) into town with Nick and the professional golfer girlfriend Daisy has bestowed on Nick.  All five of them, after stopping at the gas station that Tom’s mistress’s husband maintains in the slag heap between East Egg and Manhattan, an outpost overseen by the all-seeing spectacles of an optometrist’s billboard, end up at the Plaza Hotel where they rent a room for the afternoon to hang out and talk.

Gatsby forces Daisy to let Tom know that he is her true love.  She reluctantly acknowledges this to be the case.  Tom, taken aback, reminds her that she loves him, too.  She agrees with this as well.  Gatsby insists that they will leave Tom.  Daisy does not seem convinced but leaves with Gatsby to drive back to East Egg.  What we don’t find out until later – but again I will tell the story in more traditional fashion – is that Daisy is behind the wheel and they are now driving in Gatsby’s bright yellow car.  When they drive through the slag heap past the gas station, Tom’s lover, who had seen Tom at the wheel of the yellow car on the way into town – runs towards the yellow car hoping to convince Tom to take her away from her husband who has decided to leave town with her.  Daisy runs her down, killing her, and then keeps driving.  Gatsby, when they get to her house drops her off, but lingers nearby to make sure that the will be alright when Tom returns – assuming Tom may harm her.

The next day, Tom’s lover’s husband tracks down Tom, assuming it was Tom who Killed his wife.  Tom clarifies that the yellow car belongs to Gatsby and sends the angry husband in Gatsby’s direction.  Gatsby has decided to take the rap for the hit and run to protect Daisy.  He never the gets the chance as the dead woman's husband kills Gatsby and then himself – and Daisy goes off, scot-free, with Tom.  Nick is the sole person at Gatsby’s funeral with the exception of Gatsby’s father who has materialized just as all of Gatsby’s friends and acquaintances, including the “business” partners, have melted away. 

Nick mourns the loss of Gatsby, but perhaps even more so the loss of his innocent sense that justice can or will be served, and that people have genuine ties with each other.  Daisy’s casual dismissal of Gatsby may be the thing that drives him mad.  Daisy cares no more for Gatsby than Nick’s golfer girlfriend cares for him, or he for her.  We live in a world that is simultaneously fluid and rigidly defined.  The things we might think of as being most valuable – relationships – seem the most disposable, while wealth, which philosophers and theologians will maintain are ephemeral, create unbridgeable divisions among us.

The phantasies and narratives that guide our lives need to be constantly revised.  Gatsby’s love for Daisy seems to my romantic phantasy notion, to be the most desirable in this story, but it turns out to be illusory or at least transitory.  Daisy’s attachment to Tom – or perhaps more to the point -Tom’s attachment to Daisy – seems to be solid, despite both partners having philandered, and despite Tom’s despicable views about human beings and their worth being determined by their genes and therefore ultimately by their “race”.  We’d like to think this would be the more transitory belief, but it wins out, in the end.

The great American novel, then, appears to unmask the American dream.  If we are able to listen to the underlying phantasy – if we are able (and this may seem obscure, and therefore I apologize) to give up the curmudgeon Freud’s naïve belief that we are driven by our optimistic wish to meet our own needs, but recognize that we are driven at least as powerfully by a narrative that is based in immutable power differentials – we may be better equipped to understand the paradoxes that lie at the heart of American Exceptionalism – that we are, ultimately, not that exceptional after all.  Trump’s America is, indeed, a crass, uncomfortable phantasy that many of us abhor, but it is also a very real vision – perhaps a more honest vision – than we “enlightened” people would care to admit.  No, I am not saying that the eugenicist vision is biologically or scientifically accurate, but it appears to be an accurate description of a more elusive, but perhaps powerful stratum of the human psyche – that I am superior to you and, if I have the means, I will hold onto that superior position – no matter how much evidence of our equality and profiting from each other you pile up.     

 

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Deliver Me from Nowhere: Oedipal issues can be addressed - but are they ever resolved?

 Deliver Me from Nowhere, Springsteen, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Nebraska, Springsteen on Broadway, Oedipal resolution

Bruce Springsteen was a legendary figure in the middle 1980s.  I did not have the wherewithal at that point to spend much money on records or concerts, but many of my friends who did were avid fans.  He was rumored to be the hardest working rock star ever, and the length and energy of his shows was unparalleled.  I did manage to scrape up enough cash to see John Cougar Mellankamp in concert, rumored to be the second-best show at that point, and even in my nosebleed seats, I found that quite enthralling, so when friends would talk about going to Springsteen concerts, I took vicarious pleasure in their experiences.

Ten years ago, I took my son and one of his friends to baseball camp in Florida.  His friend was into Springsteen, so we listened to the Springsteen station on Sirius FM on the way down and back.  I was familiar with most of the songs – and they seemed mostly to be played from recorded concerts – so they were his big hits.  I saw and wrote about his Netflix special Springsteen on Broadway, but that left me with more questions than answers.  So, when the buzz started about this film, I purposely avoided learning much about it – I knew that it starred Jeremy Allen White (whom I enjoyed in The Bear), and that Springsteen himself had had a hand in it. 

I expected that it would be a bio pic in the style of Elvis, A Complete Unknown (about Dylan), Walk the Line (a film about Johnny Cash), Ray (about Ray Charles) or even Maestro (the biopic about Leonard Bernstein), all films I have seen and enjoyed, and each of which follows a familiar arc with a smattering of material about the family of origin, the grind to get from there to the top of the heap and then some material about their fall from grace – interspersed with a good impersonations of the singing and the singer (or conductor) nicely fleshing out the story.  There are variations, but they follow a general outline.

I was unprepared, then, for a film that looked closely at a critical moment in a career – Oh, it included a couple of impersonation moments of the star as a star, but mostly it looked at a crisis – a crisis that occurs after the beginnings of stardom – and one that, instead of derailing the star, propels the second half of his career.  More importantly, I was completely unprepared for my emotional reaction to the film.  I cried like a baby throughout this film (and because it was so emotionally moving), I may not be able to veridically describe it.

To be fair, my family jokes that I cry at Coke commercials.  And I do.  But the quality of this crying was different – I was not just moved by the performance or the story, but both together created a cathartic level experience in me – much like Aristotle’s description of the impact of Greek tragedy on the viewer.  The tragic element here was not; however, in the Greek tradition of something that causes the hero to fail, but this element drives the hero to appear to succeed, when, in fact, he is never quite going to achieve what it is that he is looking for.  The goal for Springsteen, at least as told in Springsteen on Broadway, will always lie just out of reach, so he will keep reaching for it, and this will account for his continuing success.

