Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again – An Odd Place to Learn about The Virtue of Trumpism

 Begin Again, Eddie Glaude, James Baldwin, Trump, Psychoanalysis of Racism, Psychology of Civil Rights

The Reluctant Wife asked that I read Eddie S. Glaude’s Begin Again because it is rich with psychoanalytic insight about Race and America without directly referencing psychoanalytic terms or concepts.  She thought it might be helpful to me as I struggle as an analyst to articulate how to understand Race in America.  As usual, she was right on the money.

Eddie Glaude is an African American professor at Princeton who has been puzzling, as many of us have been, over the rise of Trump.  He turned to James Baldwin’s path through the civil rights era and his navigation of those complicated waters as a guide to thinking about his own reaction to and experience of Trumpism.  Because this is a very personal narrative, it contains some of the perambulations and idiosyncrasies that writings of that sort, including this very blog, include.  Despite that, or maybe in part because of it, the book is a powerful reflection that gains momentum and power the deeper you get into it.

The original premise did not feel novel to me – The United States is founded on The Big Lie.  What is the big lie?  It is actually a whole bunch of lies, many of which are wrapped up in American Exceptionalism – that we are the land of the free and we are, first and foremost ethical, rule of law people where all creation is treated equally under the law.

Well, from the perspective of the white male, this may appear to be the case, but to maintain this lie requires a great deal of effort.  And, much later in the book, as he is describing James Baldwin’s series of exiles, it requires a kind of out of body experience.  In order to be the country we imagine ourselves to be, we have to overlook all kinds of things, like our treatment of African Americans and Indians over the last four or five hundred years. This parallels the psychological gymnastics we all need to engage in to maintain a sense of integrity despite our mistreatment of others (including by, sometimes, being too nice to them – putting women on a pedestal, for instance).  Closer to my home, psychologists might, for instance, need to interrogate their role in torturing detainees at Guantanamo Bay. 

Glaude makes the case that European Americans (white people) have been exiled from Europe and have continued to feel dislocated for our entire existence.  We have been fighting to show that we belong – perhaps.  We were, in the person of Hamilton, trying to create a monarchy, but this time to do it right.  Perhaps, and I will develop this later, we were trying to prove that we didn’t rely on Europe, but were independent – something that is an integral component of the Big Lie – that we are ready to move forward on our own.

Regardless of what is the case, we have dissociated ourselves from the messy, problematic aspects of our functioning from the very beginning.  The lie becomes that we knew what we were doing from the beginning, that we have always acted with integrity, and that we are continuing to do so today.

In the psychological world, the problem with self-analysis is that we can’t trust ourselves.  We necessarily tell the story in such a way that we are the heroes.  We did everything right.  And so we keep crashing ahead in our lives blindly assuming that we are doing things correctly, and that the world is messed up and not responding appropriately to our actions when it rejects us or tries to give us the message that we are not all that we have cracked ourselves up to be.

It takes a lot for us to go see someone else to help put ourselves right.  Trusting someone else to give us feedback about ourselves is a scary thing to do – are they really going to have our best interests in mind?  Can they accurately understand us?  In psychotherapy, we talk about this as the precontemplation stage of psychotherapy.  We aren’t even thinking about starting psychotherapy – why would we?  We are perfectly competent and able to manage things just fine, thank you very much.

The contemplation stage starts when cracks appear in that façade of self-righteous certainty.  We start to feel that maybe we aren’t so certain about the correct course of action to take.  Maybe we begin to realize that we are injuring people that we love.  We begin to question ourselves.  This is a critical moment that precipitates the contemplation stage.  Maybe we should do something differently.

Glaude doesn’t spend much time on this important developmental aspect of the civil rights movement.  The Brown vs. Board of Education decision (1954), the Civil Rights act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965) were all responses to the realization that we had a flawed system.  Glaude references Baldwin as seeing that these were not going to be enough.  These were fix ups – in my therapy analogy, they were ways of staving off actually going into therapy and doing the work that we needed to do to undo the lie.  These were actions that allowed us to remain dissociated.

We have integrated our schools, we have made amends for past wrongs, and we have empowered the disempowered.  See, we are self-correcting!  We can be proud of ourselves for adhering to our values – for moving forward with integrity – as we have always done.  We fold the actions that we have taken in reaction to the big lie to actually reinforce that very same lie. 

