Book Review

Soul on Ice

by Eldridge Cleaver

     While doing prison time on a marijuana possession charge in the mid 1960s, Eldridge Cleaver wrote a series of letters and essays. By 1970, he had become a recognizable figure in the urban guerilla movement known as the Black Panthers and so these writings were collected and published as Soul on Ice. Readers with knowledge of Cleaver’s biography may be surprised at how nuanced some of his writing is. Then again, they might not be. A lot of readers in our age have little sense of nuance and often allow their knowledge of the author’s moral shortcomings to overshadow the meaning of these essays as they stand. Even worse, some readers use Cleaver’s essays as a stepping stone to express their own self-righteous moral outrage, using it as a vehicle for grandstanding and virtue signalling without taking into consideration anything that Soul on Ice actually says.

This collection is organized into four sections. The first deals primarily with Eldridge Cleaver’s life in Folsom Prison with, regrettably, no references to Johnny Cash. It opens with an introductory essay, “On Becoming”, in which he effectively sets the tone for all the writing that comes after. He states the purpose of his writing is for self-reflection, using his prison sentence to come to terms with the mistakes he made in his youth, all the while offering commentary on the white power structure that contributed to his disgruntlement with American society. You might say that this essay is friendly in tone, maybe even humble. Cleaver draws you in by sounding like a gentle person who got misguided in life.

Then this passage comes almost out of nowhere: “I became a rapist...Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was trampling upon the white man’s law, his system of values, and that I was defiling his women...I was getting revenge.” These thoughts, spread over two paragraphs hit the reader like a stink bomb of nuclear proportions. In fact, it hits so hard that it permanently clouds the judgment of some readers, so much so that they can not read, with any degree of accuracy, most of what comes later in this book. In fact, their judgment is sometimes so clouded, sometimes deliberately for the sake of puffing up their own sense of superiority, that they completely ignore the next paragraph which marks both a transition point in the essay and a transition point in Cleaver’s thinking. Says the author, “I took a long look at myself...and admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray – astray not so much from the white man’s law as from being human, civilized...” The author, at this point, takes responsibility for his own wrongdoings and vows to turn himself around. He admits that he owes this not only to himself but to society as a whole. Readers who are clear-headed and humanistic enough to grasp the meaning of this confession will still often admit that these hard-hitting paragraphs hang like a dark cloud over everything that Cleaver says subsequently throughout the course of Soul on Ice.

In one sense, Cleaver’s confession is a stroke of literary genius. Rarely do passages in essays like this arouse so much curiosity and strong emotion, enough so that the reader feels a strong compulsion to continue reading. Such a bold admission to possibly the worst crime a man can commit demands that it be followed up with bold analysis and even bolder insights. From this point on, the bar for success is set high; it is propped up according to whether Cleaver can deliver the goods by the last line of the last essay.

Other essays in this first section deal more specifically with life in prison. One piece, “The Christ and His Teaching”, stands out above the others, not only in this section, but also in the whole book. Cleaver writes about Lovdjieff, a prison teacher who is wildly popular with the inmates and a cause for suspicion with the prison authorities. The fact that Lovdjieff is white seems surprising at first, considering the author’s antagonism to the white power structure, but it soon becomes incidental and a matter of less importance as the essay progresses. Cleaver feels a deep bond with Lovdjieff, not just because of the teacher’s passion for knowledge but more specifically for his ability to get the author to see his life situation from multiple perspectives. At the crux of the matter is the life of Thomas Merton, a theologian who renounced material wealth to live in a monastery, dedicating his life to God. To Cleaver, this monastic life and vow of poverty looks insane; to him it looks like life in a ghetto only the imprisonment and poverty in a monk’s cell are voluntary. Cleaver thinks Lovdjieff’s lessons make Merton look like a fool but what is more important is that this forces Cleaver to look at his own prison life in a different light, it forces him to reframe his situation and consider the possibilty that he is wrong in his thinking.

“The Christ and His Teachings” is more than an almost stylistically perfect essay in the way it introduces themes, points, counterpoints, and gives the reader just enough information to lead them to the main point without overstating the case. It stands out among Cleaver’s other writings because it so directly points to the heart of his thinking. It demonstrates that not only can a person change by stepping outside themselves and re-thinking the way they are, but entire societies can do the same. The purpose of the teacher, and of effective leadership, is to catalyze this process, set it in motion, liquidate fossilized ideas, and the more sincere the teacher is, the more effective their results will be with their pupils.

The carry-over of this theme of transformation being instigated by a teacher can be easily seen in the essays on Malcolm X. As is well-known, after Malcolm X went on the hajj in Mecca, he left the Nation of Islam, converted to Orthodox Sunni Islam, and renounced racism while publicly acknowledging that he would work with white people to end injustice against non-whites. While this was a controversial move that fractured the loyalties of African-American activists at the time, Cleaver writes in full support of Malcolm X’s decision, holding him up as an example for the direction society can go in the process of integration.

The chapters dealing with life in prison are the best in this collection. They are personal and self-probing, creating a clear picture of where Eldridge Cleaver stands at this point in his life. He does an effective job of rallying the reader to his side. The caveat is that, being a prisoner and one that acknowledges his guilt in the crimes he committed, he appears to be deliberately portraying himself in the most sympathetic light he possibly can. Cleaver does come across as sincere, and he probably is, but he might leave you wondering how deeply into his own moral convictions he actually went.

Aside from the section of letters Cleaver exchanges with his attorney, the rest of Soul on Ice attempts to be less personal, addressing broader and more theoretical social issues concerning white supremacy and the oppressive power structure of government and big business. Many of his ideas are naive, being broad abstractions and over-generalizations. With his shift from focus on the individual to the structures of institutionalized racism, a lot gets lost. The idea of individuals as participants in a society much larger than themselves does not get effectively connected to the broader abstract theories he proposes. There is no data to support his theories, but to be fair, Cleaver was not a social scientist and he does effectively communicate a world view, even if it is a rudimentary one at best. Some of his ideas are certainly plausible, but his arguments lack supporting evidence. On the other hand, some of his ideas, particularly in regards to gender, are questionable.

“The Primevel Mitosis” is by far the oddest and most off-putting essay in this collection. It is formulaically logical while its contents are mostly absurd. Drawing on tightly-wound Hegelian logic, the politics of the Sexual Revolution, and the Nation of Islam’s myth of Yacub, the scientist who unleashed evil on the world by creating white people in a laboratory, Cleaver argues that white men are all brain and no body, black men are all body and no brain, white women are some vaguely defined essence of pure femininity, and black women, along with homosexuals, are a hopelessly confused mish-mash of gender roles. The bizarre reasoning behind this does not need to be analyzed in depth to be dismissed. But what is most troublesome is not how misogynistic, homophobic, and shockingly racist against African-American women it is, but rather how it justifies raping white women as a tactic of political activism. At the start of this book, Cleaver denounces that idea and action as a mistake of his youth but he reasserts it here by saying that it is necessary for black men to have sex with white women for racial progress to be made. While he is advocating consensual interracial sex over rape, and there is certainly nothing wrong with interracial sex unless you are a bigot, the idea that white women can be utilized as tools for the sake of harming and disempowering white men should be regarded with suspicion. Towards the end of this book we can see how Cleaver has shifted from rape to consensual sex without actually altering the flawed philosophy that underlied his motivations to commit that crime in the first place. On top of that, while interracial relationships certainly can go a long way in eliminating racism, interracial sex is not a panacea that will magically eliminate inequality on a large scale. Cleaver is advocating a fetish, not a plan of political action.