This movie, then, is about the creation of a weird and off brand album – Nebraska.  I was beginning graduate school when it was released and there was a certain mystique about the album.  It was dark and folksy, and, frankly, to my ear, monotonous.  It was seen by my friends as a break from his more commercial work and a sign that he was a true artist.  Watching the film, I realized that I must have listened to the album at some point because I was familiar with so many of the songs, but I do not remember spending much, if any time, with it.  It was, in a very important sense, forgettable.

This movie presents that album, instead, as pivotal.  On a very surface layer, it was.  Springsteen held hostage the record executives who wanted him to keep playing with the E Street Band and churn out hit after hit.  He insisted that they release this bleak recording made on a cassette tape of his playing an acoustic guitar and singing mournful tunes as a commercial record.  Thanks, in part, to the support of his agent, he was able to make them cave so that he could establish himself as an artist.  Not just by throwing a tantrum and having thus gotten his way, but by having this dreary bit of singing hitting enough of a cord with enough people that even without it being hyped, it became an underground hit.  Point made: I know what I am doing as an “artist”; a concept that seems to be in tension with the persona of the rock and roller from Freehold, New Jersey who plays good, danceable music.

But the pivot it portrays runs much deeper than that.  In Springsteen on Broadway, Springsteen portrays himself as a huckster – someone who is telling other people’s stories that are not really his own.  The title track (the album was recorded in a rental house in New Jersey, not, as I was led to believe, in a motel in Nebraska) is a first person account of the psychopath Charles Starkweather, the heartless murderer played by a young Charlie Sheen in the film Badlands.  This haunting song is about a man who feels no guilt, but it seems to me that that is a wished-for state.  The feel of the song evokes a deep, dark kind of despair – a despair that springs, according to this film, from two sources.

The first and most obvious source of Springsteen’s despair is his relationship with his alcohol sodden and cruelly abusive father.  If only he could not feel.  But he does.  He feels, I think, I deeply sorry for his father – deeply sorry that he can’t change the way that his father feels.  I think this is a particular kind of guilt.  Most of the guilt that I feel is a very selfish sort of guilt.  I generally am a very guilty person, but the guilt I feel is for not living up to the version of myself that I should be.  I should have done better, but I didn’t and so you have to suffer.  But your suffering is the side show.  The center of my guilt is perhaps better understood as shame.  I failed to be the person that I expected myself to be.

Now there is a fair amount of shame that I am imagining Springsteen feels about his failure to make his father feel better.  If he were a better son, as it were, his father wouldn’t drink.  But there is another layer to it.  His father’s drinking – his father’s attacks on his mother and on himself – enrage him.  And he wants to kill his father – both to protect his mother, but also to put his father out of his misery – because his father, he suspects – even knows – is miserable.  He feels guilty for his murderous impulse – and wishes that he could have that impulse without the guilt – that he could carry it out as effortlessly as Charles Starkweather kills his victims.

The other part of his guilt, I believe, has to do with his own inability to be better than his father.  He is no more capable of committing to the relationship with Faye, the younger sister of a friend from High School, who is a fan and the mother of a young child from a previous relationship, than his father was able to commit to caring for the young Springsteen and his mother.  In my imagination, like his father, Springsteen desperately wants to do this – or at least to be untroubled by his need to have more than fun with Faye – so he writes with envy about being Starkweather – about being able to not feel anything but fun in his relationships with the important people in his life, and to be unaware that he is ruining their lives by not being able to commit to them.

Springsteen’s confrontation with the ghost of his father and with his own inabilities in the relationship with Faye lead him into a very dark place.  His agent recognizes the soundtrack as a symptom of that darkness, and he realizes that he is in over his head in terms of his ability to help him, so he refers him for psychoanalytic help. 

The film fast forwards from his first meeting with his analyst to ten months later.  Springsteen has just completed a successful set on tour and is meeting with his parents backstage after the show.  There is a tender interchange with his father – and the implication, at least to this viewer, is that the effort that he pours into each performance – the care that he puts into the creation of the impersonations of others – is driven by both a desire to make his Daddy happy and also by a desire to create in the minds of the audience the experience of being with the person he would like to be rather than the person that he fears himself to be; he wants them to imagine him as someone who is reliably there for them.

In Springsteen on Broadway, Bruce acknowledges that the moment portrayed in this film when he enters into treatment with an analyst has extended into a relationship that has continued for at least the next 25 years.  I can’t pretend to know what went on in those conversations.  I can only report on the experience I had watching the film – part of which I have related above.  So, if you want to call this projection, I will not be able to contradict you.  Whether it is accurate is, as it were, up to the boss (I know he hates that nickname, but it seemed to work in the sentence).  But it is also up to you – whether you felt something similar as the events of this moment in his life paraded across the screen.

I think that Springsteen imagined himself to have the power to fix his father.  More centrally, I think he felt guilty for not having been enough – for his presence not being a joy – that it was, instead, a burden.  In addition to feeling guilty – and fearful that this was the case, I imagine that he was furious at not being recognized as the brilliant child – the gift – that he was.  The gift that all children should experience themselves as being.  In the novel The Great Gatsby, which I am currently reading, Gatsby imagines himself, when he is a child, to be a God.  For Gatsby, he is ashamed of his very limited parents.

Certainly, Springsteen would have been ashamed as well – so he hides the aspects of himself that he is ashamed of.  This film is about the beginning of the process of coming to grips with his shame, his anger, his guilt, and his anxiety about the ways in which his relationship with his father pointed out all the ways in which he was not a gift – he was not a God.  To become a rock star is to be treated like a God.  To remain balanced and humble in the midst of the adulations of thousands or even millions demands a reckoning with the parts of oneself that are mortal and fallible. 

Nebraska was, then, not the ego piece of a Diva, but, instead, the acknowledgement of a genuinely troubled soul.  To cut and perform Born in the USA, which he had already written, an upbeat anthem intended to both stir stadium sized crowds, but also to give voice to people who were not him, Springsteen chose to explore who he actually is and who he would like to be, including being ashamed of wanting to be the people that he is and cannot be. 

I think that the lesson that comes out of this movie is that, if we are to surpass our fathers, we need to know that when we do, we are not better than they are – we are made of the same stuff.  And what we need from them is what they needed from their fathers; validation and attunement.  In the dressing room, Springsteen asks to sit on his Daddy’s lap – and his father suggests that he do that just as he did as a little boy.  Springsteen clarifies that he has never befoe had a seat on his father’s lap. 