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violent movement was based on helping the white man see that he was violating his own principles in segregating blacks and then beating them and shooting fire hoses at them.  This movement was founded on the principle that the white man is, in fact, a moral person who wants to act in moral ways.  When we can illustrate his immorality, he will be appalled and work with us to fix that.

This led, in Baldwin and Glaude’s minds, to characterizing King and others in that generation as Uncle Toms.  White men are not, in essence, simply moral.  They are complex critters, as we all are.  They, no more than we, do not have to be perfect to be loved.  But neither they, nor we (as we imagine King), know that.  We are seeking a more perfect union.  And this perfection is likely to be the death of us all! 

Glaude’s position, following Baldwin, is that we need to leave the country to really see it.  When we are inside of it, even if we are feeling alienated, we cannot see the source of the alienation.  We need to enact our alienation by travelling elsewhere – we need to become exiles.  For Baldwin, this meant travelling to Paris, but also to Istanbul – to being in an entirely alien place where the language is unfamiliar and we can be isolated, from our own country and the country we are living in.

I think that what Glaude helped me see about Trump is that he has created the sense of isolation – the sense of being a foreigner in one’s own country.  We can’t believe that he was elected.  We can’t believe he is being nominated again after he made such a mess of things and led an insurrection.  He is a felon, for God’s sake, and sees himself as the anointed one.  What kind of country do I live in?

Glaude sees Trump as the second wave of defense against the reformation of our country that the Civil Rights movement promised.  When the Civil Rights movement collapsed, when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, when the younger, more radical members of the movement were chased off or imprisoned by the FBI, when the faith in government was brought into question by Nixon’s actions, Glaude sees our choice to replace Carter with Reagan as the death knell to the possibility of having made the needed transition.

Electing Obama provided the possibility of moving in the direction of the transition, but instead it put into place our wish to return to the way things were, and Trumpism – the three nominations of the man, the first nomination of a convicted felon (something Glaude could not have foreseen when this book was published in 2020), clarify that a huge portion of our population endorses an abhorrent individual with abhorrent beliefs – but because of the popular support, they are not aberrant beliefs; they are widely held ones.

I have observed, by the way, in years of watching faculty votes on various issues that we generally act based on consensus.  Most of the time, when we vote on something, we all agree.  When we vote on something about which we are torn, this generally does not represent a true division among us, but the actual vote ends up being a measure of the aggregate individual ambivalence.  That is, if the vote is 6 to 4, we are, on average, leaning towards the measure with 60% of ourselves.  Of course, there is some variance – 4 of us were at least 51% opposed – but we are generally not divided.

The watch word currently is that our politics are very divided.  What this book is helping me see is that we are not as divided as we imagine.  We are torn.  Individually and collectively.  If Trump stands for the Big Lie, we are enticed by that lie – we want to believe it – and we recoil against it to varying degrees.

We want to believe that we have pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps (and don’t remember that MLK told us that it is cruel to expect someone without boots to do just that). We want to believe that we are rugged individualists – and we don’t want to acknowledge that we are also needy and want and need the nurturance and care of those (women and POC) who we say are dependent on us, to care for us.  Were we the essential workers?  Some of us, yes, but many of us were non-essential.  We want to get rid of the safety net, and are afraid to admit that without that net we will work ourselves to death out of fear that if we don’t have enough to last three lifetimes, no one will care for us.

Trump speaks to our insecurities in highly coded language.  We fear the outsider – the one who will come and take what we have away from us.  Of course, at the moment that I am writing this, Joe Biden is enacting that same fear.  He appears to no longer be as competent as he once was, and yet he believes that no one else can defeat Trump.  More to the point, he believes that he embodies the antithesis to Trump rather than being a participant in the Big Lie.  His position that he is the ONLY ONE that can beat Trump is a participation in this lie – though so was his handling of Anita Hill when she was testifying against Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court hearings.  It was painful to hear him try to articulate how a proper woman could possibly have heard the words “Long Dong Silver” by any other manner than to have Clarence Thomas utter them. 