On a brighter note, in “Convalescence”, as well as comments in other essays, Cleaver addresses the issue of white people “appropriating” African-American culture. He mentions the likes of Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles; all of these are currently whipping-boys for the anti-appropriation crowd these days, but like Lovdjieff, Eldridge Cleaver would insist that these people look at their beliefs from another angle. Cleaver DEFENDS these white people for borrowing Black people’s culture. In his era, white people were not hearing pleas from African-Americans for racial equality but they were hearing their music. It would also make sense that white people would accept other white people who encourage integration simply because they are of the same peer group. What those writers and musicians did, according to Cleaver, was making it possible for white people to see that Black people have a legitimate point of view; they have something that can benefit all races and bring people together. Jack Kerouac and The Beatles, without being explicitly political, sent the message that it is acceptable for Black people to be themselves and that it is acceptable for white people to appreciate that. While Cleaver acknowledges that their borrowing of cultural elements and styles from Black people is superficial and even corny, he makes jokes about how silly white people look when they dance to Black music, he also demonstrates how they were opening a doorway, allowing white people of all races to interact in the same physical space. These cultural icons are like Lovdjieff and Malcolm X, catalyzing change and making people reorient the frameworks they use to perceive the world.

Getting back to his opening essay and the statement about rape that hangs like a dark cloud over everything else in Soul on Ice, we have to consider whether Eldridge Cleaver lived up to the task he set himself with that statement. Aside from it being a painful confession for him to make, did he succeed in effectively using his writing to re-evaluate his life, taking responsibility, and making changes for the better? In the end, I can meet him half way and say he got off to a good start but leaves a lot to be desired. His self-reflection comes across most effectively in the chapters on prison life and the essays drop in qualoty as they go on. He shifts away to writing about larger social issues that effect him personally but take the spotlight farther away from himself than it should be. While he expresses the need to end segregation and usher in a new era of social equality, even proposing a means of doing so through interaction in social spaces surrounding popular culture, he never sufficiently addresses the question of why he, the individual man named Eldridge Cleaver, saw rape as a legitimate form of expression. He never answers the question he poses to himself. He may have done this in his private life, thinking it was too personal to publish, and he does start off with an apology and a promise to be a better person, but on a literary level, he owes it to the reader to address the issue in some detail since he brought it up in the first place. By the end, it looks like his analysis of white injustice is a way of avoiding responsibility for the crime of rape that he committed. This obviously not the impression he wanted to make.

While not all of the essays in Soul on Ice are great, there are a few high points that make it a vital work of literature. His own life is another matter. After getting kicked out of the Black Panthers for wanting to escalate violent revolution while they were more concerned with free breakfast programs for children and helping African-American people get jobs, he went from one cultish group to another, becoming a Moonie, a Mormon, and finally a republican. He even tried to start his own sect called The Church of the Sacred Sperm; sounding too much like something out of a John Waters movie, it predictably went nowhere. He also invented the penis pants. If you don’t know about them, look them up online. This is the life of a man who felt lost in the world, struggling and failing to find a place to belong. His homophobia, his emphasis on hypermasculinity, and his obsession with his own penis are easy to laugh at, but there is something horribly sad about all that. He was overcompensating for feelings of weakness and vulnerability. While he blames white society for his rage and eccentricities, and in some senses this is justifiable, he had deeper personal issues that never got addressed. I’ve met a lot of troubled people in my life and I see certain patterns; I find myself wondering if Cleaver was sexually abused as a child. When Allen Ginsberg said, “I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness”, he could very well have been talking about Eldridge Cleaver. He was a tragic figure and the biggest tragedy is that he never got the help he needed.

Soul on Ice has definite strengths and weaknesses. The strengths outweigh the weaknesses, especially in Eldridge Cleaver’s ability to express his anger, his hopes, and his confusion with a precise and rigid clarity. You can see his demons and angels fighting a brutal war even when he is not directly writing about himself. Like the heroes and idols he portrays in this book, he gets you to re-evaluate the way you think. Even if you don’t appreciate what he has to say, this book is a valuable historical document for students of African-American history, the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, and the countercultures of the 1960s.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. Ramparts Books/Dell Publishing Co. Inc., New York: 1970.

 

Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?

 Since the internet has made the entire world a library with no exits or supervisors, many readers treat every published piece of writing as a conversation opener, demanding a bespoke response.

Read the full essay on Dame

Book Review

Caligula: A Biography

by Aloys Winterling

     Caligula was an insane Roman emperor. Well, hold on a minute, maybe not. Aloys Winterling wrote Caligula: A Biography to examine that dispute even though it is an obscure one at best. For the most part, he proves his point that Caligula was perfectly sane, but the question I have as a reader is why did he see a need to make this argument in the first place?

At the start, Winterling outlines his thesis and the criteria he uses as a metric for evaluation. Caligula’s eccentricities were misunderstood or taken out of context. Nobody could have obeyed his orders if he were insane. No Roman physicians ever diagnosed him as being insane. The accusation of mental illness was meant as an insult as opposed to a clinical psychiatric condition. Some of these criteria are problematic, to say the least, almost so inept that you might wonder how a professor of history could not see his own blunders in his evaluation. But I will come back to that later.

At the time, Caligula was the youngest emperor to have ever led the Roman Empire. He was an upstart, full of youthful vigor, and ready to change the Roman government in ways that were not to the liking of the senate or the aristocracy. After being ruled by the three Caesars, the senate was growing increasingly more weak while the emperors were growing increasingly more powerful. Caligula wished to continue this trend and eventually return Rome to a monarchy. A showdown was inevitable, and a conspiracy to murder the young and naive leader was hatched. Caligula was alerted to the danger and had the rebellion put down immediately. After that he went on a campaign to humiliate and further weaken the senate. Wacky hijinks ensued. The emperor pulled a handful of pranks and practical jokes to make it clear to the senate and the plebs what he really thought of the aristocracy. The oddest incident was when he appointed his favorite race horse consul and proceeded to treat him as such. This, and other stunts, infuriated the senate and caused them to complain of his insanity. Otherwise, Caligula was an unremarkable emperor; the rest of his life involved political squabbles, excessive spending, and watching chariot races and gladiatorial combat for fun. He was assassinated shortly after being crowned emperor without having lived long enough to accomplish much.

That’s all folks.

Winterling states his argument and defends it, but that doesn’t say a whole lot. To say it was impossible for Caligula to be insane because others were willing to follow him is a weak idea. Hitler and Stalin were obviously mentally ill, yet they were able to lead their nations down the path to disaster. Donald Trump was president of America for four years while psychiatrists warned us that he has clear signs of a narcissistic personality disorder. There has been no shortage of religious leaders who were certainly crazy yet they still had their followings. Joan of Arc was schizophrenic. Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer’s disease. Case closed.

No physician in the Roman Empire ever diagnosed Caligula as insane is not such a sound criteria either. Firstly, just because such a diagnosis is not in the surviving written record, that does not mean nobody ever though it was true. Secondly, the Roman Empire was a pre-scientific society so the chances of doctors in that time having accurate knowledge of psychiatric disorders is pretty slim. Besides, Winterling himself does not provide us with any reason to think that he knows anything about psychiatry either.

