A Righteous Woman's Pause For Plaudits - No Point Hiding Doing Good Under A Bushel

Vassar isn't what it once was, the women's college equivalent of the Ivy League before it went coed. While the other Seven Sisters held the line, deciding that there was still a place for a single-sex education, Vassar went coed and immediately dropped a tier.  Why would a woman qualified to go to Harvard or Yale waste her money on what was now a second rate school in an out-of-the-way corner of New York state?

 

Nevertheless, it was Vicki's alma mater to which she owed allegiance.  The school in her day attracted the best and the brightest women, and she was still friends with many of her classmates.  They had gone in different directions - some, having taken advantage of the Ivy League connection married well and were either still married or widowed; others, pioneers in a pre-feminist generation, went to Wall Street; and still others took an academic track. 

Vicki floundered a bit after graduation.  A stint at a New York publishing house, a shared apartment in girl ghetto on the Upper East Side, singles bars, the Hamptons, but nothing 'pertinent' as she put it, nothing that grabbed her attention or felt right until she met Herman Gottlieb of the New York garment Gottliebs, associates of Samuel Gompers and his supporters in the early labor union movement.  Herman had been dyed in the wool of socialism thanks to his parents who had never lost their Jewish advocacy for the little man.

 

It often takes a man to throw a switch in a woman who has been hesitant to throw it herself - the incomparable mix of political reform and sex always does the trick. Vicki conflated the two - sexual throes fueled her passion for the garment worker and her time on the shop floor amidst the spindles, spools, and sewing machines made her anxious to be rudely sexually taken, a kind of penance for the oppressed. 

The affair ended - Herman had had enough socialism, labor rights, and the plight of the downtrodden worker and headed to where he belonged - Harvard Law School where he would focus on corporate law and leave public service in the rear view mirror.  

So Vicki was again at sixes and sevens. Her stint as a volunteer at The Daily Worker and night cashier at Shraft's were both dead ends.  Her apartment on Avenue C which she had shared with Herman was now a crash pad for late-model hippies, dopers, and radical wannabees - untidy, gross in spots, and a reminder that a good Vassar education was going sorrowfully to waste. 

Epiphany Part II.  It was an easy elision from labor organizer to civil rights activist.  She had not lost her commitment to progressive causes, and Washington would be the place to mature her as yet unformed political ambitions and to make a difference.  The Americans For Progressive Reform, a well-known non-profit was exactly the right place.  The employees, all women were all enthusiastic, bonded in feminist and progressive solidarity, and serious.  

The ensuing years were all spent in the interest of social justice, and each year and each decade she became even more convinced of the rightness of the causes for which she was fighting and her anointed place within the struggle. 

After much debate she decided to go to her tenth reunion, a chance to meet old classmates and more importantly to share with them what she had accomplished.  It would be high-level show and tell and her classmates would be impressed.  After all she was making a difference. 

Much to her surprise no one seemed interested.  'What was that like?' asked Piers Cabot about the East Village, not so much of a question as it was a statement. She didn't wait for an answer as the canape tray with delicious foie gras truffles came around. 

It was like that, all husbands and children, the Women's Auxiliary and summers on Nantucket, plans for Porto in the Spring and Gstaad in the winter, nothing vaguely resembling outrage or oppression. Had she taken a wrong turn, Vicki wondered?  Who was it who said that class was destiny?

She returned to Washington disheartened and disappointed, but such counterpoise gave her the fuel she needed to refire the furnace.  The agenda was long - black men were still victims of police brutality, transgenders were increasingly put upon and bedeviled by the homophobic Right, the climate had not ceased its warming, and capitalism kept stealing the hearts and souls of working Americans.  

By the time the next reunion rolled around, she was still a cog in a perpetually turning wheel. Despite her selflessness, her diligence, and her unflagging belief in a better world, nothing much had changed in ten years.  She was still looking out a grimy window of a two-room office on Florida Avenue way east of 14th Street and bumping up against the ghetto.  

