At the risk of flogging a horse that is not only dead, but was dead on arrival, I feel compelled to continue my unfavorable critique of the movie, Out of Africa - call it a rash that I can't resist scratching.
One scene in the movie that made me recoil is when Bror shows up at the farm to ask Karen for money, and he finds Karen and Denys together:
"You could have asked," Bror says, all unwarranted hurt and bruised male ego.
"I did," Denys replies, dripping American insousiance. "She said 'yes.'"
Vomit!
Who knows if, instead of gagging, I would have tittered at the tired attempt at humor if I didn't know the truth, but I do know the truth. Karen Blixen and her entourage were anything but bourgeois in their sexual attitudes. Here's Karen Blixen, in a letter to her brother, Thomas, on sexual morals:
I have the impression that most people at the moment are in a state of absolute confusion about everything concerning rights and duties in the field of sexual relationships, marriage included. I think one exception to be found in a small advanced minority, the "smart set" in the larger countries (and to a certain extent my circle of acquaintance out here), where a sexual relationship is more or less regarded as the normal social convention among young people, in which no one - spouses, parents, or former lovers not excepted - have a right to interfere, and where everything is all right, providing neither partner loses his temper or in any way pretends to take it seriously.
Letter to Thomas Dinesen, 19 November 1927, Letters from Africa, p. 323.
The veracity of her impressions is proved by the fact that Bror, far from begrudging Denys his affair with Karen, introduced Denys happily as "my wife's lover" and continued to hunt professionally with Denys - including when the Prince of England was Denys' client.
I don't in any way argue with Hollywood's prerogative to entertain, even at the expense of the truth. But Hollywood is abusing this liberty when its "entertaining" reimagining is so much less diverting than what really happened.
If I'd been allowed to choose the title for Claudia Roth Pierpont's book, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, I might have selected, The Arduous Lives of Women Writers: Failure, Imbalance and For What? In her selection of essays, originally written for The New Yorker, about twelve women writers, Pierpont depicts an ambition - being a writer - so remote from feasibility that none of the women under examination have been able to achieve it without gross and debilitating sacrifices.
Of course, everyone knows that being a women writer makes for a hateful life - between the constant rejection, poverty, needing the room of one's own, dying of Addison's disease and all that, it could hardly be otherwise. But I forget. The way my mind works, I'm liable to connect my languishing in the purgatory of yet-to-be-published with the general pattern of unfairness and injustice in my life - another of the never-ending side-effects of having been less preferred to my obviously inferior brother - instead of, like, the normal state of affairs. Pierpont's book was that "knock knock" message we all need at various times in our lives: hello, dumbass, what you're attempting is so hard that geniuses can't do it without suffering.
Which is not to say that Pierpont's book is solely - or even primarily - about geniuses. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of her book is the number of hacks she profiles. Pierpont can scarcely veil her disdain of
Anaïs Nin's writing ("For the reader able to escape the solitary confinement of these endless pages [of Nin's Diary] through the mere act of closing a book - such a simple deliverance - relief is dulled only by a shuddering pity for the woman who lived all her days trapped inside." (p. 79)). For Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Pierpont reserves the terms "vulgar," "blatant, commercial," and "blundering colossus." (p. 130-131.) Pierpont makes no claims for Ayn Rand's work beyond Rand's admission of writing "propaganda." (p. 200.) Talentless (or talent-limited) dreamers, no less than the geniuses, suffer for the ambition of making their living from their writing.
But the suffering is extreme for such a minor crime. Zora Neale Hurston, the writer in this collection with whom I identify most closely - and whose fate I think most likely to be a foreshadowing of my own - worked as a maid in her old age and died in a welfare home, a lonely end that the critic Darwin Tuner wrote was "eccentric but perhaps appropriate" - so deeply was Hurston misunderstood.
This unhappiness that, without exception, characterizes the lives and careers of Pierpont's passionate subjects reminded me of an article Malcolm Gladwell wrote about late blooming geniuses. Largely a book report on David W. Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, Gladwell's article contains this gem: "This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others," whereupon Gladwell details the support provided by the patrons of Cezanne and (less established, but still warranting the label "late blooming genius" in Gladwell's inventory) Ben Folds. In other words, artists who have a long development period need support if they're going to make it.