Anita Hill was a woman in addition to being Black, part of what made her hard for Biden to manage.  James Baldwin was gay as well as Black.  Baldwin was arguing against identities, and I don’t mean to be pigeon holing him by articulating this identity, but clarifying that being this and that affords multiple perspectives from which to see things.  Glaude did not say this explicitly, and I am not familiar enough with Baldwin to know this, but the prejudice of blacks against homosexuality must have helped Baldwin see that Blacks participate in the big lie too – we all do.

In the book Don Quixote, the broken-down old man riding a broken-down nag with a dimwitted sidekick atop a donkey while simultaneously pining for a bartending prostitute imagines himself to be a young Knight Errant with a sprightly page by his side, fighting dragons on chivalrous behalf of his royal lady.  He is not defeated by the windmills he imagines to be the dragons, but by the knight of the mirrors.  Seeing himself as he actually is turns out to be more than he can bear.

Donald Trump’s mirror is not a funhouse distorting mirror, it is veridical picture of the aspects of ourselves that are (at least slightly uncomfortably) owned and acknowledged by half of us and but they are present (to some extent) but disowned by the other half who would distance themselves from Trump.  Glaude’s prescription – based on Baldwin – is that we should acknowledge that Trump is accurately portraying aspects of ourselves, and that when we come to own that vision as an aspect of ourselves we will have begun to be able to acknowledge the big lie and to have a more realistic self-appraisal. 

I think the question is, how close have we come to a tipping point?  I don’t think that we are ready to acknowledge the disavowed aspects of ourselves – those of us who are slightly on the Trump side of the divide disavow their attachment to the basic principles that Glaude and Baldwin would have us embrace – that we love all people because of their basic and shared humanity. 

Those of us who are never Trumpers – who feel alienated in our own country and are contemplating self-imposed exile if he is elected again - are defending against their disowned prejudice – but expressing it in their hatred and mistrust of Trump and his legions.

We are still in the contemplation stage.  We are not ready to acknowledge that we are imperfect – and loveable in spite of that imperfection.  We are not ready to love one another despite, or maybe even because of our differences.  We are not ready to remember what we have endured – the pain of being beaten, but also the pain of beating – and we are not yet ready to take to heart Baldwin’s message that the only value of that pain is to connect with the pain of the other so that we are not alone.

We are not yet ready to realize that, no matter how far away we get from this country, we carry it within ourselves.  That, at the end of the analysis, whether it is a psychoanalysis or a truth and reconciliation commission process, we are more like ourselves than not, but that we are more capable of accepting ourselves and others when we are able to acknowledge and bear our pain and use it is a conduit to be in contact with and care for others, while being open to being cared for ourselves.

In closing, I should acknowledge that when I talked through a version of this thesis with the Reluctant Wife, we switched roles.  She agreed with my belief (only after reading this book – I did not hold this before) that Trump is doing us a service by exposing our disavowed selves, but she does not imagine that we are ready to engage in the painful and difficult paradigm shift that this realization might precipitate. 

Realistically, I agree with her.  Nevertheless, I think that realizing that we need therapy – realizing that there is a significant problem – and realizing that WE need therapy – not that they need therapy – is a huge step.  I am, I suppose, a bit giddy at this realization, and, like the pageant queen’s promise to achieve world peace (or Trump’s platform plank plan to End Crime), I believe that, if I can see this, other’s can to.  A guy can dream… 

If that dream is to become a reality, we have to realize that the leadership that will lead to the solution is unlikely to come from a nationally acting leader – at least initially.  LBJ knew that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were the right things to do (and the latter was certainly self serving), but he needed MLK to push him.  Could someone like Oprah push an agenda that would be palatable?  I’m not sure who is going to help the white man see himself – and help him realize that, despite the ugliness that is necessarily part of the picture, he is still lovable – more so for acknowledging the ways in which he is fallible, needy and aggressive.  Perhaps it will take a white man, one who is secure in his masculinity and aware of its limits as a means of engaging with and shaping the world.

After thinking about this overnight, I realized that while a leader or a group of leaders would be important, the important work has been done - curricula have been developed, books have been written.  Trumpers have tried to ban some of these books - sometimes successfully.  In my experience there is no more effective way to get someone curious about a book than to ban it.  I think that Trump's (or the 2025 project's - I'm not sure which) plan to do away with the Department of Education indicates just what a threat education is to repressing/suppressing/denying our history. 