As angry as we are with our fathers for having wounded us, as guilty as we are for not having healed their wounds, and as anxious as we are about exposing ourselves to being wounded again, we still need that adulation.  Springsteen asks for it from his Daddy, but also from his audience.  He deeply needs to be validated.  Fortunately for us, he recognizes that this validation will come when he performs optimally.  He has come to some sort of peace with his need to surpass and still be connected with the man who bore and disappointed him.

 

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Fredrik Backman’s My Friends

 Fredrik Backman; My Friends; Novel; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Love; Friendship; Escapism

 

Especially in these dark and perilous times, a little bit of escapism may serve us well.  I have been thinking about starting a series of posts about normal life as the end of the United States as we know it approaches, similar to the posts about COVID that I published during (and after) the lockdown.  I published the COVID chronicles because historians were noting, as the pandemic spread, that we didn’t have good records of the experiences of everyday people during the 1919 flu epidemic.  They hypothesized that this was because people felt terribly about how badly they felt about not helping their neighbors who had been stricken and then quarantined.  I have not seen anything about not having records from ordinary Germans who were opposed to the Nazis, but I also haven’t seen reports of that – outside of the exploits of one Gestalt psychologist, Wolfgan Kohler, which I discovered teaching the history of psychology.

So, let it be noted that, in the Midwest, where the day to day stuff doesn’t seem to have changed all that much, despite the fact that this has been the most disruptive period in the history of the country, that a little escapist literature (as well as a No Kings March) has come in handy.  Reading this book transports me to a place and a time that is familiar and very far away, and to a crazy geographical space where the suspension of disbelief is helped by the dislocation that you may feel as you try to locate yourself in this fantastic but very familiar place and time.

Please don’t dismiss this book because it reads like it is written for young adult readers.  If they like it, more power to them.  But I found myself being transported by this book to my own adolescence and the weirdest thing happened – it caused me to fantasize about meeting my wife as an adolescent and that fantasy helped me fall in love with her all over again and in entirely new ways.  More on that later, but, for now, your results may vary and I can’t guarantee this will happen to you, but I do want you to know, up front, that this is a potentially powerful book.

It is a tale of discovery – two coming of age stories – well actually five – but the coming of age of a group that banded together before the age of cell phones and then the power of that coming of age story – and the art (both the story itself, but also the work of art that the story produced) to support the coming of age of the next generation – a girl who would have been one of us – both one of the four, but also one of those who have the gift to use art to connect us to each other – because she can see, both in the work of art, but also in humanity, what is there to be seen – as crazy and discomforting as that necessarily is.

I hesitate to articulate the plot because part of the delight of this story are the minor and major twists that the author so nicely keeps hidden from one moment to the next.  Suffice it to say (spoilers inevitably coming, but I will try to keep them minimal): this novel centers around the unfolding of the story of the group of adolescents who are now in their forties to an eighteen year old who comes from a similarly impoverished and simultaneously enriching background, one that includes a close friend and the kind of crushing losses that sear themselves into a person and, if they don’t turn them ugly, become an integral part of their beauty.

The old group were youngsters in a port city – one where life was grim for the parents – and even grimmer in school – especially if you were “different”.  People were not just ridiculed for the ways they stood out, they were assaulted for them – and the futures that lay over the horizon were actually all around them.  They would end up as cogs in the machinery of the port and old men and women like their mothers and fathers.  But these four kids fell in love with each other and knew that one of them, the most different, the most “special”, needed to get out.

So, one of the stories in this book is that story, the way that these kids conspired to get one of their own out of the mess they all found themselves in (and into an even bigger mess in the wide world - but isn't that the way of all things?).  This story unfolds as a member of that group recounts it to the girl who has grown up in foster homes and now finds herself without a home but with an artistic vision of the world that doesn’t have much room in it for the wealthy collectors of art who collect it not to appreciate its beauty but because it will appreciate in value.  She finds it heartbreaking that her favorite piece of art, a piece of art that truly moves her, is likely to be hermetically sealed.

This book borrows something from Donna Tartt’s book The Goldfinch.  I had a sense of that, and then the author quoted Tartt!  Both books are meditations on the relationship between art and trauma, and both are wary of the collectors of art – and want us to appreciate the art that we are holding in our hands.  And that piece of art is the story – and here we get two stories for the price of one…

The story of the kids in the book unfolds as one of the friends, one who loved the artist – perhaps the most – travels with the girl back to the harbor town where the kids all grew up together.  They are travelling there to bring the story of the four kids full circle, but the story of how they get there is the second story.  Two things are important about that second story.  The first is that the girl is as irritating to the story teller – who has always suffered the other members of the club – as any member of that club was, and the land they are travelling across – they travel by train – is not quite Europe and not quite America – but it is clearly one or the other while simultaneously being neither – helps us be disoriented as we read.  We are never quite sure where we are in either space or time – and meanwhile we are jumping back and forth between the past and the present.

Just one of the remarkable observations of Louisa, the girl who makes the cross-country trip with Ted, the friend of the artist and the rest of the members of the group, is that, in a story, when it is heard for the first time, things are not happening in the past, but now.  Backman’s use of hyperbolic language continually calls our attention to this story as it is unfolding - it is happening NOW.  We are as irritated at Backman as we are at Louisa for the outlandish importance he and she attach to every little thing – and then we (or at least I) remember how ridiculously connected to the world we used to be as adolescents – when everything meant something and we wanted to know it all.

So it was from that frame of mind that I rediscovered my Reluctant Wife.  We met as pretty well formed professionals -  and we agreed that had we met as adolescents we would not have hit it off (my Reluctant Wife was Queen of the Nerds while I, a closet nerd, was a wannabe hippie who was acting the part of the rebel without a cause).  But this book is, at heart, about the love of a group of kids – very much like the group(s) that we both belonged to – in High School and in College – that cared deeply about each other.  The group(s) that had each other’s backs while also having it out with each other in a variety of ways – I could work my way into imagining us – she and I – as members of just such a group.  And aren’t we?  Isn’t our family a reflection of those groups as well as our families of origin?  Aren’t our friend groups halfway spaces on the way to a place that we will someday call home?