There were minor successes - a municipal order in Grand Forks to shift resources from police patrols to community service; a court order from Indiana's fourth circuit to allow gender education in K-12; but all in all, she and her colleagues were a shabby lot still eating warmups and leftovers, wearing old denim, and darning socks. 

Nevertheless, she went to her reunion.  What had been an incipient display of wealth and good fortune at 32 was in full, magnificent flower at 42.  Piers Cabot was a young grandmother, Abigail Newton had just financed the renovation of the American Wing at the Fogg and was now a trustee, and Delilah Mason had discovered a new neural pathway to the cerebral reticulum and as Associate Professor of Neurology at Hopkins was a recognized pioneer in her field. 

'Are you still...where was it again...Avenue B or something like that  in New York?', asked Piers Cabot but no more interested than when she first asked the question ten years ago. 

Four years of college out of a long life is nothing, and yet it has a disproportionate influence on one's life, and so it was that Vicki couldn't shake the ingrained, inbred, historic, renowned Vassar tradition and the aristocratic society from which its students had come.  She was of that milieu but had spent the greater part of her life denying it.  When she should be summering on the Vineyard and skiing the slopes of Vail, she was still in her wretched studio apartment in Shaw and taking the Metro to work. 

Epiphany Part III. There was still time.  Nothing is ever set in stone, nothing beyond alteration or change.  Did she really care about black people? and wasn't almost seventy years of civil rights enough for the black man to pull himself out of poverty and social dysfunction?  Why was she spending her life trying to improve conditions in the ghetto when it remained the shithole it was when she started?

Her inheritance was still banked and intact, earning interest and substantial enough to buy houses in Palm Beach and St. Bart's.  Why not?

 

Yet the old pull, now a niggling guilty plea for consideration was still tugging, and she continued on her progressive course for another ten years.  Sunken costs she remembered from Econ 101 were an economic and social anchor.  She simply was not ready to pull up stakes. 

By time of the next reunion when she was fifty-two, she arrived in style - cultured pearls, Givenchy, a diamond as big as the Ritz, and the silk and organza richness of a Boston Brahmin grande dame. Free at last!  she sighed as she took her place on the dais.  She had been asked to give the welcoming address to the event and did so with 'Heritage, Tradition, and Grace - The Triad of Privilege', a speech she had specially prepared for the occasion but to be published in the DAR Journal of the American Revolution. 

The speech was elegiac of the great academic and social tradition of Vassar and the women who had made it the premier women's college of the nation - 'a tradition which once embraced, is forever, a permanent ethos of success'.  She went on to indirectly dismiss all the cant, tired rubric, and faded assumptions which she had endorsed for so many years.  'I am here to claim my birthright', she said. 

She was home again and never looked back.  Roots have their way of staying firmly in place, she said, and when the time is right, they produce limbs, branches, and flowers. 

'What was it like?', now asked a very interested classmate, and Vicki was able to answer, a new woman. 

Lunch With Bores - The High Price Of Community

The Potter family was not a bad sort, well-meaning, good neighbors - a sunken cost as Fielding Harper viewed it, hard to ignore and some interest to be drawn.  Why his wife insisted on lunch with the Potters was beyond him.  Their scraping the their leftover salads into foldable cardboard boxes- not separately but both his and her plates scraped into one sodden mess - should have been the final withdrawal from the account. 

Leave it at 'I'm there if you need me' and no presumption of interest should have been enough, but it wasn't, and off they went on the second Tuesday of every month to a neighborhood restaurant which had weekly specials on that day. 

 

It was the price to pay for living in a neighborhood - there is something expected from proximity, a bow to good will perhaps, a social bonding expected but one which Fielding was quite happy to do without.  He looked at these monthly lunches with the Potters as an investment - cynical as that was, it was the reality of longevity, pushing the envelope past one's time. You never knew when it would be time to ring the bell for the servant.  