Education is what is making our individual psyches cringe at a world that is and/or is not run by Trump.  Our ambivalence is fueled by what we are coming to know about ourselves - and would rather not, thank you very much.  Ultimately the changes that Glaude and Baldwin (and I) would hope for and aspire to will come not because a few leaders have convinced a few people, but because leaders have embedded leaders throughout the system, including in elementary school and junior high school and high school class rooms that espouse different approaches to the world - approaches that are more inclusive, less shaming, and more accepting of others, but also of ourselves.  These individuals go on to take government jobs, corporate jobs, and to move from the suburbs back to the city and to do so, we hope, with the intention of living with rather than displacing those who remained there (not always the case, I know, but someday we can hope that our children will be sitting in classrooms together connecting with each other, not because of a court mandate - which has not worked - but because we want them to).

The changes that are being talked about are both on a large political level, and, for them to succeed, they need to take place on the small individual level.  We need to wrestle with our racism, homophobia, and etc. on a global, but also on a very local level.  One of the revelations to me was that George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama who was shot and paralyzed while running for president, had a personal transformation after he was shot.  He apologized for his racist past, ran for governor on a reform ticket, and was elected and placed qualified blacks in positions of leadership in his cabinet.  He was positively eulogized by leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.  This is an important part of Civil Rights story that should be more broadly known - we can reform ourselves!

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What is the threat that Neuropsychoanalysis poses?

 Neuropsychoanalysis, Mark Solms, Antonio Damasio, Threats to psychoanalysis, purity 

Neuropsychoanalysis is something that I am drawn to – I am a big fan of the Neurologists Mark Solms and Antonio Damasio; I think works like The Unconscious Id and The Hidden Spring enhance our understanding of the mind – and provide an empirical basis for some of Freud’s basic ideas, while extending and expanding them. 

But there are many who are unsettled by the assertions of Neuroscience.  They fear that neuropsychoanalysis will be a necessarily reductive undertaking, with the neuro part of the portmanteau overwhelming the psych(e) part of the neologism. 

This came to mind when I was listening to a podcasted reading of one of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; when Freud is describing the centrality of wish fulfillment in the interpretation of dreams.  Especially listening to his words being spoken in a slow and steady cadence and without a hint of defensiveness, I became aware that the roots of the concern about the relationship between biology and psychology run deep and are integral to Freud’s conception of the mind.

My own concerns – stirred by the objections of others – were soothed by a new appreciation of the model that Freud was working from – one that clarifies the ways in which he had to move from the topographic to the structural model of the mind and helped me also understand how the structural model (despite the criticism of authors like Phillip Adams) retains and even deepens the psychological complexity rather than mechanizing it.

I have not read the Introductory Lectures in decades.  Hearing them again, I realized that I did not get the intent of Freud’s telling a fairy tale – even though I very clearly remembered the fairy tale.  Just as Freud is about to explain how we arrive at the explanation of why and how wish fulfillment is at the base of “corrupted” dreams (dreams that don’t appear to be based in wish fulfillment), he breaks off to tell a delightful story.

A man and his wife are granted three wishes.  The wife, smelling sausages being cooked in the neighbor’s house, wishes she could have sausages, and they appear on a plate before them – and they have used one wish.  The husband, angry with the wife for using up one of the wishes, wishes that the sausages would hang from her nose – and of course they do.  Two wishes.  Of course, because they are hanging from her nose by magic, they can’t be severed, and because the man and his wife are actually a unit, they agree to use the third wish to remove the sausage from her nose.

Now when I read this the first time I was probably 20 years old and not very wise in the ways of the world.  I got stuck in an identification with the husband, and - I hate to admit this – didn’t see the necessity of removing the sausages from the wife’s nose.  In addition to this betraying something about the immaturity of my character, it led me to miss the point of the story.

Freud was explaining how the fulfillment of a wish for one person could bring unpleasure for the other, and then he clarified that we have multiple subcomponent parts that have separate and distinct agendas, but they are, ultimately, inextricably bound to each other: they are all part of the same mind.  The husband was meant to portray, essentially, part of the dreamer (his or her ego, let’s say), and the wife was another component (the id, let’s say).  Both of these parts are unconscious components of the person’s psyche.  And Freud acknowledges that his critics are going to have a field day with this.  Not only are the critics going to scoff at the idea of AN unconscious – he is now positing multiple unconscious elements!