Perhaps the disorientation in the reading of this book is the necessary experience of being neither fully a member of my nuclear family any more (though the kids in both generation in this book had varying degrees of nominal families – though those families did play significant and essential parts in the book.  And Louisa had both a family and friends that predated her travels with Ted), nor of yet having a family of my own yet.  That in between space where we float a bit – trying this and that on for size.  It is helpful to the plot that Ted never quite managed to get to having a family of his own – and it is interesting that Louisa is pushing him to go there.  Of course, Ted is Backman’s alter ego – there are biographical hints – but more importantly, Louisa pushes Ted to tell this tale and he intends to do it, while it is, of course, Backman who is actually telling this story.

Since Ted is gay and Backman is a family man we might assume that Backman read Freud and agreed with his position that we are all born both hetero and homo sexual, but I think he would actually say that we are all capable of being in love with the world.  This book articulates that love beautifully – and it is the perfect antidote to the hate and destruction that seems to be threatening to obliterate our world.  Fortunately, we cannot forget that life is best lived in loving connection with others.   

  

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Eyes by Hand: Dan Roche’s deep dive into the world of oculastry

 Ocularists; Glass Eyes; Healing from disfigurement; Eyes by Hand; Dan Roche, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

Dan Roche and I have been friends since graduate school when a mutual friend in the English Department, a poet named Phil Terman, suggested we all rent a house together.  Dan, a good looking, athletically built essayist, shared not just the house with us, but Saturday morning Basketball games with the English Department, some of the best (and worst) parties thrown at Ohio State, and, with me, a history of having been an army brat, that pretty closely mirrored my history of having been a corporate brat, both of us moving from place to place as children.

Dan differed from Phil and me in that he was married.  Or at least purported to be married.  I am told that I met his first wife, Julie, at some point.  She would later be the teacher of my younger reluctant daughter, but I kidded Dan that she was imaginary, especially after having made a trip with him to her home in West Virginia, only to find her not there.  His relationship with her resulted in his first book, Love’s Labor: A Story of Marriage and Divorce.  I still think it would have been better titled A Marriage Apart.  In any case, it was written during the first year of his marriage to his second wife, Maura, who is a saint…

His newest book is, according to the blurb on the back cover, autoethnographic academic writing.  That’s a mouthful.  And this book chews off a lot in its slim 176 pages.  It is about the process of preparing for, creating, and wearing a prosthetic eye – what I grew up calling a glass eye.  These prosthetic eyes, I learned, are still made from glass in Germany, but here, in the United States, they are more likely to be made from resin – which is a fancy name for plastic (Fountain pens, for which Dan and I share a passion with his saintly wife; especially when they are expensive, are also described as being made from resin – never plastic).

Dan begins the book talking about repulsion: the pushing away that someone experiences when they look at someone with a deformity.  He uses as his source writers from the 1800s, ocularists advertising their services who promised a diminishment in the repulsion people would feel looking at the person with a missing or deformed eye.  My reluctant son enthusiastically stole away this book before I could read my copy having read Dan’s other books and he commented that this is an interesting advertising strategy – to tell your prospective customers that they are repulsive.  Of course, it is often how we sell products – mouthwash, weight loss programs, but even cars and clothes – the fear of missing out (FOMO) is just a version of this: being the one who doesn’t know, who is out of the loop, and who is therefore less than, and we are highly motivated to diminish our feeling of being an outcast, in whatever form.

Even though I love Dan, I almost didn’t make it through chapter two.  Here, in the chapter titled removal, Dan was writing in his academic voice, and describing the processes of extirpation through enucleation (complete removal of the injured or diseased eye) or evisceration (emptying out the contents of the eyeball).  Even writing out that sentence made me squeamish, much less reading the details, but Dan is now a journalism teacher and he has long been observing the treatment of his own diseased and ultimately extirpated eye from among other perspectives, at a journalistic, “objective”, remove.  He also needed to get some technical aspects of the physiology on the table so that we could understand something about the craft, as well as the art of creating objects that, he would clarify, are integral components in what can be life changing experiences.

(I feel comfortable telling you that, if you haven’t read the book, and become interested in the latter chapters and, like me, you fear this chapter would be too gross to read closely, you can skip it.  I feel comfortable telling you that because Dan has told me that when he reads my blog posts, he routinely skips the paragraphs in which I describe the psychoanalytic insights I have derived from whatever object I have been interrogating.  Also, because the information in this challenging chapter, while useful to the technical components (Dan was trained as an engineer before being trained as a writer) of the rest of the book, are not necessary to what I see as the most psychoanalytically meaningful parts of the book…)

All but one of the eight chapters are followed by transcripts of interviews with ocularists or their patients about the transformative process of creating an object and doing that in the context of relating to the person who would receive that object.  The object, the glass/resin eye, is fascinating in itself – and the process of creating it, and seating it, and the technical challenges in creating a working illusion of the presence of something that is not there are detailed.  We learn about the challenges of creating something that moves – the decisions about how large to make the pupil – the technical details of painting a realistic three-dimensional object, but we also learn about what it means to be seen by a person who is looking at you – when, for much of your life, you have avoided wanting to be seen.  And we learn about the care that the oculist provides – the care for their craft, but also the care for their patient – and the intense, powerful, and healing relationships that can be not just auxiliary to, but feel to Dan to be, at least in some cases, essential to the reparative process of being fitted for a prosthesis.

I am embarrassed to realize that, as Dan’s friend, I never realized the impact his disfiguring diseased eye had on self-concept.  Frankly, I was jealous of Dan’s good looks.  I travelled with him to Las Vegas when my first wife and I won an all expense paid trip for two at a fund raiser and, because she was planning to leave the marriage, she didn’t want to go with me.  I called up Dan and figured out how to get the plane tickets (first class, no less, for the first time in my life) to include him and me.  He was excited to go, in part because he wanted to look up old friends from when he had lived there in High School.  A picture of him with washboard abs at 16 was consistent with my experience of his comfort putting on a pair of jeans and t shirt to go out for a night on the strip looking like a million bucks with no effort – while I was feeling that no amount of preparation would lead me to look presentable.

Yes, Dan’s eye was a prominent feature, but I had long before learned to have what my friend Bede, the Wired Hermit, calls “custody of the eyes”.  I looked at Dan’s good eye when I looked at him and didn’t notice his other eye.  Of course, I can see now, this meant that I was also not noticing what Dan was feeling about that eye.  When he would talk about feeling self-conscious about it, which he did, I would minimize that – pointing out my experience of him as I have articulated it in the paragraph above.  When, during a basketball game when I was guarding him, my fingernail lifted the contact off his good eye (a very strange experience of feeling small motor feedback while performing large motor movements), Dan was seemingly unworried about how close I had come to injuring his good eye.  I imagined him to be as impervious to concern about his appearance as he appeared to be about his physical vulnerability.  Or, perhaps, I hoped that my comments, intended to be supportive, about his presentation when he would mention his self-consciousness about his eye, had made him impervious - rather than unheard.

