Edmund Wilson (photo to left), the great 20th century critic and writer, was close friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet of his close friend he said, in 1922, when Fitzgerald was only 26:
Fitzgerald has been left with a jewel which he doesn’t know quite what to do with. For he has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.
I wonder if this line from Tender is the Night is a gentle jab from Fitzgerald at Wilson: “Like so many men he had found that he only had one or two ideas…” [book two, part xi, Tender Is the Night, page 165 of the 2003 Scribner trade paperback edition].
Shakespeare’s use of language is so beautiful, his scope so fraught with meaning that we miss the brutality of his tragedies. Hamlet, for instance, is a highbrow slasher flick. If Hamlet isn’t inflicting death on somebody, he’s thinking about it. Perhaps strangely, in Stephen Greenblatt’s course last term, we got into the issue of whether Hamlet’s actions at the end of the play suggest something about Elizabethan attitudes towards God’s role in life. Hamlet is a man of faith who has faith in nothing, least of all himself. He prefers murder to turning the other cheek, and suicide to hope. We discussed in class what the idea of ’special providence’ meant to Shakespeare, based on these lines from Act V, Scene ii, where Horatio is trying to talk his friend Hamlet out of a duel meant to leave Hamlet dead.
Hamlet replies:
[T]here’s a special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be
not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves,
what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.
First, a word on providence. Providence is God’s pre-ordaining, setting the course, of the way the world works, as opposed to predestination, which is God’s pre-ordaining whether a human will be saved. Providence comes in two forms: general providence is God’s ordinary way of working — crops growing, for instance. Special providence is God doing something special (it may or may not look like a miracle), setting up a chance meeting that changes a life, for instance. [Thanks to Ward Holder for this discussion of providence and predestination]
In class we discussed this scene and what it may have said about Elizabethan religious attitudes. Shakespeare was born in 1564 (the year John Calvin died). While England had not only broken away from the Catholic Church but banned the practice of Catholicism, religious tension was rife in the country. Was Hamlet’s sparrow Shakespeare expressing something about his own ideas of predestination? Hamlet does seem to be saying his fate was predetermined and he should not avoid the duel, even though it looked like a set-up. To Hamlet, either God had determined he would live despite the set-up, or it was his time to go, and he should be ready.
One site I found sees Horatio’s reaction as a sign of truest friendship and Hamlet as noble in his readiness, instead of holding a death wish. A different site offers a religious interpretation of Hamlet’s sparrow, arguing that he merely accepts Providence for what it is, making him an acolyte of Christ, in the sense of Matthew 10:39 and Mark 8:35, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
I think John Calvin would disagree, for reasons worth thinking about.
Calvin makes two specific references to the sparrow as part of his discussion of God’s general providence in The Institutes of the Christian Religion (Book I chapter xvi 1 and 5, in the final 1559 edition). It isn’t merely sparrows that attract God’s attention, either. Calvin cites David in I xvi 5 that God gives food to the young of the ravens. Calvin goes on to say “Surely if the flight of birds is governed by God’s definite plan, we must confess with the prophet that he so dwells on high as to humble himself to behold whatever happens in heaven and in earth.”
In Book I ch. xvii 3 of The Institutes, Calvin says believers “will not, as if carried off by the fates, out of desperation cast themselves to destruction like that youth of Plautus: ‘Unstable is the loss of things, the fates drive men according to their own pleasure. I will betake myself to the precipice, that there I may lose my goods with my life.’ And they will not ….cover up their own evil deeds with the name “God.”
Calvin then attacks a sect of “profane men” known as Libertines, who apparently said that all crimes are virtues, because they are subject to God’s ordinance. Calvin says that God sets our limits but also trusts us to care for ourselves, to take precautions, to foresee dangers, to use remedies God has given. In particular, God does not want us to suffer fatal acts, Calvin says.
It is a subtle argument on Calvin’s part. But it strongly suggests that Horatio, not Hamlet, followed the truer path according to Calvin. Calvin would likely argue that Hamlet was obviously not among the remnant predestinated to salvation (I found no references to sparrows in Calvin’s discussion of predestination). He would certainly be appalled at those who supported Hamlet’s foolishness in accepting the duel. There are many reasons to disagree with Calvin on predestination, not least the twisting of his words into instruments of judgment by many Puritan sects, including historically my own Presbyterians. But his view on Hamlet suggests that if Shakespeare wanted us to see Hamlet as something other than a Stoic taking his medicine in due course.