Guess what the women writers of Passionate Minds lacked?
Whether support would have made a self-destroyer like Mary McCarthy or a battle-ax like Mae West happy is an open question; my vote is "no." (Astonishing levels of support did seemingly little to improve Cezanne's happiness quotient.) Still, support might have enabled these women and others - Marina Tsvetaeva, Doris Lessing, Eudora Welty and, of course, Hurston - to succeed more readily and more sustainably; and both the support and the success - one could easily imagine - would have improved their lives.
This problem of support - or lack thereof - seems to be what, in the end, makes realization of the ambition of being a woman writer so difficult. Whether a woman has to marry into the support (prostitution), rely on her family (manipulation, co-dependency), or work another job (exhaustion, distraction, no time for writing), finding the money to support her writing is so miserable a hustle that, among Pierpont's twelve subjects, not one survived it on any but the most abject and usurious terms.
As Pierpont sums up the situation, "These are lives in which success is hard won, retreat and even breakdown are common, love is difficult, and children are nearly impossible, lives in which all that is ever certain is that books and plays and poems are being written." (p. xiii.) The sacrifices are so great, and the rewards so meager and long-coming, that the effort doesn't look - even to one engaged in the attempt - to be worth it; and yet the compulsion to continue remains.
As difficult as writing fiction is, I'm thankful that I'm not a non-fiction writer. James Fox's White Mischief, which I recently finished, confirmed my sense that sustaining the reader's (or this reader's) interest over a the course of a long work of non-fiction is a task so thankless as to be not worth attempting. A plea: writers of non-fiction, can't you wrap it up in 20,000 words?
White Mischief is a journalistic-historical account of the murder of Josslyn Hay (a/k/a Earl of Erroll), an event which effectively ended the Happy Valley era for Kenya's white colonialists. The story ought to be interesting. All the characters, even those tangentially involved, were glamorous, scandalous, drug-and-sex addled adventurers, many of them fabulously wealthy, who did things about which people like to gossip: attempted suicide, attempted murder, abandoned their children, kept wild animals as pets, mistreated their servants, slept around.
In James Fox's hands, however, the story becomes . . . long. Because Fox devoted years to investigating the story, he wants to write about his investigation. The resulting meta-narrative detour introduces the reader to the boring, authorially self-involved, and irrelevant aspects of Fox's tale. Fox, unlike his Happy Valley subjects - sadly - seems not to have attempted suicide or murder, abondoned his child, kept a beast as a pet, mistreated his help staff, or indulged in promiscuous sex.
Fox does, however, admire the deceased writer and gourmand Cyril Connolly, who spent the later years of his life obsessed with the Joss Hay murder. While I can appreciate Fox's tribute to Connolly, his mentor and writing partner - and the source of Fox's own obsession with the case - only someone who knew Connolly personally could appreciate the lavish detail with which Fox recounts what Connolly ate and drank at their meetings. I, on the other hand, don't care.
Purely out of luck, as I was wondering, "How could Fox have told this story without the boring bits?" I began reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and I had my answer. Vargas Llosa's book, like Fox's, is about unearthing the truth about a violent event that happened more than twenty years previously. Moreover, Vargas Llosa's book, like Fox's, is as much about the investigation of the event as it is about the event itself. Unlike Fox's book, however, Vargas Llosa's is fascinating.
Vargas Llosa uses a technique of seamlessly intersplicing his account of the investigation and the event itself. In Alejandro Mayta, a nameless novelist in 1983 interviews people with relevant information about Mayta, a Communist revolutionary in 1958 Peru. Vargas Llosa interweaves the testimony of each of these interviewees, along with a first person account of the interviews, with a third person narrative of the events that occurred 25 year previously. The first person account of the interviews is supposed to be "real," while the third person narrative is supposed to be "fiction." The technique works brilliantly, not merely to generate a page-turning story, but also to probe questions of consequence, like, "How can we ever know the truth about historic events?" and "Why is fiction sometimes a better vehicle for truth than non-fiction?"
To compare Vargas Llosa and Fox is unfair. Vargas Llosa consistently and prolifically produces books of astonishing skill; Fox is a hack. With Alejandro Mayta, Vargas Llosa wrote a po-mo novel; Fox's book is more of an extended feature article for a newspaper's Sunday magazine.