Winterling’s argument that Caligula’s insanity was an insult rather than a diagnosis is a sound idea, but so what? It makes perfect sense in its context and, assuming that the most important details of Caligula’s life are known about, it isn’t a profound conclusion to arrive at. In fact, if Winterling had written this as a straight biography without outlining his thesis or even analyzing the evidence, I would see nothing in it to make me think Caligula was insane anyways. On the other hand, I take it for granted that people in positions of political power tend to be psychologically disordered to begin with. A sane person wouldn’t want to be an emperor, a dictator, or a president in the first place. I don’t think a sane person would want to be a psychologist either.

Caligula: A Biography is a so-so book. It is written at about a junior high school level of complexity so if you are used to reading more complicated books it is a bit plain. But Aloys Winterling accomplishes what he sets out to do, even if he is going for a low-hanging fruit. Caligula was moderately interesting, but he didn’t live long enough to be a fascinating historical figure. I was actually hoping for more sex and violence in this biography but admittedly, historical accuracy is more important. If you came to this book expecting something like the hilariously dreadful exploitation film directed by Tinto Brass in the 1970s, you probably will be disappointed. But then again, that might be a good thing anyways.

Winterling, Aloys. Caligula: A Biography, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Glenn W. Most, and Paul Psoinos. University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: 2011. 

 

Book Review

Freedom's Orator:

Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s

by Robert Cohen

     In the fall of 1964, onSproul Plaza of the UC Berkeley campus in Oakland, a young physics student climbed on top of a parked police car and made a speech. The car was surrounded by several thousand students, all sitting on the pavement, making a coordinated effort to prevent the police from approaching it and driving it away. This was the beginning of the Free Speech Movement and the student on the police car was Mario Savio, its main spokesperson. The Free Speech Movement began when the administrators banned political speech at Berkeley, primarily to prevent student activists from educating others about the Civil Rights Movement which was approaching its peak at the time. Robert Cohen’s biography Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s does a quality job of bringing the days of the FSM to life for readers in our current times.

As any biographer would, Cohen starts off with the family upbringing of the young subject, showing how Mario Savio’s childhood prepared him for his role in later life. His parents were working class immigrants from Sicily who raised Savio in Brooklyn. The youth was an academic high achiever who suffered from a severe stutter that was caused by anxiety and got worse when in the presence of authority figures. Cohen returns to this fact repeatedly throughout the book to illustrate how overcoming this problem propelled Savio to be an advocate of free speech and an effective speech-maker throughout the rest of his life. Other contributing factors in Savio’s development into a political activist were his grandfather’s membership in the fascist party of Mussolini and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse which made him feel a deep solidarity with all the downtrodden people of the world.

Mario Savio went on to be involved with activism as soon as he left high school. He went to Mexico to help indigenous people build modern housing for themselves and spent time in Mississippi working with SNCC to register African-American voters while the KKK were trying to terrorize and kill them. When he returned to Berkeley he participated in non-violent demonstrations in favor of equal representation for Black people in the labor market. When SNCC, CORE, and other leftist political organizations began setting up tables on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza to educate students about Civil Rights, the pro-establishment administration called the police to have them arrested and removed. That led to the spontaneous demonstration where Mario Savio made his groundbreaking speech.

From there, Cohen details what happened with the Free Speech Movement and their two committees that worked on solving the conflict they had with the authorities. The FSM not only had conflicts with Berkeley’s management team, they also had internal conflicts that had to be overcome. Mario Savio was also a man who had his own deep, internal conflicts. The biography examines these issues both sympathetically and critically, never shying away from pointing out where the FSM’s weaknesses were even though he wholeheartedly admires what they did.

Other topics covered are Mario Savio’s relationship to the New Left movement and the hippie counter-culture, neither of which was he enthusiastic about in his support, his battle with mental illness, his career as a college physics professor, and his lifelong commitment to advocacy for minority and low-income students in their struggle to pursue higher education. The final part of the book is a collection of Savio’s speeches and essays. This was the least memorable part of Cohen’s biography, mostly because all the key ideas there were already addressed in the first three sections. The final essay, an effective explanation and defense of affirmative action, hits all the right notes and is well worth your time even if it is a bit dry.

Aside from the clear and precise details, a strength of this biography is how well Cohen explains the methods of the Free Speech Movement which provides a good contrast to the political activism of our current times. Mario Savio saw the educational institutions of America as being run like machines so they believed in shutting down their operation through demonstrations and forcing the authorities into a position where they would have to negotiate in order to get the machine running again. When the Berkeley students seized the police car, they held it for ransom and the price was a place at the negotiating table, not some outlandish over-the-top abstract claim like ending the patriarchy now or stopping capitalism. The FSM risked their safety to put themselves into a position where they could make demands. Their activism was done with the intention of reaching short terms achievements that could lead to more short term achievements which collectively would result in a larger transformation of society at a later time. Political activism today is mostly done by ineffective street demonstrations and picking fights with strangers on the internet, neither of which have proven to be effective. The end result of political correctness was Donald Trump. Occupy Wall Street is a great example of the colossal failure of the 21^st century American left; it was a massive demonstration where nobody made any clear demands and so nothing got accomplished. Today’s activists should learn a few lessons from the Free Speech Movement and the Civil Rights Movement to see how things actually get done. Demonstrations are not magic spells that correct the world’s problems. Arguments on the internet have never, ever, succeeded in convincing anybody to change their mind about anything significant. Without direct action that leads to realistic demands and negotiation, activism amounts to nothing more than vanity, publicity stunts, and whining.

Mario Savio is here portrayed without any embellishments. His style was plain and down-to-Earth. There was nothing flamboyant in his character which again stands in stark contrast to the celebrity boutique activism we have now and the McLeftist-tainment costume shows we get from activist at the street level. Savio acted out of conviction more than egotism. For him, change was more important than fame and that is why he was able to lead the Free Speech Movement to victory armed with nothing but the minds and bodies of the people who supported the cause. Mario Savio comes off as any ordinary man on the street, albeit an ordinary man on the street who made a significant difference in the conduct of our nation.

While the cause of free speech in the 21^st century has become the domain of loony conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other bizarro right wing ideologues, leftists have come full circle and are now demanding censorship for offensive speech. UC Berkeley has become a big part of the reactionary left’s blunders since they have banned Bill Maher, Ann Coutler, and Milo Yiannaoulis from speaking on their campus; the latter two individuals deserve all the humiliation the receive at the hands of the public and then some, but they still should have the right to make asses of themselves on any college campus they choose. Colleges are supposed to be places for the free exploration of ideas, not factories, as Mario Savio would say, for producing pre-fabricated workers for big business and government bureaucracies. Universities are also not meant to be indoctrination centers which is what they become if speech is censored in the name of not offending people. It is a sad irony that UC Berkeley, after having put a commemorative plaque to Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, is now a hotbed of censorship and cancel culture being propagated by the people who have benefited the most from the Free Speech Movement. Without Mario Savio, some of the advances made in the name of minority rights, women’s rights, and LBGTQ rights would not have been possible. Activists of today’s left owe it to themselves to read a book like Freedom’s Orator so they can raise their awareness of how freedom of speech benefits everybody and censorship only benefits the people of privilege they claim to be fighting against.

Cohen, Robert. Freedom's Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s. Oxford University Press, New York et al: 2009. 

 

Joan Didion obituary

Detached observer of American society and political life through her collections of journalism, novels and screenwriting

Read the full article on The Guardian

 

Book Review

Selected Works 

by Cicero

     In ancient Rome, Somnus (otherwise known as Hypnos in Greece) was a personification of sleep. He lived in a cave that contained the river Lethe(forgetfulness). Somnus is only tangentially connected to Cicero via and time and place but he is being mentioned here because he visited me several times while I was reading Cicero’s Selected Works. Without diminishing its historical importance, I will say that this book was a crashing bore that persistently made me drowsy and Somnus successfully lured me into his cave several times throughout the course of this short 200 page essay collection.