An aside:
Shakespeare would have known of the life and death of Sir (and Catholic Saint) Thomas More, martyred in 1535 for his belief that Henry VIII should not get a divorce. I read “A Man For All Seasons” this term and Robert Bolt’s More represents a truer Catholic than Hamlet. In Bolt’s play, Thomas More takes every precaution he can to adhere to his principles without having to die for them. He dies because Henry cheats. In the end, though Bolt leaves this unspoken, More seems to go to his death with readiness.
Here’s the only version of Hamlet Act V Scene 2 I could find on Youtube:
The new issue of Harvard Business Review focuses on failure. That’s not a topic you’ll typically see taught at Harvard Business School, by the way — nobody wants to pay $50,000 a year to get told how to fail. I read a good, brief article by Roger McNamee, who co-founded Elevation Partners (We blew our opportunity to change the world). He writes about how the firm’s initial success led to more money coming its way, which led to financial engineering and its ultimate failure of vision, and his departure. He ends with this grouse:
America has enormous creative energy, but its industries are dominated by lawyers and accountants, not product people. Thirty years of financial engineering and short-term profit optimization has impaired the ability of American companies to innovate. Silver Lake had a chance to change that. We were succeeding. Then we gave up.
There’s the whiff of sour grapes here, but also the scent of truth. It’s hard to know how to read fresh disappointment. I hope we see more on Silver Lake, its promise and its path.
I took a class with Peter Galison last term, in which we studied the writing of Thomas Pynchon, particularly “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The book inspires many reactions at once. I found it obscene and sublime and beautiful and disgusting and engrossing and boring. The New York Times review in 1973 far outstripped me. It said:
Despite that, it won the National Book Award in 1973. It continues to amaze people. The artist Zak Smith was inspired in 2004 to make an illustration for every single page. Here is his take on Slothrop’s beach wear:
I don’t claim to get all of what’s going on in GR, and I don’t actually recommend it to people unless they’re willing to put a lot of work into it, including buying one of the guides to the novel, which run close to as long as the book itself. In my naive way, I don’t agree with some of Pynchon’s narrative choices. I think the book would not have suffered a bit if he’d axed certain scenes, or left them unsaid. But postmodern narrative is about as far from journalistic narrative as you can get, so who cares what I think?
The novel surfaced again in a class on the Bible in literature that I’m taking this term, which is focused on “Paradise Lost,” “Moby Dick” and “King Lear.” That last is there because the course actually covers the books the professor considers the most tremendous works in the English language, only he didn’t want to give the course that name. The professor, Gordon Teskey, made the comment in the first class that the other candidate for the reading list was “Gravity’s Rainbow.” (Teskey pointedly said that he was not calling these ‘the best’ works in the English language, but ‘the most tremendous’). You can certainly see Melville’s influence on Pynchon. Funnily enough to the modern reader, many reviewers in Melville’s day found Moby Dick a shocking and even obscene novel.
Galison came to speak to the Niemans not long ago, and he’s not unlike GR in his individual complexity (I should clarify that I find him neither disgusting nor openly obscene). He’s a physicist and historian of science who writes about fundamental practices of science. He also makes documentaries about visually challenging topics like storing nuclear waste and secrets. Here’s a lengthy piece profiling his work (and his somewhat legendary ability to go without sleep).
Will Americans decide it’s time to borrow again? The Wall Street Journal thinks so. Its top story recently said U.S. families debt levels have fallen to below what they were in early 2005 (see Families slice debt to lowest in 6 years). The drop in debt, the paper told readers, means we consumers now are “in position to start spending more.”
I boggled at that statement, in part because it came in the same sentence that told us that families lowered their (our) debt “by defaulting on their loans and scrimping on expenses.” But mostly because the same story notes that debt levels still sit at 116 percent of disposable income. Just ten years ago it was below 100 percent of disposable income. There was little in the story that suggested that Americans were in much of a mood to spend. How do we derive this desperately hopeful first sentence from such an article?
Worse, on the jump page of this article (in the print edition), there is an article on China’s growth (see China Trade Rise Prompts Shifts Around the Globe). It features prominently a comment from Larry Summers, who predicts no one will remember the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008. We have pretty short memories, since we have short memories. Who remembers all the depressions and recession from before the Great one? For that matter, it’s almost certain that Summers will fade into obscurity. He was nowhere near as powerful as Andrew Mellon, and Mellon is largely forgotten today. But that same article featured this interesting comment from Robert Lawrence, a Harvard economist:
“The U.S. economy has become so specialized that less-skilled U.S. workers no longer compete head to head with emerging-economy workers.”
A lot of Americans probably feel like they’re not as skilled as they need to be. So why would they start borrowing now? This takes me back to the Journal’s top story, which seems to me to be muddle-headed, or at least based on wishful thinking.