It was one of those 'Love her, loathe him' friendships, but what do you do when couples are joined together at the hip? Fielding, brought up with good manners and courtesy couldn't bring himself to rudeness which would have put the last nail in the coffin lid, so he suffered through, kept his counsel, and deferred to Bob Potter's stories about static heads, flow rates, and overflow valves - redoing the bathroom.  

 

It wasn't just a quick on-and-off reference to necessary homeowning investment, but a saga of trips to Home Depot and tales of comparative pricing, the durability ratios of plastics and porcelain, fittings, work windows, and auxiliary fixtures. 

Marfa Potter was more doable - she at least fit the Harpers within an accommodating frame of reference, but she still banged on about her wayward son, the desultory job of her daughter, and the absent family in Chillicothe until the restaurant had emptied. 

The American Park neighborhood was typical of an upper middle class, professional enclave of Washington.  It was cohesive via political allegiance rather than midwestern neighborliness, chatting across the picket fence or hanging the wash.  Neighbors' bonding was borne of commiseration - that fool in the White House - and hours were spent in driveways spieling about the retrograde, morally destitute, impossibly arrogant man in the Oval Office. 

Fielding enjoyed listening, and always stopped when hailed.  There was something vaudevillian about the miserable pain and suffering of his neighbors. Every pitch and roll, every toss and turn of hatred was part of a circus act in which he was to play the appreciative audience.  He went up Byfield Street and stopped at the Barkers, the Wrights, the Villas, and the Schwartzbaums like down a shopping aisle. 

But all the Punch and Judy, Grand Guignol, the hysteria and the nonsense was far more entertaining than a penitential lunch with the Potters.  Fielding, a natural born conservative who had never even as an adolescent veered off the straight and narrow, had at first found it hard to keep his own counsel and his mouth shut when one neighbor or another lit into Donald Trump; but when he began to see it as a side show - a stop at the bearded lady, one at the midgets, another at the baby with two heads - did he look forward to his walks up and down Byfield Street. 

Now, one word about Clausewitz, Darwin's territorial imperative applied to geopolitics, America's joining The Machiavellian Club of Three - the new international triumvirate of Putin, Xi, and Trump - would have gotten Bob Potter off socket wrenches and given Marfa Potter fits, but was it worth it? Indigestion comes with stirring the soup.  

 

On the other hand Fielding's apostasy would have assured cloture.  That would be the last Caesar salad and chicken tenders they would ever have to eat together. 

Fielding's wife had invited another couple to lunch a few months back.  She was a classmate of his wife, and he was a retired administrator of one of Bill Clinton's social welfare agencies.  The woman had banged on over the oeufs en gelee, the pasta dish, and halfway into the meat course about the political deity of Kamala Harris and how she was about to head off to South Philly to get out the vote for her; and Fielding had had enough.  Not only were his remarks poorly received, but he was cancelled, told in no uncertain terms that he and his wife would not be welcome at any reciprocal meal. 

Breeding and some residual sense of propriety helped him keep his tongue with the Potters.  It was a contribution to neighborliness and a deposit in the marital account.  Having lunch with the Potters was dues paid to his wife, all of which would be returned in kind at a later date.  Marriage is, after all, a contractual affair. 

Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist considered the master of Bach's Goldberg Variations abruptly gave up concert performance and began recording in his own studio.  There he could perfect his interpretation, editing, re-recording, editing again until he was satisfied that he had produced the perfect work.  Audiences were just intrusions, annoyances, trifling irritants, so better to leave them aside and do the work for which he was suited if not destined. 

Faulkner’s genius was solitary.  His characters may have been  figures borne out of the South, Mississippi, slavery and Jim Crow, the mulatto and octoroon culture of New Orleans, the Delta, and American idealism but were nevertheless his own.   The opening long paragraph of Absalom is Faulkner’s confection of all the above.  Atmosphere, drama, suspense, resentment, fear – all put together in one solitary work of  insight.  The voice of Rosa Coldfield is Faulkner’s and Faulkner’s alone

Most genius is solitary. Faulkner worked alone.  Absalom, Absalom perhaps the greatest A emerican work of fiction ever, resulted from his sensitive and personal perceptions of the South as a place, race as a signifier, and family as the crucible of maturity. 