Cicero was a Roman statesman, neither patrician nor plebeian and also an outsider because of his obsessive-compulsive insistence on moral purity and honesty at any cost. He came from the Stoic school of philosophers. It could be tempting to say that Cicero’s political life was more exciting than his ideas, he had five men executed in the Catilinian Conspiracy to prevent the senate from being overthrown and he supported the assassination of Julius Caeser, but he is most famous for his oratorical skills and writings in Latin concerning the ethical branch of philosophy.

Since Cicero’s forte was public speaking, this collection opens with a transcribed speech in which he denounces Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily. He denounces Verres for nepotism, bribery, and debauchery while declaring the superiority of running government as a system of laws as opposed to the tyranny of men. As far as speeches go, this is a good one with precise phrasing, effective punctuation, rhythmic cadences, a mixture of abstract and concrete ideas , and a sufficient buildup of thematic tensions to keep the audience engaged. Compare this to the transcribed speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. or Barack Obama and you can see how a good speech works just as well in writing as it does in speaking. Hearing it spoken in the echoing chamber of the Roman senate must have been impressive. But a clear picture of Cicero, with his Apollonian self-righteousness, begins to emerge early on. While I am inclined to agree with Cicero that honesty in government is necessary, if I wanted to have a good time, I would rather seek out the company of Verres.

The essay “The Second Phillippic Against Antony” is another work of character assassination that targets another individual. Again, despite the moral indignation, Cicero makes Antony look like an interesting character in contrast to Ciecro’s high ground which certainly is higher but certainly not exciting. Antony, after all, was the guy who got to fuck Cleopatra. In these polemics, Cicero presents us with such a stark contrast of the rigid orderliness of Apollonian ethics and the disorienting, life affirming celebrations of Dionysus, the polar tensions that have defined the human experience up until the present day.

The second section of Selected Works is a collection of excerpts from letters Cicero wrote to his friends and colleagues, many of which were penned during his time of exile from Rome. He comments on politics and some battles. There isn’t anything of interest here unless you are deeply immersed in the study of Roman history. These read like footnotes and supplements to a more significant work on the history of the empire and as a casual reader, I didn’t get much out of them.

Moving on, there is a dull essay called “on Duties” pertaining to ethics and honesty, mostly in regards to commerce and the marketplace. No doubt, this Stoic philosopher probably had his own personal grievance in this matter since when he returned from exile, he found that his property had been confiscated and sold without his permission, although I am not sure if that happened before or after this essay was written. I actually don’t care enough to bother checking the dates. Cicero uses the criteria of moral righteousness and advantage to evaluate the ethics of non-disclosure in financial transactions. (Yes, I know you are yawning already) Morality means adhering to what is natural and since lying is unnatural it is immoral. Therefore, using deception to gain an advantage in a sale is unnatural and fundamentally against morality. Even though, as an honest type of a person, I am inclined to agree with this concept, it still seems like a flawed argument and a reductio ad absurdum as well. Cicero spends very little time examining nuance in his argument nor does he address the ambiguous concepts of “natural” or “advantageous” in sufficient detail.

The equation of nature with morality is a problematic construct since morality is inherently subjective and humanistically determined, hence not natural. Deceptiveness is also not unnatural since an insect may have evolved to look like a plant in order to camouflage itself from predators. This would be entirely natural and since being deceptive in this way would further ensure the survival of that individual insect and benefit its species if it successfully reproduces then this deception is not immoral from a human standpoint either. So Cicero’s argument collapses almost immediately and without much effort from the reader. Forging German passports and visas to help Jewish people escape concentration camps would just as well be a form of deception that is morally justifiable. I could imagine Richard Dawkins beating the crap out of Cicero but to be fair I do see the rudiments of game theory in this essay since Cicero argues that more people in society benefit when business is conducted honestly and with minimal conflict than otherwise. Cicero just doesn’t take his argument far enough. His concepts of “moral”, “honest”, “deception”, and “advantage” are not sufficiently defined here, unfortunately, to make the argument work.

The final essay, “On Old Age” addresses the topic you would expect it to. The Stoic Cicero comes out in favor of the elderly, essentially arguing that old age is superior to youth. Since physical strength declines as we age, we get more time to spend enhancing the life of the mind. As a philosopher and ethicist, Cicero is far more concerned with philosophical and educational matters than he is with strength which is good for little more than menial labor and warfare. In his view, the thinkers get to rule society while everybody else gets stuck doing their shitwork. These ideas are neither surprising nor lofty but they are refreshing in today’s world where being young and stupid is valued over being old and wise. It is even worse now with the younger generations that rail against racism, sexism, and homophobia while expressing a vile and nasty hatred towards anybody over the age of forty. Ageism is just as much a form of discrimination as those other ills and expressing ageist ideas can very well be considered hate speech in some circumstances. But in the internet matrix world, young people know everything and old people know nothing so that is just how it is nowadays, be it sensible or not.

Overall, Cicero comes off to me as a morally upright prig, the kind of po-faced killjoy who screams at people for farting in his presence. If there is one thing that John Milton proves it is that we need villains in order to make life interesting. It was the upright and uptight American Puritans who banned Christmas celebrations and alcohol during Prohibition. It is the Islamic Wahhabis and Salafis that try to purify the world by draining all the joy and color out of everything. It is the homicidal monk in Umberto Eco’s The Name Of the Rose who kills someone for laughing, claiming that laughter is immoral because Jesus never laughed. Bone-dry morality is just as boring as a pile of cardboard. Even conman Christian preachers have figured out that nothing puts a congregation to sleep faster than a sermon on righteousness. That’s why the grifter evangelicals have injected so much showmanship into their prosperity gospel with razzle-dazzle stories about going to war against Satan. Why do you think that Qanon inspires fanaticism when Methodism and Lutheranism don’t? While most intelligent people who aren’t sociopaths would be inclined to agree with what Cicero had to say about ethics, that doesn’t mean his beliefs were exciting to read. The people he attacks are far more exciting. He certainly was an important historical figure and I have no interest or intention of taking that away from him, but these Selected Works are little more than a cure for insomnia to me.

Cicero. Selected Works, translated by Michael Grant. Penguin Books, New York: 1971, 

 

Book Review

Diane Arbus: A Biography

by Patricia Bosworth

     You could make the case that the transgressive photographer Diane Arbus sufficiently represented the zeitgeist of the times she lived in. Patricia Bosworth’s Diane Arbus: A Biography, although being unauthorized, has become the standard book for documenting her productive but troubled life. Bosworth does not explicitly claim that Arbus was an avatar representing the values of her times but it is easy to see how this could be true and understanding the values of the 1950’s and 1960s will go a long way in helping you understand the significance of her photos.

According to Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus was a precocious child, seemingly almost tailor-made to be an artist. She was an avid reader, felt emotions strongly, and was strangely sensitive to physical sensations, feeling life in every material item she touched. She experienced the world around her at at a much deeper level than everyone around her which, darkly, sometimes led to periods of melancholia and depression. She came from a family of secular Jews with ancestral roots in Ukraine. Her father owned a chain of expensive fur coat stores with their flagship location being on 5^th Avenue in Manhattan. Diane Arbus grew up in a sheltered environment with her family protecting her from the negativity of the Great Depression and World War II in their New York City apartment.

