With the Lower Depths: Some Changes in Literary Outlook
Berman, Paul
Paul Berman WITH THE LOWER DEPTHS Some Changes in Literary Outlook In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe devotes a single passage to the way historical memory influences a certain kind of...
...Today we can imagine a greater concentration of power in the giant multinational corporations— or a greater democratic control over production and markets (instead of the outright nationalized economy dreamed of by state socialists of the past...
...Socialism among the New York Jews of a generation or two ago was not a liberation theology...
...The more abject and pathetic and defeated people were, the stronger was grandfather's conviction that socialist ideas of egalitarian cooperation and working-class productivity had a moral and not just historical or economic basis...
...He observes that the grand nineteenthcentury novelists seized on the city as their subject, with its themes of rich and poor, extreme individuality, justice and injustice...
...Does it, too, linger in the consciences of grandsons only as a half-forgotten tug on the conscience— "one of those things you believed in for all mankind and didn't care about for a second in your own life...
...Maybe the writers of the nineteenth century looked to the downtrodden for themes because they felt that the poor were not, as they have come to seem today, marginal, but were instead the key to the future...
...We can picture a "South Africanization" of the work force based on unskilled labor and strict hierarchy—or a greater economic role for professionalism, pride-in-craft, decentralized management, worker participation, and other measures (instead of the direct seizure of the factories dreamed of by the old-time syndicalists...
...The Bonfire of the Vanities works up a splendid satiric indignation against the parvenus and the people who spend $350,000 on a fireplace—yet its truest rage hammers at the mendacity and violence of the nameless black and Latin immigrant masses, who never appear as anything but an anonymous muttering mob...
...But it may be that, without these sturdy old doctrines to prop them up, sympathy and solidarity begin to sag...
...Several reasons can be offered for why such a narrowing of the moral imagination has occurred...
...He wrote about the Spanish royal court, about the 190 • DISSENT Changes In Literary Outlook revolutionary republicans, about the rising middle class (his special subject), and also about the wretched South Madrid slums that were not, judging from his vivid descriptions, any sweeter or safer than our own South Bronx...
...His second belief was economic...
...Yes, the labor movement was truly religious, like Judaism itself...
...He stood with and not against "the lower depths...
...Of course a variety of works from the present can be named—but not too many of them, and at any rate, they can't claim to speak for our age...
...he's not naturally a novelist...
...Maybe the writers strummed their sympathetic chords because they had a notion of history and economy that directed them to do so...
...Yet one night Senator Barry Goldwater had been on TV promoting a right-to-work bill, and his father had started growling and cursing in a way that would have made Joe Hill and the Wobblies look like labor mediators...
...There was something Jewish about it...
...And hasn't this theme faded from the modern novel...
...The beggars gather outside the church and wail with pain, the drunks indulge their vice to the point of suicide, the deluded Quixotesque dreamers sink ever deeper into homelessness, every third person seems half out of his mind, and as the pages turn, GaldOs's heart pounds harder and harder for these unfortunate people—if perhaps not for every individual...
...No matter how wrongheaded a socialist might be, no matter how cruel and vindictive, he possessed somewhere in his soul a spark of the light of God, of Yahweh...
...It was one of those things you believed in for all mankind and didn't care about for a second in your own life...
...Wolfe pictures his own novel in the Zola tradition, but if Zola's social sympathies are kept in mind, The Bonfire of the Vanities could just as well be taken as an example of that tradition's demise...
...Among the dominant novelists of our own time, how many would even try to write about the people whom GaldOs adopted as his protagonists: a beggar in Misericordia, a prostitute in Fortunata and Jacinta, a stunted victim of industrial pollution in Marianela...
...The old-fashioned sympathy hasn't disappeared entirely, of course...
...In identifying the residue that old-fashioned New York socialism has left on someone like the not-too-principled assistant district attorney, in noticing that the mere shadow of a term like socialism arouses a kind of atavistic response in such a person, even if socialism's meaning has by now gotten tangled up in matters so extraneous as to reach all the way to religion—in noticing all this, Wolfe has observed something true and significant about liberal instincts in the present...
...Wasn't this the old fundamentalism's most crucial feature of all...
...Today we have protest novels against the poor...