This is not to say that Fielding Harper was a genius - he was not - but that he had the instincts of genius, that unique appreciation of solitariness - the only environment where creativity can gestate.  'My parts do not make a whole', the Phillip Seymour Hoffman character says in the Sidney Lumet film, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. This assembly can only be accomplished alone. 

'We all die alone' was Tolstoy's message in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan, who has carefully constructed his life to leave him alone realizes that ironically in his moment of death, he is facing it entirely, absolutely alone.  No family, no friends, no colleagues, no community makes any difference when one is facing eternity.  There is no more personal moment, no moment which states the obvious - we live and die alone.   Ivan should have been preparing for this moment, not whiling away his time in fabrication. 

The world of perfunctory, obligatory social engagements is maya, illusion - distracting from the essential, only reason for being - spiritual evolution. 

Nietzsche had the same idea but expressed it differently - the expression of pure, individual will is the only validation of human life. 

So, Fielding Harper soldiered through another Tuesday lunch with the Potters, held his tongue, finished his fettuccini alfredo, thanked everyone, and walked home alone. 

Life In A Windowless Room - Jack London, Darwin, Machiavelli And The Despair Of A Political Idealist

Bob Muzelle was getting on in years, time to retire, relax in a chaise lounge, and go to bed early; but after decades of fighting the good fight, confronting racism, sexism, and rampant capitalist greed, beaten and bruised by Bull Connor's thugs and Donald Trump's ICE, he couldn't just fade away.. Social justice was not just an occupation, but an ethos, a raison d'etre.  Without it he would be nothing, a shell of a man, a stick figure, a silhouette. 

'Now, Bob', said his wife Corinne, taking him in her arms and comforting him like a baby, just as she had done throughout the years. 'Isn't it time?'. 

Corinne although she had stood by him in all the years of cold water flats, secondhand dresses, Hamburger Helper, and junkyard cars, wanted at least a few untroubled, undisturbed moments of her own. Life with Bob had not been easy, and to be quite honest, she had had quite enough of this morose, unhappy man. 

She, unlike her husband, had not aged in place; and from the leftist firebrand of the Sixties, lover of Mark Rudd and confidant of Stokely Carmichael, huddled happily with her comrades in a basement in the East Village till now she had not remained the same.

Over the years she had become more an intellectual woman, satisfied with life as it is not what it should be.  In her thirties bemusement at the continued political hysteria of her husband and his friends set in - puzzlement at his dogged pursuit of salvation, his insistence on redemption, and his growing belief in Armageddon.

 

Later, still faithful to her husband, but more of a caretaker than a lover, she became restive, irritable, and angry.  She was sick and tired of traipsing through copies of The Daily Worker and back editions of The Nation and Ramparts strewn on the floor; listening to alternate radio every morning, shortwave broadcasts from Havana in the evening, and drop-ins and coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen every other day.  

It was the Village again, the same conspiratorial huddles, power salutes, hugs, and promises - the lot of them straggling in after a day of protest on the Mall, ragged, beaten but deliriously happy. 

Bob was stuck in the Sixties, old ideas rattled around in his head and were written down in new manifestos.  The world outside was an even more horrible, desperate place than it had been at the beginning of his political journey. He began shouting out the front door, picking up yesterday's placards and waving them at passing cars.  He was, as Corinne had feared for some time, demented. 

'Give a liberal enough time and he will become a conservative' was the old saw that proved true again and again. Most Sixties radicals were living in the suburbs with desultory interest in politics at best.  Live and let live - not quite que sera sera but at least a calm sanguineness - was the meme around town, and the likes of Bob were increasingly regarded as old wood, better stacked and covered, dried and cured to go finally up the chimney in smoke. 