In the 1950s, Diane married Allan Arbus, the first boy she fell in love with during high school. Despite their almost inseparable attachment, she simultaneously had romantic notions for Allan’s close friend Alex Eliot, who she eventually had an affair with. The husband and wife team rose to prominence in the art world as fashion photographers, working freelance for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life. They churned out magazine spreads at a dizzying pace like a highly productive factory while maintaining high standards of quality. Their work was monotonous but stable and dependable; still an unease and creeping feeling of dissatisfaction was underlying their lives. If Diane Arbus could be said to exemplify the cultural attitude of the 1950s it would be in this dullness and restraint of emotions. Everything in her life was fine and that was entirely the problem.

Up to this point, Bosworth’s biography suffers from one major flaw. There is very little said about Diane Arbus herself. The author goes into a lot of detail about the people in Arbus’s life but doesn’t say enough about her. There is a lot of information about her family and friends while Arbus just fades into the background. Her absence weighs heavy on the narrative while Bosworth goes into yet another sidetrack discussion about her brother, her friends, or other members of the professional photography community of that time. The author might have been trying to camouflage Diane Arbus in the people surrounding her to make a point of how inconspicuous she could be, but if that was done intentionally, it was taken too far, so far that it interferes with the flow and meaning of the text.

During the ‘60s, Arbus’s life began to change and this is where this biography becomes more interesting. As a fashion photographer, she got used to seeing different sides of her models. Many of them were poor, suffering from depression, or having problems with drugs and alcohol. Some of them were homeless or victims of domestic violence. But when the Arbuses photographed them, they took on a whole other appearance. These displays they put on for for the camera were superficial and fake. She took interest in who these models were in reality. She decided to use her photographer’s talents to explore this other side of life. Diane Arbus began taking pictures of carnival sideshow freaks, homosexuals, eccentrics, the mentally ill, nudists and all other manner of people who existed at the margins of society. She became fascinated with the seedy street-life of 42^nd Street. She photographically documented the world of outsiders in America. She didn’t just take their pictures, though. In most cases she spent hours talking to them, getting to know them, sometimes visiting them in their homes, sometimes having sex with them. By getting to know them first, she felt like she could break through to the real people they were. When most people are confronted with a camera, they act as if they want to project to the world how they want to be seen but Diane Arbus wanted to show the world how they really were. By photographing these outsiders, Arbus tried to see something of herself in them, to identify with them and to force the viewer to do the same by confronting us with their images. Her style of portraiture was aggressive, rough, sometimes even intimidating.

For Diane Arbus, this photography was a means of transgressing her own boundaries. She was breaking taboos with her art and likewise in her own life the initial feeling of liberation led more and more to extremes. She became continuously more promiscuous, attending orgies, and going as far as having casual sex with complete strangers in public places. As the 1960s progressed, becoming more and more liberated and free spirited, her life became more disorganized, her marriage ended, and her photography become more popular. But as gallery managers and art dealers hailed her as a visionary and genius, she sunk deeper into poverty and mental illness. Just as the hippie generation ended with the Manson Family murders and the deadly chaos at Altamont, Diane Arbus sank into a hopeless state of depression and committed suicide. It was as if she personally embodied, step by step, year by year, the whole process of lifestyle experimentation, social change, and the undoing of repressions that characterized the counter cultral movement of that pivotal decade. Going so far off the rails and into wildly uncharted territory, unfortunately, led to the simultaneous downfall of both Diane Arbus and the hippies’ strive for utopia at exactly the same time.

In terms of the narrative, Bosworth does a much better job of telling the story in the chapters dealing with the 1960s. Maybe that is because that decade was the most productive and most interesting period of Diane Arbus’s life, but also the author does a better job of keeping unnecessarily extraneous information from intruding. There is still some sidetracking, she provides a lot of biographical information about Weegee even though Arbus did not actually know him, but this sidetracking is less prevalent and the narrative moves along more smoothly as a result.

Diane Arbus: A Biography certainly has its flaws. The writing is sometimes choppy and Patricia Bosworth provides quotes from a wide array of people who don’t seem to be particularly important or insightful for the purposes of this book. These shortcomings are not big enough to ruin it. Patricia Bosworth did a sufficient amount of research to make it work in the end and she succeeds in putting Arbus’s life and oeuvre into context in terms of art history, photography, theory, criticism, and the socio-cultural climate. A definite picture of Diane Arbus stands firm at the end. She was a woman who moved faster than everybody else, so fast that her contemporaries could not keep up with where she was going until it was too late. She reflected and influenced the times she lived in and it is only with hindsight that people are able to see what that means.

Bosworth, Patricia. Diane Arbus: A Biography. W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London: 2005. 

 

Book Review

Parting the Waters:

America In the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

     Good quality books on the history of the Civil Rights Movement in America are surprisingly hard to come by, especially considering how pivotal this political movement truly was. Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1953-64 is as good as it gets.

Branch’s first volume in this massive three book series has the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the central figure of the narrative. It all begins with King as a mediocre high school student from a middle-class African-American background who wishes to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the clergy. Extensive details are given about his college education, time spent at divinity school, and the growth of his personal philosophy. While you can see King’s intellectualism start to soar above and beyond that of his peers, these early chapters really do dwell on the subject more than they should have. If you think theological seminaries are not too exciting to read about, this part of the narrative might drag quite a bit.

But the pace revs up and takes off when Martin Luther King begins preaching in Birmingham, Alabama, becomes more acquainted with Gandhi’s practice on nonviolent protest, and embraces racial integration as the purpose of his life. We can see how the bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, picket lines, voluntary jail sentences, and public criticism of the Deep South’s Jim Crow laws propelled him to become the premier leader of this most important socio-political uprising. We also get to see how ugly and evil the southern segregationists really were as they beat, bomb, lynch, and murder any African-American they can find who tries to improve the lives of Black Americans. Taylor Branch does an excellent job of showing just how rotten the people in the South were at that time and just how tyrannical the state governments and police were as they colluded with the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan to commit acts of terrorism against the citizens of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi who merely wanted little more than a fair chance at life. Some passages of this book are infuriating to read but honest American citizens need to know all the details of this shameful part of our past so we can prevent our nation from ever sinking this low again.

Along with the activism of Dr. King, we also learn about other organizations like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, CORE , and the more radical SNCC who later went on to work more closely with the New Left political movements of the later 1960s. These organizations contributed a lot to the Civil Rights Movement by organizing voter registration drives and the Freedom Rides throughout the Deep South after the government banned segregation at the federal level. Branch shows, however, that not all African-American advocacy groups were sympathetic to King and his cause. Surprisingly, the NAACP saw him as a dangerous rival and gave minimal support to his ideas. The African-American Southern Baptist Conference also put up strong resistance to King and his own organization, the SCLC.

Branch’s account of these times are so successful because he provides a street-level picture of how nonviolent demonstrations worked and why it was such a game-changer in the history of American politics. On one hand, the demonstrators were well-dressed African-American groups, sometimes mixed with courageous white supporters, who often made their point by sitting, laying down, praying, and singing church hymns. On the other hand were violent rednecks and police, attacking them with clubs, dogs, and fire hoses, sometimes resorting to using guns and bombs to murder people or blow up their homes and churches. Ultimately, the optics of this all did more violence to the barbaric segregationists than it did to the peaceful demonstrators who looked, more and more, like innocent victims. Rather idiotically, the Southern white people kept claiming that African-Americans were a threat to society and racial integration was inherently dangerous but it was these same white troglodytes who were committing all the acts of terrorism and violent repression. When the media broadcast images of segregationist brutality across the nation, public opinion quickly pivoted to the side of the Civil Rights activists. Branch does a sufficient job of showing the reader what this all looked like. He really puts you in the center of all the action.