My empathic failure is mirrored by a therapist Dan describes having consulted in the book.  Dan listed a litany of concerns to the therapist and then opined that they might be related to and waved at his head.  Confused, the therapist asked him what he meant, and Dan responded, “My [deformed] eye.”  The therapist stated that he hadn’t noticed.  Dan curtly characterized the therapeutic relationship as short lived.

Would I, as Dan’s therapist, have taken his concerns to heart?  Would I have offered the kind of care that he received from the husband and wife team who created the prosthesis for him when he finally received the ophthalmic care that he wishes he had received earlier in his life?  Does caring for a friend differ from caring for a patient?  Should we join our friends in their infirmities and vulnerabilities?  What keeps us from talking about the things that are most important in our lives?

Here is the paragraph Dan might skip in his reading of this post:  Peter Fonagy, in talking about the sexuality of men, talks about our sexual selves as being ignored by our parents and peers – when infants have erections, he says, care givers frequently look away.  This preserves our sexual selves in a child like state, he opines.  Thus, when we become sexual, there is the potential for a delightful, child-like connection with our sexual partners.  We can explore sexuality with the joy of discovery that children have – we don’t turn from it with the jaded sense of having been there and done that; something that can spoil other new and challenging endeavors.

Perhaps the deep connections that Dan articulates between the ocularists and their patients – and this would mirror the connection between therapists and their patients – and all healers and those they heal – is access to hidden aspects of the patient; the parts they have kept hidden or, perhaps even when they have invited others to see them, as Dan did me, they have been repelled – as if to minimize those parts would protect the person from feeling shame – or perhaps would protect the “friend” who might care from having to explore his or her own feelings of being vulnerable, disfigured, or whatever the friend is hiding.  What we might miss, at these moments, is the opportunity to connect with the childlike, undeveloped, and therefore perfectly lovely and accessible parts of the person that we care about.

Dan describes the moment when a person who has long had a visible deformity see themselves in a mirror for the first time with the prosthesis in place as an experience of seeing themselves as they have always hoped they would be seen as profoundly validating.  I have a friend, Virginia, who does research on plastic surgery, and she reports that often the opposite occurs – especially on reality TV shows where patients are given a big reveal.  They often see themselves, and still see flaws, and this leads them to… more plastic surgery.

I imagine that, for some of the patients that Dan describes, especially those for whom a prosthetic eye is just part of recovering from a traumatic disfiguring accident, there may be disappointment that, for instance, the prosthetic eye doesn’t solve the entire problem.  But I think that Virginia would wonder if the patient who is simply having plastic facial surgery to repair being unsightly – is disappointed because they were looking forward less to a physical change than to a psychological change.  They want to feel desired or connected, or to feel that they won’t continue to be overlooked.  The physical change does not assure them of the result they want.

For the individual with a prosthetic eye, the defect is more focal, and thus the remedy is more clear – and it may inspire hope that the desired social effects can now be pursued.  Especially, and this is the central point that Dan makes, in the context of a relationship with an ocularist who has heard and understood the impact that their disfigurement has had on them, seeing the eye in place gives them hope that they can achieve both the personal integration they desire, but also the social acceptance of them as a whole person.

If you are curious about Dan and his eyes, you can see a quick video of him talking about the book here.

Addendum:  After writing this post, I realized that I was being less than candid in my "objective" experience of Dan.  When his eye was withered, I purposely avoided looking at it.  I practiced what my friend the monk called custody of the eyes.  When I did look, I felt, Okay, I hate to say it, revulsion.  I imagine that Dan read that on my face - I don't have a good poker face.  Or if not on my face, on other's faces when they experienced something similar.  This might be a momentary reaction, but that moment surely packs a huge punch.  I put that squeamish feeling (perhaps that is a better term than revulsion) aside, in part by retaining custody of my own eyes and making eye contact only with the good eye, and my overall impression of Dan is what I report above.  I overlooked, as it were, the blemish - something that we do in relationships with others - but when others have seen that we have seen that blemish (whether it is visceral or psychical) I think they don't forget that we have seen it, and neither do we, even if we have successfully directed ourselves away from it and believe we have constructed them without it...  So I applaud Dan for acknowledging what he and I would rather not acknowledge.

 

  

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Joan Didion’s Letters to John: A different perspective on therapy from the patient’s perspective.

 Joan Didion; Letters to John; Psychoanalysis; psychotherapy; psychology; memoir; journal

A friend lent me his copy of Joan Didion’s letters to John as I was finishing, unbeknownst to him, Untangling, by Joan Peters.  These are two very different books about very different treatments, but both are told from the perspective of the patient about their treatment by a mental health professional, and so it made sense to read them.  It is also the case that a significant corner of my practice involves meeting with parents about managing their parenting of adult children with mental health issues and, though the focus on the daughter faded quickly in Peters’ case, that was front and center with Didion’s book.

Both authors entered treatment (for Peters, her second treatment) to address issues related to raising an adoptive daughter.  From that common starting point, the two diverge significantly.  Peters’ book is about her analyses, each last for about eight years meeting three or four times a week; Didion’s is about the first year of a ten year once a week therapy.  Peters’ book is a memoir, Didion’s book is a series of letters to her husband to keep him up to date on the treatment – and therefore is more like a journal than a memoir.  Peters’ book was intended from the get-go to be published; Didion’s letters were discovered posthumously and published without her consent, nor John’s, nor her daughter’s, because all three of the principles are deceased, as is her therapist.

The issue of (lack of) consent to publish weirdly raised similar issues with me as with Peters’ book.  I was uncomfortable with the amount of information presented in both.  With Peters’, where she is the author, I had a someone paternal concern that she may not have realized how open she was being in her presentation.  Of course, that is not my call at all – but I acknowledge my paternalistic concern in my review as a feeling state.  For Didion, I have only read The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following her husband John Dunne’s death (the John in the title of this book).  The Year of Magical Thinking is closer to a journal though it is also a memoir, and her writing was very open – but it was also something she intended to publish.  It is not clear that these letters, again even more like a journal than a memoir, were ever intended to be published.  Do the dead have a right to privacy?