Still, however unfair, the comparison sharply reveals - to my mind - the superiority of fiction as a medium. Freedom from the bondage of facts releases the author from the tiresome task of shaping a page-turner out of life's petty story lines; instead, the author's challenge is to imagine a story line that's also a page turner. The former is a problem of organizing information; the latter is a problem of art. For the both (this) author and (this) reader, the choice of which book is more worthwhile is clear.
Hitler is the poster boy for the limits of activities and practices that are supposed to be good for you. For example, Hitler advocated vegetarianism and seems to have practiced something close to it. He probably even ate granola. Nonetheless, he wasn't interested in giving peace a chance. As for the purported health benefits of a vegetarian diet, for Hitler, vegetarianism didn't impart glowing skin and glossy hair; nor did it counteract the effects of a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head.
Now Hitler is exposed as an avid reader. In Timothy Ryback's Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life (reviewed by John Gross in The New York Review of Books), Hitler is revealed as a bookworm and condemned as an "autodidact, with an autodidact's limitations."
After quoting the book's epigraph, a passage from Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring," Gross reflects:
The trouble was not that [Hitler] didn't drink deeply enough, but that he drank from the wrong springs. . . . It wasn't his defective learning that was dangerous, but his ideas.
I see the problem a bit differently. Ideas, from my perspective, are neutral. They take on positive or negative valences depending on how people make use of them. Shielding Hitler from the idea of anti-Semitism, for example, wouldn't have protected the Catholics, Gypsies, homosexuals or handicapped who also died in concentration camps, or humanized the Slavs and Russians who were characterized as animals by the Nazis.
The problem wasn't the idea of anti-Semitism, but the way Hitler responded to it. And his response may have had something to do with the way he read. I have been extremely enamored of an explanation put forth by Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid (reviewed by Caleb Crain in The New Yorker; shamefully I haven't read it yet) about the way reading changes human thinking.
"The secret at the heart of reading," Wolf writes, is "the time it
frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came
before." According to Wolf, reading doesn't use much of the brain, allowing the rest of the gray matter to engage with the text, both rationally (e.g., interrogating the accuracy of a given statement) and irrationally (e.g., calling up emotions provoked by the text). "The efficient reading brain," Wolf explains, "quite literally has more time to think."
Our brains don't respond the same way to video, for example. Crain writes:
Moving and talking images are much richer in information about a
performer's appearance, manner, and tone of voice, and they give us the
impression that we know more about her health and mood, too. The viewer
may not catch all the details of a candidate's health-care plan, but he
has a much more definite sense of her as a personality, and his
response to her is therefore likely to be more full of emotion. . . . The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel.
The closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion. It can
be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is
almost unbearable to watch such a television show.
With the caveat that one can never know what's in the mind of another, I'll hazard that Hitler can't have been engaging very strenuously with his reading material. He seems to have been reading not to "have thoughts deeper than those that came
before," but to "feel at home with his show." Ryback "constantly reminds us [in Hitler's Private Library] of [Hitler's] intellectual shallowness," says Gross, and Gross himself labels Hitler a "lumpenintellectual." Hitler apparently read, not for the pleasure of learning, but to bolster his insecurity. "Cruelty, resentment, and the lust for power weren't the only things driving him. He needed to believe in himself as a thinker as well," writes Gross.
A man who read to appear learned, and who abstained from meat in order to appear humane. (According to Léon Degrelle, an SS general, Hitler "could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature.") Perhaps Hitler is not the poster child for the limits of vegetarianism and bookishness, but instead the poster child for the hazards of cultivating a facade at the expense of the interior.
My most abiding response to Sophie's World is surprise at how narrow the history of philosophy is (in Jostein Gaarder's telling). The most basic assertion of philosophy is that the "big" questions -- who are you? where does the world come from? -- are universal to humans. As Gaarder writes in Sophie's Word, "[T]here is something else . . . which everyone needs, and that is to figure out who we are and why we are here." (p. 14.) And yet the history that Gaarder writes of the answers to those two questions focuses on the responses of a small group of white men hailing from a sliver of the world's geography.