As if this weren’t complicated enough, he then adds another metaphor.  Freud suggests that the creation of a dream involves a capitalist, who provides the wherewithal, and an entrepreneur, who pursues how to achieve the end that the capitalist has in mind.  He suggests that the feeling state forms the wish.  This is the latent content of the dream.  The entrepreneur constructs the dream to meet that wish – with the caveat that the construction likely needs to hide the actual intent of the wish fulfilling aspect from the censor.

Freud is saying that the entrepreneur, who is constructing the manifest content of the dream, can have all kinds of motives in his or her constructive process.  They may engage in a variety of problem-solving techniques, a warning, a reflection with “pros” and “cons”, but, he says, analysis always reveals that underneath these is a wish.  And the wish is generated in the immature part of the mind – the id.  This place that Solms and his colleagues have called the emotions.

The wish is the capitalist.  And the wish will out.  The entrepreneur, at least in this essay, is the day residue – the stuff that occurred in the day before sleeping.  This stuff from the day before becomes the building blocks that allow for the wish to be played out.  That said, the entrepreneur is also an active agent, the architect that arranges the building blocks, taking into account the building codes and the limitations of the site.

So, there is an emotional seat – a wish that is expressed by a feeling state – I want or need this.  The emotional seat is the core of the Latent Content of the dream.  But, the latent wish that I want fulfilled may be problematic for a number of reasons, and the entrepreneur/architect/dreamer must figure out how to construct a dream out of the available materials that will meet the needs of that underlying feeling state – that will, in a word, fulfill the wish – without tipping off to the censor that the wish has been granted, because the desire is disruptive.

Now Freud worked for a long time with only one drive – sexuality.  During the first world war, he was forced to add a second; he called it the death drive, but this morphed into an aggressive drive.  He was able to get pretty far with sex and aggression.  What the neuropsychoanalysts (and others) have added are a plethora of additional drives.

Using the work of Jaak Panksepp, Mark Solms has proposed that we have Seven Drives.  I think that this means that we have seven suspects for what may be driving the dream (and no one has said that only one can be in play – so I think we probably have seven factorial possibilities to consider).  So instead of a single capitalist, multiple capitalists are in play.

I think the emotional systems, in so far as they are universal in their functioning, would be the aspect of the “mechanism” of the mind that would be most concerning to those who object to neuropsychoanalysis.  They fear we would be reduce ourselves to these biological mechanisms that are driving our behavior (including our dream behavior – Freud generalized from dreaming to symptomatic and then to general behavior).  Even if we leave out the tremendous variation between people about the apparent strength of these drives and the manifold differential ways that they can be shaped by both biological and psychological genetics, the variety of possible combinations of drives bearing on any given behavior should give those with concern pause.  This is not a simple system.

The kicker, though, is that how we juggle those drives has everything to do with how we psychologically construct ourselves in the world.  Information comes in, managed psychologically.  I attend more to colors – you more to sounds; I listen for threat, you listen for warmth.  Our perceptions of the world are also determined by our biological and psychological genetics.  Once the perceptions have come in – once the day residue has occurred (in the case of dreams), the emotions drive the construction of those “facts” (and, of course, this happens on a moment to moment basis during the day – we may find ourselves “triggered” by this or that keyword or event, and we may experience (or not) the raw feeling erupt – or creep - through our defensively constructed exterior to assert itself).

This process of construction – while it takes place (when we are thinking as neuroscientists) in the brain, are determined by the psychological rules – the defenses, but increasingly analysts are recognizing, by the culturally formed aspects of our psyche – and we react based on an incredibly complicated and ever shifting algorithm.  Might we decode that algorithm someday?  Might we reduce ourselves to a program?

The aim of psychoanalysis has always been different than reduction (at least among its best practitioners).  The aim has been to recognize the patterns that are the result of the algorithm – to notice how they play out in various settings (including in the relationship with the analyst – the transference) – and to create a space where we can be curious about this and to interrogate it, while simultaneously practicing new ways of interacting – laying down new interactional patterns.