What gets someone in the door to therapy?  How do we look for help, especially when part of the reason we may be looking for help is that those who were to have helped us have, in sometimes very important ways, failed us?  Sometimes we come in because of a diagnosis.  In the 90s, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) was an important entry point.  Now third-party payers will say that if someone comes in for ADD, they should be treated for that and released once that treatment has proven effective.  But what if the diagnosis is an excuse to ask for help in becoming mentally healthy?  I think that, for both of these women, their presentation of difficulty with their daughters was a legitimate need for help with parenting, but also an entry point for addressing bigger concerns about their own functioning.

When I meet with parents of adult children with mental health issues, I generally meet less frequently than weekly after an initial getting to know you segment.  The mental health system can be hard to navigate even for a mental health professional, and part of what I provide is some coaching in this regard, but managing our feelings as parents of adults is also challenging, and this is the therapeutic aspect of the relationship.  In those cases where we do meet more frequently, generally at the insistence of the parent(s), the treatment becomes more individual or couples therapy - and that's what I think took place in both cases, though in Didion’s case, for most of the year, the part of the treatment reported on remained focused primarily on the relationship with her daughter.

Didion, in her letters, fell into a pattern of paraphrasing what she said to the therapist and putting what the therapist said in quotes.  Didion has worked as a reporter and she seems to be doing that here.  The quotations seem accurate, but also grammatically too well constructed to be verbatim transcripts of the conversation.  Didion is also a novelist and the psychiatrist is, partly, a construction on her part, though I think she intends to represent him both fairly and positively.

Since these are letters to her husband, she does not go into the background of each incident that he already knows about because he knows about it.  At one point she casually refers to a broken hip as a sign of aging and it takes a while to figure out that she is not referring to this as a metaphor or as an illustration of her point, but as the current state of affairs – that she fell at a party and broke her hip – but of course her husband knew this and so her reference would have made sense to him.  The editing is very light – we have footnotes that explain who people are when, for instance, only their first names are mentioned, but there is a lot of context that we have to work to create on our own.  So we don’t know the details of some of the couple’s statements, for instance, to their daughter because Didion will say something like, “I told him about the conversation we had with Quintana we had on Friday.”  Particular pieces may then emerge as she and the psychiatrist then interrogate what took place.

I found myself reacting to the psychiatrist’s position of a). being all knowing and b). seeing he and Didion as living parallel lives.    I don’t believe that this account is entirely veridical – in part for the grammatical reasons stated above, but also because of a mismatch between what the psychiatrist is saying and what he is directing Didion to do.  The psychiatrist, in Didion’s report, is exhorting her – indeed, telling her directly how she should give Quintana more space to make her own decisions, to think her own thoughts, but he is not giving Didion that same space – he is not practicing what he is preaching.

Partly the ways in which the treatment says “Do as I say, not as I do” is, I think, a residue of the culture at large that Didion and her psychiatrist grew up in, partly a residue of the medical and mental health culture the psychiatrist was trained in, but it may also be an expression of, for lack of a better word, a wish on the part of Didion, which goes back to her cultural and familial desire.  The language that the psychiatrist and Didion use is that Quintana was never able to grow up because Didion depended on Quintana to be there for her.  There are clear parallels with Didion’s mother who didn’t know how to express herself – and Didion became a prolific writer – expressing herself – becoming, in her writing, the outgoing party person her father wanted her to be.  And she did this in the context of the relationship with John, and also of Quintana.

The psychiatrist is using language – Didion’s preferred form of communication – to try to overwrite her lived experience.  He is coming out of a tradition of insight being the means of changing behavior.  What he doesn’t seem to see, at least in this beginning of a very long treatment, are the ways in which his use of language – as a directive – ends up re-enacting her experience of being coached by her parents on how she should act while they modelled the exact opposite of what they were proposing she do.  Her father wanted her to be outgoing at parties with his family the way he was not, and her mother wanted her to engage with people openly and warmly while she shied away from close contact with others – including, especially, sexual contact with her husband, Didion’s father.

What Didion reports is an opening up as a result of the contact with the psychiatrist.  Or, more precisely, she reports that the psychiatrist sees her opening up as a result of the treatment.  She gets and understands and fights against her wish to direct Quintana, which she knows will keep her dependent, and is able to see the wisdom of facilitating her autonomy.   At this point, it is important, I think, to say something about the economics of this situation.

Didion and Dunne are professional writers.  One of the things that I remember from the Year of Living Magically is that John Dunne said that a writer never goes anywhere without his pen.  I frequently think about this when I delay writing a blog post and my command of the material fades across time (as is the case a bit here – I finished this book three days ago and I have been writing this post in my head over that time).  They are disciplined writers.  Didion doesn’t (I don’t think) miss a letter to John once she starts writing them until she is done with them – and I think she finishes writing to him when the treatment turns away from Quintana and becomes more overtly about herself (more on that later).

Didion and Dunne earned most of their money from writing screenplays (they wrote the first draft of the Streisand/Kristofferson A Star is Born and retained the authorship credit even after they were fired from the project).   They claimed that their true love was reporting and writing novels.  They wrote the screen plays for the money.  But the money was not peanuts.  Quintana is meeting with her psychiatrist once a week for part of this treatment, Didion’s psychiatrist is meeting with Quintana’s psychiatrist, Quintana is in day treatment for part of the time.  Quintana lives in a New York apartment that her parents have bought for her.  She quits a job and she is gifted 100,000 to tide her over – or maybe there is a hope that she will invest it – but if she doesn’t, there’s more where that comes from.

But it is not just the money that is a lot – it is the comfort with moving in rarified circles.  Quintana is a photographer and photo editor.  She is working for the top magazines.  And she is drinking a lot of alcohol.  She is shy about presenting her work – she has won awards for individual photos, but she has never had a gallery show of her own, which would be her next step. 

Didion grew up with her one of her high school friends becoming a Supreme Court justice.  She and Dunne penned blockbuster movies, hang out with movie stars, and Quintana has been part of that – but as their appendage.  Being independent and autonomous may be a different hill for her to climb than for others.  When you are born (or adopted right after birth) on a very high peak, it can look like a long way down from there.  And it can feel shameful not to be able to maintain yourself at that level.

Just as there seemed to be a lot of directing of Didion by her therapist – which I think she craved and profited from – there was not as much emotional connection with Didion or with Quintana as Peters experienced in her second analysis that she described in Untangling.  The empathic connection that Peters experienced was definitely a mixed bag.  It stirred up for her feelings about not having empathy early in her life – and triggered her to re-experience, or perhaps experience for the first time the intense feelings that she figured out how to manage on her own as a very young child. 