There’s a lot of talk about America’s failing schools. Here at Harvard, there are flyers on bulletin boards blaring that U.S. students, versus those of other developed nations, place 15th in reading, 24th in science, 30th in math (I will not reproduce it, because the information on it will then stick in your minds as true). This morning I was flipping through Christian Century, which highlighted a contrarian blurb about these international test scores from something called Dissent. I went to look up the article in Dissent, which turns out to be a left-leaning magazine. In an article entitled “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools, it says:
Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
I found the data striking. A quick look at OECD data on income inequality suggests that the U.S. overall outperforms other countries that are less rich overall, but have similar poverty rates, such as Mexico and Turkey, the exception being Korea, which has some of the top scores in the world. On the TIMSS test (math and science for 8th graders), city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore and relatively small nations like Hungary (population about 10 million) do well. The only large nations that outperformed U.S. 8th graders in 2007 (the latest test) were Japan, England, and Russia. But remember that the U.S. is the world’s third-largest country by population, with 310 million citizens. Russia’s population is less than half that of America’s, Japan’s closer to one-third.
I may take some time to play with data on poverty levels and income, and compare it to test scores. I wish Dissent had done this, but it really wanted to whack big foundations like Gates and Broad and their growing influence on education policy.
It’s Ash Wednesday. Over breakfast, my children looked blankly at me as I attempted to explain to my children why people impose ashes on their heads. “Can we just get to Easter?” said one, looking for the pot of gold at the start of the rainbow.
In honor of which, I offer this link to Hot Tuna performing Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning. I also offer someone singing a rendition of T.S. Eliot’s The Hippopotamus (in which the hippo, though merely flesh and blood, among the saints shall be seen performing on a harp of gold).
Not sure why I can’t get the embed feature to work this a.m., but I can’t.
It puzzles me that Harvard offers no courses on non-fiction narrative. I like novels, but why the English department offers nothing on non-fiction as literature (except in the context of writing courses) seems a travesty of judgment.
If I were to pick five non-fiction narratives to build a course around, I think I would choose these:
“History of Standard Oil,” Ida Tarbell. Published in 1904, it established trusts as a thing that needed beating down by nothing less than the federal government. It made John D. Rockefeller infamous (and richer than ever), and established journalism that brooked power.
“Hiroshima,” John Hersey. A narrative from 1946 that still evokes awe amongst journalists, and chronicles the human effect of perhaps the most impactful technology of the 20th century.
The “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby,” by Tom Wolfe, 1965. I’m tempted to put Joan Didon’s excellent “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” instead, because of its connected narrative threads. But Wolfe’s style provoked more imitators (perhaps because it was easier to imitate than Didion) and I think a non-fiction narrative class needs to look at something by Wolfe. The nonfiction novel trend of the ’60s also merits mention, notably Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” Mailer’s “Army of the Night” and Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”
“All The Presidents’ Men,” Woodward and Bernstein, 1974. Sparked the end of trusting in the powerful, and inspired a generation. Maybe two.
“The Perfect Storm,” Sebastian Junger. The book that confirmed narrative non-fiction as the most important kind of long-form writing at the end of the 20th century.
All of them electrified readers and writers alike, and I think established important cultural markers just like great novels. I’d take this class.
Curious to see what’s happened to story-telling over the course of the last century, I am taking a class on the American Novel from Drieser to the present. It’s a misnomer, in a sense — we don’t read any Drieser. But his 1900 novel “Sister Carrie” gets credit for sparking a new more realistic form of storytelling amongst American fiction writers. The professor, Philip Fisher, argues that the American novel then turned away from the moral form, where actions have consequences. Instead, Naturalism and Manners (that is, social constructs), a chance set of circumstances that overwhelm any individual desires of the characters in these novels, become the dominant forms of the novel, along with Aestheticism, the pursuit of beauty (and, Fisher argues, the only type of novel in which characters have freedom in deciding their course of action).
Our first assignment was to read Willa Cather’s “My Antonia.” I was struck by how differently she portrayed the immigrant experience from the way Upton Sinclair does 12 years earlier in “The Jungle.”Where Sinclair is sour, Cather is sweet. Her immigrants ultimately do well for themselves, largely on the strength of their backs. Sinclair’s Lithuanian hero, Jurgis, blows out his back, ending his American dream. Sinclair’s villainous capitalists crush the souls and bodies of those who make them their money; Cather’s capitalist, Cutter, is far more muted and even a comic character (his wife has that great line: “Mr. Cutter, you have broken all the Commandments — spare the finger bowls!”). Perhaps that’s because of setting: Sinclair is in the city and roughly concurrent with 1905, while Cather, though writing later, sets her novel primarily in the late 1860s and 1870s, when Nebraska was first settled by whites. Indeed, Cather seems to deliberately avoid delving in the ugly and brutal side of the lives of her characters. The murder(?) of Antonia’s father is brushed over (and later the possible murderer, Krajiek, seems to just disappear from the story). If the father was murdered, no one has an outright identity crisis in My Antonia. The closest we get is Antonia telling Mrs. Harling “a girl like me has to take her good times when she can. I guess I want to have my fling, like the other girls.” Jim’s possible affair with Lena is ignored; no casual sex in this book, at least not openly. Then again, Lena seems like the original Jessica Rabbit: she’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way.