At another level of society, President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, took notice of what was happening in the South which was a Democratic stronghold in their day. Both of the Kennedy brothers felt personal sympathy for the Civil Rights cause but politically it was a dilemma. They didn’t want to turn their backs on their Deep South constituencies but they also wanted to maintain law and order. Martin Luther King had direct contact with Robert Kennedy, but the acting AG dithered while trying to encourage Southern politicians to reach solutions on their own. There were times when the Kennedy brothers were preparing to send federal troops into the South to prevent the police from killing Black people. They had to do this several times in order to enforce the desegregation of public schools. Branch’s portrayal of the Kennedys may leave the reader with mixed feelings about them. They checked their personal feelings to uphold the law even though the law disgusted them. This had the effect of trivializing the Civil Rights cause in the eyes of its adherents. It was all a tricky situation for John F. Kennedy because he won the presidential election with support from both the segregationists and the desegregationists. It is easy for us to criticize the decisions a president makes but considering that most of us never have been, and never will be, in that position of power we might not be the best ones to make those kinds of judgments.

Another political layer to this history is that of J. Edgar Hoover the sinister activities of the FBI. Hoover was an outright racist who hated African-American people. He especially had a personal hatred for both Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy so he set the FBI on a task to destroy them and the organizations involved with the Civil Rights Movement. He was convinced that Dr. King’s SCLC was infiltrated by communist agents with direct ties to the KGB. The FBI did extensive wiretapping and espionage operations on King and his associates. When they failed to turn up evidence, Hoover fabricated it, claiming that Dr. King’s lawyer and closest white friend Stanley Levison was being paid by the Soviet Union to destabilize America. Branch shows us how sick-minded J. Edgar Hoover really was. In light of the spying they did, and probably still do, on American citizens, you might question whether America is really all that different from any other totalitarian nation or not. Just remember that the US government was against racial integration until it became a viable issue for strategically winning elections.

Other fascinating topics covered in this book are the Ole Miss Riots that happened when James Meredith tried to register as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, the assassination of the NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Dr. King’s writing of the landmark essay “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in which he castigated the hypocrisy of white segregationist clergymen, and the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

The biggest problem with this book is its size. At over 900 pages, there are a few parts that could have been edited out. While the majority of Dr. King’s work was not direct political action, it was actually organizing, planning, and fundraising, the details of every meeting he ever attended are not necessarily important. The same can be said for White House cabinet meetings. Some of the information also gets redundant, especially Branch’s mentioning of John F. Kennedy’s extramarital affairs. For example, the tryst that Kennedy had with a possible East German spy may be relevant to the discussion about his contentious relationship with J. Edgar Hoover and why he insisted that King throw Stanley Levison under the bus to placate the FBI director, but Branch goes over the details too much so that it just seems like a waste of paper after a couple paragraphs. Then there are other important parts that do not get sufficient detail. Little is said about the Constitutional Amendment and federal legislation passed under the Eisenhower administration and the emergence of the Nation of Islam along with Malcolm X are mentioned only briefly.

Taylor Branch’s Parting Of the Waters, despite its length, is an easy book to get engaged with. The subject matter is important and it can really change the way you look at American society and race relations. Even when the author preachers to those of us who already members of the choir, it is still an eye-opening narrative. The next time somebody asks about the ten books you need to read before you die, this should certainly be one of them. 

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America In the King Years 1954-63. Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster Inc., New York/London/Toronto/Sydney/Tokyo: 1989. 

 

Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries

lecture by Edith Hall of Gresham College

 

Book Review

Plutarch's Lives

     Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Greek and Roman history were saturated with violence, blood, and gore. People who naively believe that past times, particularly in antiquity, were simpler or more meaningful would benefit from reading Plutarch’s Lives before making such a statement regarding values.

The Greek author Plutarch was primarily a philosopher concerned with the branch of ethics. This epic anthology of essays reads more like historical biography, though. Each chapter tells the life story of a Greek or Roman general or politician, with the Persian Artaxerxes being the sole exception. These biographies are paired in an unaltered succession of Greeks and then Romans in that respective order throughout the whole collection. At the end of each pairing, a short comparison of the two regarding their strengths and weaknesses provides an evaluation to explicate which of the two proved to be more virtuous. As a work of ethical philosophy, Lives does not stand on its own very well. This is mostly because the evaluations are short and sketchy while rarely every coming to any strong conclusions while the biographical histories are bulky and overloaded with detail. The ethical comparisons are the weakest parts of the book,

So be it. Lives may not be a profound ethical treatise but as a source of history it proves to be a rich and rewarding read. At the beginning we are treated to writings about the early days of Athens and Sparta alongside the foundations of Rome. This includes the classic story of the Rape Of the Sabine Women. The first third of the book mostly details battles, wars, and minor military skirmishes with the central theme being about the generals who led these melees. This first part of the book is exciting at first but quickly becomes redundant in its descriptiveness; there are only so many battles that armies can fight on foot and horseback, using swords, shield, and arrows before they all start sounding the same. Aside from classical warfare strategies, many of which resemble plays in modern team sports, scattered bits of interesting trivia do emerge. For instance, it becomes easy to see why the eagle was adapted as a symbol of Roman military superiority since their warriors would line up with a left wing and a right wing to swoop down on their enemies, just like a bird of prey. Plutarch also heaps praise on the head of one Greek general who invented the iron helmet because wearing such a heavy headpiece would cause a combatant’s sword to break when striking the head of their opponent. This sounds like a good idea on the surface but the modern reader has to consider the wisdom of wearing a twenty pound piece of metal on their head in the sweltering Mediterranean climate. Being smacked with a sword while wearing an iron helmet could not have felt pleasant either. This was centuries before aspirin and acetaminophen were invented too. Warfare in those days could not have been much fun and from the looks of it, that was the primary occupation for men in those days.

Further into the book, the historical themes begin to vary. As the Greek and Roman Empires expand outwards, the lifestyles and personalities of their leaders get described in greater detail. The most familiar names like Cicero, Cato the Younger, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Antony are the literary high points of the Lives. Alexander of Macedon does more than inherit Greece from his father, Philip, who conquered the territory; he also marches across Persia and India, expanding the eastern border of the Greek Empire. Alexander’s conquest of India is curious. There were a few small battles here and there, some diplomacy and negotiations every now and then, but mostly he rode around with a fleet of boats, entering village after village to declare each one his own territory. You just have to wonder how seriously his new subjects took him after he left and never came back again.

One of the great elements of Plutarch’s writings is the way he points out multiple perspectives on individuals and events. Along the way, he mentions conflicting details as written in different source materials, but this element of shifting perspectives is really driven home in the telling and re-telling of the life of Julius Caesar. The story of his turn from senatorial consul to dictator, along with the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire, is examined from the points of view of Pompey, Cicero, Antony, Brutus, and Cato the Younger, among others, each in their respective biographies. Thereby we see how he could have been taken as a hero of the people or as a power-hungry tyrant depending on who you ask. The idea that news is always biased is not a contemporary notion as Plutarch demonstrated this principle here, possibly also keeping the doors open to moral relativism for future generations since the ethics of Caesar’s assassination are ambiguous from the standpoint of those involved in the plot.