The neuropsychoanalytic contribution to the analytic process seems to be enhancing both the connection to the biological substrate, but also the psychological components.  I think it is also clarifying that the intermingling of the psychological and the biological is complex and, far from reducing us, it helps us appreciate our complexity, diversity, and the ways in which we are all derived from the same complex genus.

Freud’s wish at the beginning of this exercise, was to be able to describe human functioning as a result of neurology.  We might think of that as the wish of the housewife and neuropsychoanalysis is in the process of delivering this sausage on a plate.  Now we can either savor it – and incorporate it into the psychological structures that Freud was forced to elucidate when the neurology of his day was too primitive to describe the functioning of the mind, or we can wish it away – just have it hang from our noses – unintegrated, but also unremovable, when we will be forced to use our third wish to undo the mess (as we did with Freud’s wish to ignore any other empirical instrument than analysis to evaluate his hypotheses, letting that wish hang on our faces so long that we almost became irrelevant). 

Let’s learn from the past, embrace this new way of thinking and allow it to be another springboard to move our ideas forward.

  

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Amor Towles Table For Two: Is there room for reality?

 Amor Towles Table for Two Psychology Psychoanalysis Patriarchal Constraint

Amor Towles Table For Two: Is there room for reality?

Amore Towles is a clever and hardworking craftsman.  The short stories and the novella in this collection of works are as well-crafted as the studiolo he describes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Towles writes:

…The studiolo … is a rather unusual installation, even for the Met.  During the Italian Renaissance, it became quite popular for gentlemen of standing to have a private room in their home into which they could retreat.  In order to inspire creative meditation, these rooms were often decorated in a manner that celebrated the arts and sciences…. The Met’s studiolo is not much bigger that…[a] pantry…  its walls had been finished with an intricate design of inlaid woods that gave the appearance of cabinets filled with scientific devices, musical instruments, and books.  In the creation of this delightful illusion, the artist used over twenty species of trees and all the same tricks of perspective that were employed by the Renaissance painters.

The studiolo is used in this short story as the vehicle for helping the retired art dealer to change his nephew’s mind about the importance of sharing a piece of family art with the human community – a shift that will bring the art dealer a 25% commission.  Like many of the short stories here, and in general, this one hinges on the character of the art dealer, but also on the character of the nephew and the nephew’s family.  The art dealer, as a man of the world, is disdainful of the nephew’s character and that of his family.  They represent something that is out of his reach – human connection and even warmth, all while they are teetering on the edge of financial ruin, because they run their lives on principles that are “sweet”, but not serving them well.

Towles invites us to join with the crafty art dealer against the guileless family, all the while feeling that the crafty man is hollow, empty, and exudes a certain kind of out-of-date cool that we would admire if we weren’t, ourselves, feeling disdain for the erosion of the world around him and his own erosion at the center of that world.

The moral tension in this story is played out as a variation on a theme – in The Bootlegger – where the protagonist – in this case an Investment Banker (Towles profession before turning (back to) writing) – takes the moral high ground against a man who turns out to be engaged in a deeply moral – though illegal – activity. 

Spoiler alert: In each of these cases, the hollow shelled person ends up getting their comeuppance and all is put right in the world – but the heavy-handed morality that is dealt out – the sense of right and wrong – is so powerful that my guess about Towle’s former profession was that he was an attorney.

 Before leaving the short stories, I was surprised by the ending to one in particular.  It was a delightfully told story of a high-class man admiring a warm-hearted individual when they were stuck together when a snowstorm that shut down LaGuardia.  They got a room in town, started having drinks together, and because of the stranger’s warmth, there was quickly  a group of people surrounding them in the hotel bar having the best of times. 

By getting their cell phones mixed up, the high-class man started talking with the warm-hearted man’s wife in Chicago who was deeply concerned about her husband because he was an alcoholic who had been sober for a year, but clearly had just fallen off the wagon – hard.  It turns out that the warm-hearted/ husband/ alcoholic had recently started working in his father-in-law’s company and his wife was very concerned and instructed the high-class man in a very controlling way on how to control her out of control husband.

I was expecting, at the end of the story, that the high-class man (again the narrator) would tell us that it made sense with a wife that controlling her husband would lose control when he got a whiff of freedom, but the high-class man expressed envy of the warm-hearted/ husband/ alcoholic for having a wife who cared about him that much.