Cather gives us but small sentences of crisis: “There was nothing in life for him but trout streams, ever since he’d lost the twins,” she notes at one point. She leaves it to us to fill in a lot of those blanks.
Morality is there, but more a duty than a force, in line with Fisher’s argument about the shift in American novels towards naturalism. Witness Jim when he arrives at the homestead: “I did not say my prayers that night; here, I felt, what would be would be.” We also see traces of the vast environment Jack London poised against his characters (and all of humanity) in the violent snows of Nebraska, i.e. Jim’s comment that “I was convinced that man’s strongest antagonist is the cold.” Providence does get invoked, but by the grandmother, suggesting to me that Cather wants us to recognize a generational shift in beliefs. The book ends with Jim referring to “those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be.” Not Calvinist predestination, but chance, rules the day.
I was struck by how Cather’s town, Black Hawk, is inhabited by much more likable people than those we’ll meet two years later in Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street “(it is striking that this course avoids Lewis and Pearl Buck and Steinbeck, especially Steinbeck. No Toni Morrison or Isaac Bashevis Singer, either). We do see this sterile small town atmosphere and its myopic people emerge towards the end, suggesting a dying off of energy and vitality in the second generation among the people who, unlike Jim, do not go to the city. In this sense she presages what Lewis will mock and eviscerate just two years later.
Cather’s book is filled with remarkable and strong women, which feels unusual to me from what i know of the fiction of the era. I found that refreshing. But it may have been a reason why Cather does not push into dangerous territory, like having Jim marry Antonia, or having any of the ‘hired girls’ marry a town boy (Fisher introduced us to a Jhumpa Lahiri story that does explore this theme in a contemporary context).
Nebraska epitomizes fly-over states today; one would not visit there without a specific reason. But Cather makes the place sound lovely and placid and full of life. She has such evocative turns of phrase: “the panting wheeze of a saw,” spring’s ‘nimble air”, the “draft-horse necks” of the peasant women.
Often I think our modern math and neuroscience just tell us what we already know. Here’s Max Weber writing about a puzzle of agricultural output in 1905 in “The Protestant Ethic:”
a man who at the rate of 1 mark per acre mowed 2.5 acres per day and earned 2.5 marks, when the rate was raised to 1.25 marks per acre mowed, not 3 acres, as he might easily have done, thus earning 3.75 marks, but only 2 acres, so that he could still earn the 2.5 marks to which he had become accustomed. The opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less.
Despite this, Colin Camerer et al. noted in 1997 that “The standard economic prediction is that a temporary increase in wages should cause people to work longer hours.” Camerer et al. used data on New York City cab drivers to test this premise, built on the economic truism that people will substitute labor for leisure (that is, work more when it pays better, and work less when it pays less). They found that many cab drivers, especially those with less experience, have “negative wage elasticity.” That is, they work less on good days, rather than building up cash reserves that will tide them over and allow them to work less on days when customers are hard to come by. In the jargon of behavioral economics, this is because of ‘narrow bracketing,’ where drivers bracket their time day-by-day, rather than taking a longer-term perspective, and also due to loss aversion (the cabbies set daily targets and don’t want to fall short on bad days, so, having knocked off early on their good days, on their bad days they must drive more).
Camerer’s paper also makes reference to agricultural studies, and notes that such problems of narrow bracketing and loss aversion could be endemic to the kind of people who seek out piece-rate work like farming and cab-driving. But the authors say this seems unlikely. [The paper is “Labor Supply of New York City Cab Drivers: One Day at a Time,” Camerer, Colin F., Linda Babcock, George Lowenstein and Richard H. Thaler, as published in “Choices, Values and Frames, ed. by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, c. 2000]
The wonder is that the standard model would ignore the observations of actual behavior. Camerer, by the way, is not using particularly complicated math in his study; I wonder if it will work against the adoption of such ideas.
Edmund Wilson (photo to left), the great 20th century critic and writer, was close friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet of his close friend he said, in 1922, when Fitzgerald was only 26:
Rainbow.” The book inspires 