Yet another interesting aspect of Plutarch is his chronological overview of the Greek and Roman Empires. This was not his intention in writing the Lives but the historical patterns emerge nonetheless. If you are inclined to think of the two ancient superpowers in terms of stages succeeding one another, you get a different picture from the way the biographies are paired and contrasted. It would be more accurate to say that Greece and Rome ran along parallel paths until the Greeks were absorbed into Macedonia and then began expanding outwards. As they began to decline, Rome ascended and the two merged into one another. Plutarch himself was a product of this historical process being an Athenian who moved to Rome and based his writings on research he did from books kept in that dominant city of the Italian peninsula. By the end of this book, the Greek and Roman armies are so intertwined, it is difficult to tell them apart. An interesting pattern emerges in Rome too. As the Romans expand westwards into Gaul and Spain, then eastwards across Turkey, called Asia in these histories, and further into Parthia, Armenia, and Syria, the city of Rome begins to implode with lots of civil disturbances, assassinations, and violence between factions competing for power. The idea that Rome fell as a result of barbarian invasions does not stand up so strongly when it becomes obvious that localized, civil strife did a lot to weaken the republic from the inside before the Goths or Vandals showed up on the scene long after Plutarch died.

Despite its relevancy to historical narratives, Plutarch’s Lives, with its glut of information, may not always be an easy read for modern audiences. While he attempts to write biographies of each personage, this writing is not biographical in the way we understand it in today’s world. This was written long before psychology was conceived of as a means of interpretation so what we get are examinations of character traits and behaviors, mostly looked at through a lens of moral judgment. While there are a few comments on subjective motivations here and there, hinting at what we would consider an inner life by today’s standards, the people of this book act as if they are pushed and pulled by instincts and impulses while the finer elements of their psychology are projected outwards into the machinations of the gods, some of which are revealed to them by auguries and divination. As we now know, such fortune telling is far from an exact science. It makes for interesting poetics though. The writing is often long-winded too but this could be a fault of the translator’s.

Plutarch’s Lives is a tough and masculine book, permeated with violence from beginning to end. Every pages details warfare on both land and sea, along with governmental overthrows, torture, punishment, assassinations, and suicides. Most of the descriptions are not quite as graphic as what Homer wrote in The Iliad, but Plutarch does have his vivid moments of sadistic fascination. You can easily get the impression that the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean did little more than fight and kill each other, but it would be unwise to overstate that idea since the Greeks and Romans contributed so much to the evolution modern culture, the humanities, engineering, and politics that we should not forget the enormous debt we owe to them for these advancements, made when people had so much less than what we have now. Overall, Plutarch is not for the general or casual reader, nor for the faint of heart, but his Lives are a real treasure for those with an honest curiosity about the ancient world.

Plutarch. Lives, translated by John Dryden. The Modern Library, New York.  

 

Book Review

An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

     According to Cherry, a character in Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, people are either “souls” or “spirits”. The souls are those that are powerful enough to run America and the spirits are merely everybody else, the ordinary people who don’t. The people who are worst off are the souls who fell and became spirits because they are able to remember what it meant to have influence. This is the main thrust of this novel. Almost all of the main characters are people who pursued the American Dream, maybe got a taste of it, and then fell into obscurity.

Stephen Rojack is the main character, an ex-congressman, a talk show host, a college professor, a decorated war hero, and a man who once was on a first name basis with John F. Kennedy. His life starts to go to hell when he realizes he doesn’t fit in with the upper crust of American society and everything then gets worse when he kills his wife then tries to make it look like a suicide.

As the novel opens he is having a conversation with the moon. The moon tells him to kill himself but he doesn’t and goes after his wife Deborah instead. The moon serves different purposes throughout the novel. First, it is a reference to the moon goddess and the muse of poetic inspiration, a literary tradition that goes as far back into history as the written word itself. The contrast between the moon’s elevated position in the sky and the symbolism of falling run through the whole story. At a primal level, the moon is also associated with witchcraft and magic; references to the occult permeate the narrative. The moon also indicates Rojack’s mental instability, hence the word “lunatic”. His delusional belief in the powers of magic ambiguously demonstrate the possibility that Rojack can not face reality, possibly due to mental illness. The moon talks to him and tells him what to do, acting as his conscience and guide but the question pf whether he is sane or not, a psychotic man hearing voices, is a constant theme, a question that only gets answered in the epilogue. Finally, the moon moves the story along as a literary device the same way that the witches function as a chorus in Macbeth. Mailer semiotically invokes literary tradition but the character of Rojack also represents the end point of this traditional line of symbolism; he is a man who wants to leave his past behind and start his life over again.

Rojack’s wife, Deborah, plays a prominent role at the start of the novel. She is a wealthy, well-connected, high society woman. She has a social life that is both active and secretive as she and Rojack are separated. Not only is he of lower social class than her but she also belittles him, plays with him, and emasculates him with insults and cruel put downs. When he goes to visit her in her apartment, she demands a divorce so he strangles her and tries to make it look like a suicide by throwing her out the window. Notice the symbolism of falling.

While this murder is the main event of the story, what happens next plays a symbolic role in showing where Rojack’s life is heading next. Rojack seduces the German maid Ruta. While having sex with her, he alternates between penetrating her vagina and anus. This takes on significance as his own inner conflict between good and evil. When he is in her vagina, the sensation is described as Heaven and when he is in her ass it is described as being in Hell. He is faced with the choice of ejaculating in her vagina and getting her pregnant, this option of following the path of good, but ejaculating in her ass means choosing evil and following the path of Satan. Rojack chooses evil and therefore lies about his wife’s death to the police, reusing to admit that he murdered her, despite the obvious evidence against him.

Stephen Rojack later goes to a secretive after-hours bar to meet up with Cherry, a mafia princess and mediocre nightclub vocalist. Despite her less-than-stellar singing abilities, she proves to be a strong woman. She bosses the mafiosos in the bar around and it is clear that she holds power over them. She takes Rojack back to her apartment for sex but through their dialogue, the crux of their life situation is revealed. Cherry is romantically involved with an up and coming African-American singer and Harlem gang leader named Shago Martin but she wants to get rid of him. In fact, she wants to leave her whole past behind. She is tired of the mafia and craves an ordinary existence without all the violence. Rojack, showing no remorse, admits that he killed Deborah because he also feels empty and wanted to leave his old life behind. Both of them have become yet two more people who are lost in the world. They quickly fall in love and start making plans for the future. You have to wonder if they are just drunk and caught up in the heat of the moment or if they are serious but naive in regards to their circumstances,

A lot more gets revealed when Cherry’s boyfriend, Shago Martin shows up to confront Rojack. Shago comes at him with a knife but tensions ease and Rojack listens as the singer explains his point of view. He once had ambitions to be a prominent Civil Rights activist, going on Freedom Ride demonstrations in the South but upon returning to Harlem, jealous people accused him of being interested in publicity only after his picture appeared on the front page of the newspapers. Nonetheless, he continued trying to climb out of the ghetto by pursuing his career as a jazz singer. Shago actually hated Rojack’s wife, Deborah, because he once sang at a charity event and she was so patronizing to him, insulting him for being Black that he, ironically, wanted to see her dead. Both Rojack and Cherry listen to his story attentively and with some sympathy, but Shago again insists on fighting Rojack. The altercation ends with Shago being thrown down the stairs. Again, notice the symbolism of falling.