I say this not to raise an issue of political correctness, but to question the fundaments of philosophy. If these questions are universal to humans, why does our history record answers from only so few? The most obvious possibilities are either that (1) the questions are not universal, (2) that there's a recording problem with the answers, or (3) philosophy has failed to recognize answers to these questions that are offered in another format or under the rubric of another discipline (e.g., myths, political theory, theology).
Is it possible that people don't ask who they are and where the world comes from? One way of rephrasing this question is to ask if we can we find a society without a creation myth? Such a society apparently exists: the Pirahã in the Amazon have no identifiable creation myth (as documented in this New Yorker article and this Guardian piece). The Pirahã also seem not to have a sense of time, which is a likely explanation for why no one in their society asked what existence was like before the Pirahã.
But most societies have a sense of time, along with creation myths. Are there nonetheless people in those societies that don't ask who they are and where the world comes from? Without having conducted any empirical research on the question, I'd venture to say "yes." Asking these questions requires a degree of self-awareness; and self-awareness isn't as common to the human condition as, say, phlegm.
Gaarder might disagree with me. In Sophie's World, Gaarder argues that the capacity for wonder is innate in children, and society drums it out of them: "Although philosophical questions concern us all . . . . [f]or various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background." (p. 19.)
My own perspective is that the process often works in the reverse: absent awareness raising at the outset, people won't necessarily ask "who am I?" and "where does the world come from?" In my own view, the capacity for wonder, like compassion, is innate only in varying degrees in different individuals, and it must be cultivated. Sophie's World is itself an account of such calculated cultivation.
Moving on to the second question, is it possible that there are some recording problems with the answers? I feel confident in saying that oral cultures got the shaft when the history of philosophy was compiled. Without a written record, oral cultures faced problems preserving their thougths and communicating them across geography, time and language. Whether anything can be done to restore the knowlegdge banks of oral cultures is doubtful -- these repositories largely exist only in the memories of the long-dead -- but the issue of this "lost" contribution to human thinking shades into the third question as well:
Is it possible that the history of philosophy hasn't recognized answers to its questions that were offered in different formats, or under the rubric of different disciplines? In Sophie's World, Gaarder includes coverage of Darwin, Marx and Freud, people who are not primarily associated with the discipline of philosophy, so perhaps Gaarder would reject my third question. But I believe the challenge remains. Aside from Gaarder's exclusion of obvious candidates, like Confucius and Buddha (there are passing references to him, but nothing in depth), Gaarder doesn't confront the fact that modes of thinking in societies vary depending on whether the society is an oral or literate one.
"Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it
does. . . . More than any other single invention, writing has
transformed human consciousness," writes Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest and English professor, in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy. People in literate cultures think differently; they organize information and construct the world in patterns that diverge from those that predominate in oral cultures. Thus, they may ask different questions; and even if the questions are the same, the answers will certainly be different. A thousand years ago, the Kyrgz tribe answered the question "who are we?" with the epic poem, Manas. Is it philosophy? Probably not. Does it belong in the history of human thought about philosophical questions? Probably yes.
From this brief examination of these three questions, the shape of an answer to my original question -- why does the history of philosophy include answers from such a narrow range of humanity? -- begins to emerge. Specifically, before an individual will offer answers to philosophical questions that qualify for inclusion in the history of philosophy, he or she must live in a culture that:
has a sense of time;
creates conditions for the cultivation of wonder (or, alternatively, creates conditions that don't squash a sense of wonder innately present in an individual);
is literate.
Undoubtedly there are more factors, but this is (an already too long) blog post, not a treatise, so let's leave it at those three. The important point, however, is that philosophy's claims for universality seem rather frail. If we can't even say that every human society experiences time, or has a creation myth, how can we agree with Kant's theory (as phrased by Gaarder) that "moral law has the same absolute validity as the physical laws. . . . It applies to all people in all societies at all times." (p. 330.) It's an intriguing idea -- and one that might even be to some extent right, if an innate sense of fairness can be equated with morality -- but Kant based his assertion on only the slenderest sampling of human culture and society, which either makes his claims for the power of reason either absurdly arrogant or pitiably silly.
And here, perhaps, is the practical answer to the question of why the history of philosophy includes answers from such a limited range of people: philosophy's insistence on the supremacy of human reason and the universality of its application to humanity, regardless of evidence (or its absence), appeals to a particular kind of ego that often goes by another name: asshole.