Didion’s psychiatrist seemed to be relating to Didion as a peer.  He made frequent self-revelations about, for instance, his own aging process.  I think that, empirically, people like and respond well to both direction in psychotherapy and self-revelation.  The former helps them feel less uncertain, and the latter helps them feel less alone.  Didion certainly appreciated – even almost revered – her psychiatrist. I don’t know where the treatment ended up, but I would be curious if they became curious about the quality of their relationship.  I don’t think that was likely to happen though.  They seem to have fallen into a kind of avuncular friendship with the psychiatrist as the older and wiser guide.  Perhaps he shows up in The Year of Living Magically and I have just forgotten that.

In any case, the book ends as the treatment of Quintana reaches an impasse.  My own guess is that at this point, the treatment took a turn and was more related directly to Didion's life.  The reason for the letters was so that John could have insight into the material that came from the sessions with the psychiatrist.  Maybe the psychiatrist was presented as more authoritative because Didion wanted to have someone on her side in dealing with John, but that does not make sense.  Both she and John, like the parents that I have worked with, seem genuinely invested in supporting their child.  They also seem genuinely perplexed about how best to be helpful.  My own style is to join them in the perplexity - and to offer some ideas, but to elicit ideas from them.  The psychiatrist here is reported to be working from a different, more authoritative position, and that seems to suit Didion just fine - and to be genuinely helpful to she and John, even though Quintana's situation, at least as far as it progresses in the book, does not get through a very difficult period in her life.  

The description of Quintana's death offered at the end of the book speculates about the ways in which her drinking may have contributed to the natural causes that led her to predecease Didion, but it does not clarify whether she was able to reduce or end her drinking before her death.

 

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So Big: Edna Ferber’s American Dream feels a bit more like a nightmare than a tragedy.

 So Big, Edna Ferber, Pulitzer, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Chicago, History

So Big is the 1924 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by one of the most successful authors of the first part of the twentieth century, but both it and she appear to be on the brink of being forgotten.  I get and understand this.  My reaction to this book was, at first, strongly dismissive.  Edna Ferber’s true love was drama.  She wanted to write for stage – and Giant – another of her works, was turned into a screen classic starring James Dean.  But I dismissed this book as being two dimensional – the characters seem constructed from the outside in rather than the other way around.  I wished it were a play so the actors could blur the fine lines that her character articulation created.

Despite my critical eye and ear, this book is an easy read.  It is visually stimulating and it tracks not just the development of its heroes, but also one of my favorite cities, Chicago, from the late 1880s through the early 1920s.  Even though I didn’t trust my narrator, I found myself enthralled, almost against my will, by the unfolding story of this neat and tidy family who experience both the poorest and richest ends of the economic spectrum as this city was gaining its broad shoulders.

By the way, this post contains multiple spoilers.  The author includes many spoilers in her story.  She begins the book very near the end – she promises that things will turn out well – but it is the process of getting from here to there that she wants to interest you in.  So, she is not so much spoiling as teasing.  She is also promising a happy ending.  I will include the ending in this post so that you can judge with me whether it is happy or not…

Selina DeJong (nee Peake), the stalwart star of the early part of this novel, seems to be spun from spunk and resilience in the face of adversity.  She embodies the kinds of virtues that the Boy and Girl Scouts would have us aspire to.  My reaction to this was not just dismissive – it was more visceral and profound than that.  Edna Ferber seemed to have created the kind of character that my Mom would have had me be and, to be fair, the kind of character that she strove to be.  And this raised my hackles because I have both desired to be and become that person, and have desired to be and become someone entirely different – my own person; whatever that might be.

So, I listened to a podcast on Machiavelli this week and the author made the claim that Machiavelli is responsible for the modern world.  Machiavelli lived in Florence, Italy, and he, like seemingly everyone else in Florence, the cradle of the renaissance, worked for the Medici family.  And Machiavelli’s writing did something the Greeks and the Romans, but also the religious writers rarely did.  He wrote not about how people should be, but about how they actually were.

Writing about things as they are, the podcast author maintained, led directly into the scientific writings of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and thus Newton.  Unlike Aristotle, whose science was based on how nature should work (Nature abhors a vacuum; therefore, a football is propelled by the prevention of a vacuum forming behind it in flight), these men based their science on what they actually saw in the world (a body in motion tends to stay in motion).

Similarly, in writing about politics, Machiavelli wrote, in the Prince, about what he observed the Medici to be doing – not what they said they were doing.  They were corrupt rulers who created a space for a morally and spiritually free society to flourish.  So, where the ancients were writing morality plays about what heroes like Achilles, Odysseus, and Oedipus were doing as positive and negative models of how we should and should not act, Machiavelli was writing about how people did act, and this opened the door to Hobbes, but then Locke to write about the state of nature and man as a creature of nature (yes, Darwin would be one of Machiavelli’s intellectual offspring).

Thomas Jefferson, in writing our declaration, managed to create a mish-mash out of the reality-based grievances he articulated and the aspirational moral goals that still haunt us – particularly as he applied them only to land owning white men.  And Ferber is writing in and against that tradition, as a highly accomplished woman in a country that is just granting women the right to vote and that still holds onto the rights and ideals of white men.

So, her hero, this Selina DeJong, carries a lot of freight.  She needs to lead us into a modern world that includes women and that is open to the world.  But Ferber uses the means - the rhetoric - of the ancients.  She creates Selina as a moral model; an almost inhuman or even godlike version of a woman.  She embraces and uses traditional male virtues, but she articulates them in a profoundly feminine way.  I suppose it makes sense that I objected to her; my Mother confided in me once that she wanted me to become the kind of man that my father was not, and I think she meant by this that she wanted to inculcate me with feminine virtues.  I think Ferber wants us to do the same for society, and I rebel against this, while recognizing its value.

So, Selina, when her father dies, leaving her nothing but a good private school education at the tender age of 19, sets out to teach the South Chicago Dutch truck farmer’s kids.  As the spunky and resilient kid that she is, she experiences the cabbages growing in their rows as beautiful, something the farmers and their wives never considered as possible – they are a commodity and a job, not aesthetic objects.  She not only survives, but somehow manages to embrace cold, hard work filled living conditions as a boarder and teacher – and she, somewhat surprisingly, to her and to us, falls deeply, passionately, and very sensuously in lust and in love with a hardworking, but pretty dimwitted Dutch farmer who bids for her box lunch at a church fund raiser despite the wealthiest widow in town clearly wanting him to bid for hers.

