125. Consistency in Joseph Heller

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"Joseph Heller consistent? The author of Catch-22? Nah, it was his inconsistency that made him famous. You never knew what Yossarian (his fictional double) was going to do. One day he was blacking out all the adjectives in enlisted men's letters, the next day all the articles. One day he was all for defeating Hitler and the next day he was deserting the Army and going to Sweden. That, random impulsiveness, is what made him so attractive — and got Catch-22 voted the seventh best novel of the 20th Century."

I know, but the consistency I am referring to is different from all that. It's a consistency of character. In Catch-22 Yossarian is a beast to women. They're either prim nurses you "grab by the snatch" or "wonderful tomatoes" you "should have been screwing." That's the way it is with his whole animal-house gang. Amusement when the nurse tries to get away and irritation when a fellow officer quits on a tomato without giving her to a buddy is all they feel. In a recent biography (Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of Joseph Heller, by Tracy Daugherty) we see that Heller was a beast to women all his life.

"You're taking the man to be the same as the fictional character."

Yes, just as his daughter Erica does in her recent book, Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and Life was a Cath-22. To her he's Yossarian and he's got all Yossarian's callousness. She thinks she sees herself belittled in one of his books and asks, "How could you write about me that way?" "What makes you think you're interesting enough to write about?" he replies.

"But that's just his daughter's report, of one incident. It could be biased and the incident could be exceptional."

Could be, but then there's what he said to his wife when she asked him why, after 39 years of marriage, he was leaving her. "Because you are old and fat and ugly," he said. That's reported from outside, on good authority. What we see in the life is what we see in the novel: consistent, juvenile, '50s-male beastliness.

"OK, this novelist was a bastard. But that shouldn't disturb me. I'm an English professor, I know that a lot of novelists were bastards, and I know that that shouldn't make any difference in the value we put on their novels."

But this bastardly set of values is right in the novel, front and center, up for admiration.

"True, but they're expressed by a character who feels pity for all the prostitutes suffering at the hands of American soldiers in Rome, and for all the abused wives and children back home, and all the miserable people everywhere. Doesn't that make him a lesser bastard?"

No. It only makes him a contradictory bastard. If his humane feelings were genuine they'd be consistent. His expressions of pity, all in abstractions, all at a distance, are clearly phony. They make a claim for humanitarian credit that only sentimental people will honor — you know, people who don't care whether or not feelings are consistent, the ones who so love the feeling of the moment that they quit thinking.

"So all those professors who put Catch-22 on their reading lists, and made it the subject of symposia, and backed those who made it number seven, have quit thinking?"

They've quit thinking the way academics are supposed to think. Those who take Socrates as their model must always respect logical connections — part with whole, premise with conclusion, principle with practice, cause with effect, ends with means.

"Always?"

Always. Even as they teach literature. Poets claim to be "large," they "contain multitudes," and therefore, according to Walt Whitman, they can very well contradict themselves. Professors wanting to escape from logic can claim the poet's license, but they won't get it from Socrates. They know that. That's why they so often go to other philosophers.

"Who issues such licenses?"

Not scientific philosophers. Not British philosophers. Not continental philosophers, even — except maybe down at the tail end. Absurdists issue licenses. They're the ones English professors took Catch-22 to right away. If reason is "useless" and logic has been "dethroned" then you can go back to class with your license. If anybody objects let them go to Sartre and Camus, who will show them the larger (existential) permit.

"You mean English professors were still driving on those licenses in 2000, when they backed Catch 22 for seventh place?"

Who knows? You can see the beliefs implied by an intellectual's word-choice but that's a long way from guessing what's behind them. Thomas Powers writes (in the 8 March London Review) that Norman Podhoretz changed his mind about Catch-22 because it "had done 'moral, intellectual, and spiritual harm' by undermining support for American military endeavors Podhoretz happened to back." Happened to back. There's the belief: values are random, some backed by this person, others backed by that. No sign that values can be rationally ordered, no recognition that one of the values is the value of defeating Nazi Germany, nor that it might be a shared value, nor that there might be rational justification for it. It's just one of the values that Podhoretz, at the moment, happens to hold.

That's a pretty close fit with Yossarian's beliefs. And I think it's a close fit with the postmodern philosophies appealed to to defend those beliefs. I can see and know that. Whether Powers has those philosophies in mind, though, whether he would acknowledge and defend them in a classroom, that's something I don't know about him (or, indeed, about any of the public intellectuals writing in the LRB), and can only guess at.

124. We Have Listened to George Orwell!

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When I compare the writing in my European history textbook of 1946, the year Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" came out, with the writing in a current European history textbook I think we have listened well.

Ferdinand Schevill (A History of Europe, first edition, 1925) wrote, in a marginal gloss, "The reign of Alfonso XIII opens (1902) not inauspiciously." Orwell hated the "not un-" construction, so common in professors' writing. When Professor Harold Laski wrote the following sentence he climbed all over it:

I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien.

Five negatives in 53 words. Orwell counts them for you. In the sections on Spain in Palmer, Colton, and Kramer (The Making of the Modern World, 10th edition, 2007) I count not a single "not un-" construction.

The negative-to-word ratio is now way down in all scholars' writing. In everybody's writing. The classic "not unlike" double negative, the star of Professor Laski's sentence, was used in the New York Times 621 times in the decade before "Politics and the English Language" appeared. In the next decade it was down to 563 and the ratio has been falling ever since. We're all scared to death of George Orwell.