My objection is not that I’m right and Towles is wrong – it is that I think we are both right.  And I think that living within the strict guidelines that the wife (and the man’s alcoholism) dictate is difficult – and will have a good outcome because of her vigilance, but there will also be a cost.  In a word, the world is not as neat as the studiolo would suggest.  It is messy and complicated and there is much more ambiguity and confusion than the pat answer provides.

Which leads us to the Titular Novella.  A lovely compact piece, written in the style of Dashiell Hammet – a Noir crime thriller – but starring a woman as the mastermind who untangles the complicated actions of the sordid denizens of Hollywood in the late 1930s.  This piece is a page turner, not least because it includes Olivia DeHaviland as she prepares for her role in Gone with the Wind.

In my role as a psychologist, I have worked in forensic settings, in inpatient settings with hospitalized patients, and have seen many patients and supervised the work of many clinicians and consulted on cases in a wide variety of settings, but the most unusual individual that I have met was a friend of a friend.  The friend was in town for the weekend and I joined her when she called on her friend, an artist.  The artist and her husband ran the local art film house.  We went up to the apartment the artist shared with her husband.  It was actually two apartments that had been put together – and it had two kitchens – a regular kitchen and her poison kitchen where she was baking her current art.

She was a feminist who was interested in the history of women’s rights and she discovered that, when women could not divorce or if they could divorce, they would be forced to live without adequate support, their recourse was often the use of poison.  To publicize this sad state of affairs, she would bake arsenic cakes and publicly display them.  When asked if I wanted anything to eat or drink, I politely begged off.

The strong woman – Evelyn – at the center of the story Table for Two, is both self-possessed and unmoored.  Having called off a marriage (again, this is the 1930s) in New York, she travels back home to Chicago, but at the last minute decides to continue on the train to LA.  Along the way she meets an ex-cop who teaches her how to use a Mickey.  She uses this weapon twice to protect Olivia DeHavilland (and the second time, herself), and she supports both herself and DeHavilland becoming as free as they are able to be in a patriarchal society.

Evelyn/ Eve’s struggles are, I think, a version of Towles’ struggles.  On his website, Towle states that he was recognized for his writing ability when he was an undergraduate at Stanford, and pursued a Master’s in writing at Yale, but became an Investment Banker at his father’s insistence.  After he became “fabulously wealthy”, he returned to the writing craft. 

Towles writes of the wealthy and of Eve’s wish to visit monuments, but then points out, “True, the men who had built these monuments (or, rather caused them to be built) were gone….  For the world to have any sense of justice, a team of artisans had to come forward with their hammers and their paintbrushes and pumice stones in order to patiently unmake the palaces of the proud.”

Towles should have added pens to his list of tools that the artisans would wield.  What is interesting about him as an artist, I think, is that he would deconstruct the world that he has inherited, but he is very ambivalent about his role in doing that.  His identification is with the very world he would deconstruct – not just because he is a member of the monied class, but because he believes that the world should be an orderly place.  He states that he labors over his stories, writing detailed outlines of them so that they are as tight as a drum.  I imagine that, on some level, he is threatened by the possibility that someone would find his stories to anything less than extremely well crafted.  In a word, I wonder if he is afraid to be vulnerable.

I am not criticizing him for this.  In fact, I empathize with his position.  I blog anonymously for many reasons, but one of them, surely, is that I am uncomfortable with how others might critically appraise my criticism.  I, like Towles, am a member of the patriarchy.  If we are to unmake the palaces of the proud – if we are to create an inclusive world in which the contributions of all are recognized – and recognize that the efforts of all are necessary for us to create the monuments of which we can all be proud, we need to figure out how to unmake and remake ourselves. 

This is a complicated task.  It might be the work of our mature selves rather than our younger selves.  We may need to spend the better part of our lives reinventing ourselves – and support the next generation's efforts to do that as well.  What we venerate, what we hold dear, are the very things that we need to question.  And it is not so much the products that we need to remake, but the way we make the products, and that is a scary proposition, because it means leaving behind what we know will work and moving towards doing things in ways that are novel and uncomfortable.  We need to support each other as we do this – both by acknowledging that we are turning the ship – as I think Towles is doing – and by pointing out that there is a lot more turning to be done for Towles and for all of us.

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