The newly married couple work his lowly farm – the poorest of the farms in the area – and she proposes improvements which he rejects, and they have a child.  This child, Dirk, becomes known as So Big because of his response to the question, “How big are you?” by spreading his arms wide and saying, “So Big!”.  When her husband dies, spunky Selina packs So Big into the wagon and drives the team to market, something that the other farmers clarify is never done by a woman.

When Selina arrives at the market, bringing her washed, sorted and well-presented materials to compete with the others, she arrives on the worst day of the year, the Jewish holiday, and many of the buyers are in temple, so she tries to sell her wares door to door and, just when she is about to give up, she stumbles upon the home of one of her old private school mates, the daughter of one the Chicago butchers who has turned himself into an Oscar Mayer figure with the wealth to go with it. 

When the Oscar Mayer figure offers to gift her money, she virtuously refuses, accepting a loan that she then pays back, against his protests, with interest – we might be thinking that this is a Horatio Alger story about Selina – but her whole reason to become wealthy, which she does become, is not for the selfish consumeristically focused reasons, but to raise and support So Big. 

So Big goes off to the University of Chicago – then to Cornell for architecture once he finds his calling.  He comes back to practice his craft, but gets stuck doing draftsman work for a big firm.  He falls in love with but can’t marry the girl of his dreams – the daughter of his Mom’s rich girlfriend from school.  This girl marries into truly extravagant wealth and but manages to stay connected to, and, we sense, in love with So Big.  She expresses her love by steering So Big towards making more money as a bond salesman than he ever could have as an architect.

As he develops, So Big repeatedly moves away from his mother’s wishes for him.  He becomes, instead of the artist she envisioned him to be – the architect that there is evidence he has passion to be - a man about town, someone who listens and observes and moves quickly up the developing ranks of the elite in the city.  This process begins early, when he goes off to the University of Chicago and befriends then abandons a woman much like his mother, and one whom his mother likes.  He shuns her as part of being seduced into become a fraternity boy.  But the challenging part of all this is that he is both leaving his roots and what his mother would have him do, but he is also moving into a life that better suits the aptitudes and virtues that he develops in this new world.  He seems to become the best possible version of himself in the context of this apparently nurturing and supportive, if judgmental, world.

(After writing this post, I had a long conversation with my mother about her parents - both graduates of the University of Chicago later in the twenties.  Her mother was born into the class that was being groomed there, her father came from more humble origins and, though he successfully went into the insurance business in Chicago, my mother reports that he never felt himself to be a member of the ruling class; he always felt like an outsider.)

Despite becoming the best version of himself, in the concluding chapters, So Big comes to realize that his mother’s vision and way of living is far superior, even though he looks down on her.  He ends up desiring a woman who is a self-sufficient commercial artist who embodies all that he could (not) have become and this woman won’t have him because he has not become the artist that he could have and because he does not embrace the world as broadly she would have a desirable person do.  Instead, this commercial artistic woman feels a kinship with his mother, and with one of Selina's students from long ago that Selina helped to emancipate from the small farming community with its narrow views. 

So Big now experiences himself as small.  When his mother asks him how big he is, he responds by holding his thumb and finger a half inch away from each other and says, "So big."  He begins to disdain both himself and the woman he has adored and who has helped him become this best version of himself, the version of himself that not long before he wished his mother would have seen and appreciated, but now realizes would not measure up to what she expects of him.  He sees that the student from long ago who has gone off to Paris and become an artist is her true son.  This realization guts him and the curtain, as it were, falls.

This is, in other words, an odd tragedy.  It is not by trying to avoid his fate, but by embracing it – by being true to himself or at least significant and important parts of himself, that So Big ends up betraying himself.  The Pulitzer Prize in literature is awarded to the book by an American author that best exemplifies American life.  On some level, awarding that prize to this book underscores the American dilemma.  We, like So Big, want to become ourselves, but in our pursuit of happiness, we get distracted by the wealth that we acquire on the way.  Or do we?  Is it that what we are good at is making money?  Are we essentially commercial, without the art?  Are we, at heart, needy, greedy people who want something until we can have it and then we decide that we want something else?  Are we boats with very shallow keels?

Edna Ferber was encouraging us to travel into deeper waters, but the vessels she gave us – both Selina and So Big – did not have the kind of deep keels that would allow them, together, to traverse those waters.  So Big did not have the wherewithal to be who he was on his own.  He needed to be coaxed into becoming himself, and once there, he was unhappy with what it brought him.  We could view this as a Machiavellian (meaning clear-eyed) vision of the American soul.  William A. White, who championed this book to its Pulitzer Prize, might have supported this position.  I fear, though, that it both recognizes and underestimates us.  The book repeatedly praises the first generation – the Oscar Mayer character is stronger than his son, Selina is stronger than hers, and in each case, the child is seduced by money into becoming, as almost every member of the most selective eating club in Chicago is observed to be by So Big when he joins it, bloated.    

We, as Americans, might aspire to be like the rich English who engage in highly stylized and clearly classist traditions like fox hunting.  When the North Side Rich Chicagoans import a bedraggled fox to chase, it underscores that we have not developed this tradition, as the British did, to address a domestic problem (too many foxes) and then turned it into something that is our own – but we are more like the Romans, appropriating Greek art forms.  Ferber seems to be asking whether we can be artists or if we simply copy from others.  

Edna can remonstrate us to become artists – to be become open to the world, embracing and enjoying diversity, but she is preaching to and holding a mirror up to people who are isolated in the middle of a big country and are more concerned with survival than with aesthetics.  As a nation of immigrants, we are here because there was something intolerable where we came from, but when we arrive, we simply want to be insulated from all that was intolerable, but we don’t trust ourselves to build social institutions that would do that, and, Ferber suggests, we are, with rare exceptions, not sturdy enough to accomplish this on our own.

Despite Ferber’s clear-eyed, Machiavellian vision, she can’t resist some old-fashioned hero worship as a means of keeping a dream alive. Unfortunately, the kind of brow-beating and template based creations of heroes may be as prone to failure as so many other American institutions – Hollywood, with whom Ferber had a long relationship – comes to mind.  Perhaps art emerges from within – and trying to impose it from without – whether as a parent or an author, is, as this book suggests, doomed to failure.  We may recognize it, but we, apparently, cannot create it.  Perhaps we can, in our best moments, not snuff it out, but instead stay out of its way.

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