But it is not Shago’s fault that he descends so brutally down the stairs. He is thrown down by a white man. This is Mailer’s acknowledgment that the white power structure is holding the Black people down. The fist fight between Rojack and Shago is further emblematic of the statement Mailer makes about violence. The two men, while being angry and confrontational with each other, also display some mutual admiration for each other. This respect is not enough for them to resolve their conflict in an intelligent way though, so they resort to violence instead. If you read carefully, Rojack’s act of violence is ultimately a failure. If W.E.B. DuBois had read this novel, he might say that their fight resulted from a mutual incomprehension because Black and white people don’t know how to get along. That isn’t inherently bad, as he would have it; it just means that they haven’t learned enough about each other to have a constructive dialogue.

In regards to this fight as a variety of failure, at first Rojack feels triumphant for having won but this sensation is a short-term, fleeting stimulation. What happens next is that Cherry loses respect for him. She wants to leave her mafia life behind but at that point Rojack just looks like another violent mobster to her. The long term effects also have deadly consequences for Cherry later in the novel and Rojack loses her forever. Mailer is pointing out the futility of using violence as a means of solving problems.

The fight with Shago Martin is not the only act of violence that fails to solve problems. Returning to Rojack’s murder of his wife, he seems elated at first but as the novel goes on, he finds that no one believes his story about her suicide. Since the incident was reported in the news, everyone he meets brings up the subject, honestly telling him that they believe he murdered her. Rojack is the O.J. Simpson of the 1960s. He wants to escape from his past but people keep reminding him of it over and over and over again. To make matters worse, the negative publicity costs him his teaching job and his TV show gets cancelled, ironically replaces by a music show hosted by Shago Martin. The murder of Deborah has caused his life to collapse. Again, the act of violence leads to failure for Rojack, not success.

While on the subject of symbols, it must be pointed out that falling plays a key role in unpacking the meaning of this novel. Falling is what most of the characters have in common. As the novel opens, Rojack is vomiting off a balcony, onto the parapet below, an image that foreshadows the path everyone he encounters is on. The suicidal Rojack prepares to jump from that same balcony but changes his mind and instead throws Deborah out her window. Then Shago Martin gets thrown down the stairs. Finally Rojack flirts with death by walking along a tenth story balcony railing in the rain, risking a final, mortal fall. This falling symbolism is an echo of Satan’s fall from Heaven in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Remember that Rojack chose the path of evil when he sodomized Ruta. But Rojack had begun his fall before that. He fell out of favor with his wife and became an outsider in the privileged social life he strove to be part of. Her murder started an avalanche that took him further downwards, straight into hell. His subjective thoughts are permeated with images of loneliness and despair and he wanders in a fog of bad smells and fetid odors that he can’t escape from. As Rojack moves around New York City, his life just keeps getting worse.

Deborah is also a fallen character. When Rojack married her she was glamorous, charming, and pretty. By the time he kills her, she is a mean-spirited, overweight alcoholic. After the murder, he finds himself entangled in a web involving big corporate business, the mafia, and the CIA. He learns that Deborah was extremely promiscuous, working as a spy and having sex with men in exchange for intelligence. She was a low level agent, not taken seriously by others, and there is an implication that spies were feeding her false information so they could use her for sex. The more we learn about Deborah, the more her glamorous image is tarnished. Her darkest secret is revealed when Rojack meets with her powerful father at the end.

Shago Martin also falls while he is climbing. Not only does Rojack throw him down the stairs, but Cherry also dumps him after he insists she have an abortion. His desire to be a political activist got cut short because of the members in his community, while being a prominent gang leader in Harlem who gets beat up by a middle-aged white man can not be anything but humiliation. This is even worse because Rojack’s wife insulted him when he sang at her charity ball.

Cherry is also a character on the decline. Her ambition was to escape from a small-town life of poverty by getting cozy with the mafia. While she gained a high degree of respectability in that crowd, she still ended up being a small time lounge singer, more respected because of her beauty than her talents. Her dream of escaping the gangster life leads her into a relationship with a man who had just murdered his wife.

All of these characters are people who strove after fame, wealth, power, privilege, and everything that we think of as The American Dream. None of them made it there. Some of them came close but then fell. Rojack and Deborah were souls, as Cherry would say, who fell and became spirits like everybody else. Cherry and Shago wanted to to become souls but never made it. They never reached The American Dream and instead were living the titular An American Dream. The shift from the definite article “the” to the indefinite article “an” signifies a lot. The American Dream is a singular, sovereign goal while an American dream is just one dream out of a multitude of dreams. It is random, anonymous, and ordinary. Like the Deborah’s large number of sexual partners, Rojack declines to being just another ordinary partner in bed; he became a dream rather than The Dream. The characters in this novel are all living this ordinary dream; they all became nothing more than the masses of plain people, wandering like lost ghosts through the American landscape, chasing after something they don’t know how to get. Mailer is saying The American Dream is nothing but an empty illusion that fades away more and more the closer you get to it.

In the end, though, Rojack does achieve freedom. He gets away with murder but to be free of the consequences and the memories, he has to leave the America, supposedly the freest country in the world, and escape to Guatemala. He chose to follow the path of evil. He achieves freedom by running away from responsibility. It is a hollow victory. The American Dream for him has been reduced to nothing but a part of his past he wants to leave behind.

In this novel, Norman Mailer juggles some important themes but it is a mixture of powerful and flawed writing. The subjective inner monologue of Stephen Rojack does a lot to carry the story. In a lot of ways, this inner voice expresses the whole significance of the book, more so than the events and plot twists but the stream-of-consciousness style varied widely from being brilliant to being vague. But the characters are well-drawn and indicate social issues that were fiercely debated at the time of its writing. Unfortunately, this also makes the novel a little dated. When Rojack brings Cherry to orgasm, Mailer is acknowledging a feminist issue that was on the table in its day. The meaning of this will probably go right over the heads of younger readers, but people who are knowledgeable about that time will recognize that the female orgasm was considered an important current issue in popular culture back then. In our times, after standards and mindsets have changed, it just unfairly comes off as sounding crude. The biggest problem with this novel, though, is that Mailer does not take it far enough. It is about a desperate man in the grips of despair but the narrative is too detached to really drive this point home effectively. Mailer was too stoic, too unemotional, too cold, and too macho to be able to plumb the depths of misery in this story so Rojack does not strike the reader as strongly as he should.

It is hard to imagine An American Dream being remembered as a classic novel. The themes and style are out of touch with the direction our society is heading in now. But it does have some elements that still make it worth reading. One question remains: why did Norman Mailer write this? In real life he stabbed his wife during a psychotic breakdown and spent a couple years in a psychiatric hospital. Fortunately, she survived. Mailer, however, lived in this shadow of this crime while struggling with mental illness for the rest of his life. Did Mailer write this in an attempt to come to terms with his own violence? On the surface, the answer appears to be no. Rojack shows no remorse. But Mailer also portrays Rojack as an antihero, an unhappy loser, living with symptoms of schizophrenia and psychosis. If you read this novel carefully, he almost sounds as if he is offering a quiet apology but this apology is too subtle for your average reader to see at first glance. Then again, maybe this theory is all wrong. Norman Mailer is dead and we can never ask him now.One thing is certain though, An American Dream is a critique of American masculinity and its problematic nature.

Mailer, Norman. An American Dream. Vintage International/Random House Inc., New York: 1997.

 

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How to Read In a Retardopia

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by G.C. McKay

G.C. McKay