Orwell saw how scared scholars were of each other.  You think they weren't scared?  Listen to Schevill, on one page: "Our judgment can hardly be other than..." "It cannot be maintained, however, that..." "No one familiar with...will fail to give weight to " "The reflection will not be denied that..." "We are driven to fall back on..." "A satisfactory analysis would have to take account of..." "Nor should...be overlooked." That's scared. Academic scared. Hedge, hedge, hedge.

"Ah, but Schevill had a lot to be afraid of on that page. He was writing about Spain in the twentieth century. His specialties were Italy in the Renaissance, and the Balkans. He's flying over territory where he could get shot down any minute. Remember, in 1946 he's still writing to a lot of people trained, as he was (Freiburg, 1892), in the German tradition. Mortal Teutonic combat."

How I know it. Any Ph. D. student who faced a committee in those days knows it. Prussian accents. You're a wuss among he-men. "Don't hit me, don't hit me." Write articles or books after that and you're damn well going to hedge. You never get over that fright.

"Of course not. It goes with the territory. What business are we all in? The search for truth. Truth is by trial. The tougher the adversaries the better the trial and the closer you get. The aim of universities is to bring tough adversaries together. You don't expect newcomers to walk onto their court without fear do you? No, they're going to be scared, and that's a good thing. It will make them more careful. Care, which shows itself in cautious language, is what the enterprise is all about."

Then Laski's language just showed great care? I shouldn't gag?

"You can gag, but only because he's carrying a good thing too far. His 'not un-' construction comes under an ancient and honorable category of understatement called 'litotes.' It's characteristically used to keep from going overboard, either in praise or in blame. 'He is not unintelligent.' 'He is not overly bright.' If you think you're going to be too harsh, too judgmental, too bald, too impressionable, or not sly enough, if you need a few mannerisms of care to hide your essential lack of it, you go litotic. Go too far and you go wuss."

As Laski did.

"And wouldn't you add Schevill? Isn't he a wuss?"

I wouldn't say so without noticing where he wound up. He ended that section calling Spain "a backward country." That's pretty direct, and it took some guts, even in his time — when you could still call an age "dark." And I, an undergraduate, knew what he was driving at, because I wrote in the margin opposite his description of Spain's leadership, "Mañana types." Lazy. How did Schevill build me up to that? In what looks to me like a wussy way: "As nothing was done [to utilize Spain's resources] we are driven to fall back on the ancient charge of a certain sloth in the national character." He doesn't want to call anybody lazy, or backward, he doesn't want to say they lived in darkness, he's a good, liberal, non-judgmental historian, but sometimes by God logic just forces you, drives you, however desperate you are to find an excuse for your fellow human beings, to make a judgment on them — one that, alas, coincides with established stereotypes. Now tell me: Isn't "wussy" is the right word for that?

"I don't think so, but I don't think 'gutty' is right either. There's too much guts for 'wussy' and not enough for 'gutty.'"

Which side does it lean toward?

"Wussy."

But you can't say it. You're perfectly set up to be clobbered by Orwell. In a minute you're going to say it's "not unwussy." Have you been listening?

123. Still Wondering What "Existential" Means

From the Business Section, New York Times, 13 March, 2012: With the presidential election in sight and a deadline looming at the end of the year to cut trillions from the deficit, the partisan debate over the budget has become an existential battle over the purpose of government.

122. Ballet, Yoga, Sexual Intercourse.

The difference between ballet and yoga, I now know, is that although in ballet the interaction between men and women dancers is an allegory of sexual intercourse that never happens, in yoga it happens. It’s supposed to happen. According to William J. Broad, my instructor in a recent NYT story, “Hatha yoga [the current guru kind] used poses, deep breathing and stimulating acts” to get copulation going. The entire discipline, all those painful, health-giving postures, all that wholesome effort next to the weight machines, the whole thing, it all “began as a sex cult.”

Knowing that, I will no longer be surprised to learn from a reporter that another guru, preaching “a gospel of gentle poses mixed with openness aimed at fostering love and happiness,” has been diddling his devotees. It’s a history I should have known, really. The serial philandering of celebrity guru Swami Muktananda did make the papers in1981, and there have been a number of scandals, beneath the Times’ attention, reported since, including one involving the swami who gave the invocation at Woodstock. By 1995 there was so much sex between teachers and students that the California Yoga Teachers Association had to impose a written code. “We wrote it,” Judith Lasater, the group’s president, told a reporter, “because there were so many violations going on.”

Well, that’s all vulgar and in its unconstraint it teaches me the value of ballet, where I see such wonderful constraint, such tense holding back. All is formal, stylized. As I watch I hear instructions to the dancers: “Keep the lips from touching, hold the pelvis short, simply brush the finger tips.” Keep it allegorical, that is. Each slip into the literal is vulgar.

And, I would say, each slip lowers the erotic temperature. The heat is highest before the lips touch. That would be for dancers, artists, maybe viewers. Can’t say the same for real people, living life. Except maybe for Anton Chekhov, who apparently couldn’t go beyond foreplay with women he loved. The touch of genitals was a comedown. There’s your ideal viewer of ballet, excited by foreforeplay. The heat of refinement.