Some of his old partisan friends actually changed their tune. How could one not after seeing history repeat itself in the same predictable ways. The Twentieth Century - the hundred years of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Ze Tung and Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide and tribal slaughters from Borneo to Chad - was as bloody and brutal if not more so than any period of history; and the Twenty-First was starting off to the beat of the same drums. 

 

Corinne Muzelle was one of these turncoats, although out of respect for her husband she kept her reformation under wraps.  On the sly she attended libertarian sessions at the Cato Institute, moved on to more conservative forums, and finally to political certainty.   

There is something compelling about the story of Buck, the hero of Jack London’s story The Call of the Wild, the epitome of animal determinism.  After years of being yoked to his human masters, tied and tethered in a society alien to his own, he finally escapes, and his male aggressiveness and dominance for so long stymied and subverted, emerge.  

He hears the call of the wild – an irresistible appeal to the basic, primitive, primordial nature of every animal being.  There is a completeness and perfection in the male character of Buck – he has no feminine side – and his will is male, one unmistakably virile, potent, and forceful. 

London, writing in a pre-feminist, post-Victorian era, accepted male dominance as a given – a hardwired, deeply-rooted, ineluctable force of human nature and society, so the literary allusion was not surprising.  After all, he wrote not many years after Ibsen and Strindberg had written their proto-feminist plays in which men are subjugated to female power.  

Hedda Gabler rules her weak, impotent husband and controls the destiny of her lover.  She admits, a woman created in Fredrick Nietzsche’s image, that the only validation of life in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will.  

Both London and the Scandinavians had one thing in mind - the absolute, indomitable will of human nature.  Whether cast in terms of male and female dominance or in more general Darwinian terms, the message is clear.  Unless and until the human genome is rewired and reconfigured, the territorial aggressiveness of human nature will persist.  

Darwin's The Origin of Species and its central theme of the survival of the fittest, has never been challenged.  In every species and subspecies of the animal kingdom the same survivalist imperative exists. 

Cooperative units - those social idylls singled out by internationalists - exist only to increase strength, a solidarity not of a higher philosophical order but out of military advantage.  Cooperation is a tool of survival.  Allies join together in cooperation against a mutual enemy; compromise offers a temporary hiatus to war.  Clausewitz was right - war is but another means of diplomacy. 

Machiavelli was the first to understand the hardwired nature of human activity and apply it to politics.  He saw nothing unusual or abhorrent about war.  War was only wrong when it was waged improperly, under unfavorable circumstances or at the wrong time and place. 

Although Corinne was not an intellectual and had read neither Clausewitz or Machiavelli, she understood London and Ibsen.  She identified with Hedda Gabler, an amoral, willful actor in a Nietzschean drama.  Hilde Wangel and Rebekka West, Ibsen's women whose only ambition was dominance, control and the expression of pure will were no different; nor were Shakespeare's Richard III, Tamora, Lady Macbeth, or Dionyza.  

It was increasingly hard for Corrine to disassociate her husband, Bob, from the ethos of a progressivism which denied human nature, the indisputable persistent, characteristic human violence of the past and the present, competition, and countervailing force and remained insistent on progress through faith, love, and charity. 

Bob was an ineffectual, increasingly unhinged Don Quixote tilting at windmills - a man out of touch, addled by his own inverted intensity, demented by inchoate passion. 

Where was the man she married?  Or had she even married a man?

Jack London was right.  The Wild will always be wild and the untamed and unintimidated will always dominate.  The only peace and accommodation occurs when to equally matched and armed adversaries stand off - tooth-and-claw in the tundra or the Cold War. 

Political evolution takes its toll.  Corinne could no longer look at Bob with the same patient, understanding eyes.  He was a fool, a dupe, a man reveling in his ignorance and own brand of received wisdom.  He lived in rooms without windows. 

The jig was up, and sunken costs meant less and less.  It was time for Corinne to move on.  The few years she might have left would not be spent moping, crying over spilled milk, seeing bogeymen in every dark corner, howling at the moon like a rabid wolf.