...Dickens, Sue, and Zola wrote protest novels against the rich...
...There's no reason to denigrate Wolfe's gift for satire and caricature...
...But the sacred and the socialist would probably not have mixed...
...Wolfe's Bronx assistant district attorney, Kramer, searching his political conscience, stumbles on the word "socialist" in the columns of the Village Voice (an enjoyable touch...
...He tells us in the introduction to one of his celebrated studies of South Madrid, Misericordia ("Mercy" or "Compassion"), that he "proposed to go to the lowest layers of Madrid society, describing and presenting the humblest types, the greatest poverty, the professional begging, the vice-ridden vagrancy, the poverty that is almost always sad, in some cases picturesque or criminal and meriting correction...
...We can imagine and even predict that choices like these will become unavoidable in the future, as the economy globalizes and advances, and that concepts of economic organization drawing on socialist inspirations will seem more relevant, not less, in the years to come...
...Perhaps someone will mutter that today's poor are not quite up to the higher standards of the poor of yesteryear—that the bottom class of today is morally more wretched, that drugs and crime have given us a depths so low as to lie beyond sympathy...
...And for these people, too, he felt at least a flickering sympathy...
...Still, leaving aside the confusion over religious terminology, something is correct about Wolfe's picture...
...Sympathy and solidarity were, for a writer like him, as much the themes of literature as any other emotion...
...By dint of many a gruesome subway trek to 161st Street, he has drawn an artful cartoon of the courthouse politics and newspaper life of New York, just as his hero Zola, by descending into the coal mines, caught something of the miners' misery (though if we are to bandy about nineteenth-century comparisons, it might be more appropriate to group Wolfe with a melodramatist like Eugene Sue, whose Mysteries of Paris, like The Bonfire of the Vanities, began as a series in a periodical...
...Someone may complain that today's bottom class upholds too many crackpot theories and cheers too many demagogic manipulators...
...Grandfather Kramer is no more...
...Paul Berman WITH THE LOWER DEPTHS Some Changes in Literary Outlook In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe devotes a single passage to the way historical memory influences a certain kind of modern liberal sensibility...
...In the same vein, it could be said that the great city novelists of the nineteenth century wrote studies of specific grand motives and emotions as influenced by the hubbub of city life...
...In a polemical essay that Wolfe has published in the brand-new edition of his novel, he takes up one aspect of this question, though by addressing issues that are literary and not socialist...
...He didn't soften the ghastliness...
...He regarded the rich and powerful, not the very poor, as his enemies...
...Maybe his socialism tilted to the radical side...
...we have Tom Wolfe...
...Yet the feeling that he worked up in Misericordia and in other novels was an immense sympathy for these wretched persons of the Madrid slums...
...The father of someone like Assistant D.A...
...Yet, as with his notion of Jewishness and socialism, perhaps something SPRING • 1991 • 189 Changes In Moran Outlook about it is not untrue...
...Of course The Bonfire of the Vanities has no occasion to mention a grandfather and still less what was learned at the meetings...
...Still, all you have to do is glance at the writers that Grandfather Kramer, if he was a reading man, would have treasured, from Dickens to Jack London, to notice that a difference in generosity between the past and the present is not imaginary— at least in books...
...Socialism leads to a contemplation of unions: His father was a would-be capitalist, a servant of capitalists in actual fact, who had never belonged to a labor union in his life and felt infinitely superior to those who did...
...But it is no longer very sharply defined...
...What about grandfather's third doctrine, then, the moral sociology, the sympathy for fellow working people and even for the very poor and the oppressed...
...q SPRING • 1991 • 191 Arthur Young "It's the struggle, my boy—poverty makes young men successful and develops character...
...It's harder nowadays, in fact it's impossible, for a quick-witted comrade to stand on a crate with a flag and rouse a crowd of fellow wage-slaves...
...He looked at other working people in all parts of the economy and the world, and his heart beat with sympathy and identification...
...Now, grandfather's doctrines on history and economics have not been flatly disproved, and they have certainly not disappeared...
...He supposed that the vast working class was capable of forming its own economic system, that working people, either directly or through their leaders, could assume the management of production and distribution and do it not only more justly but more efficiently...
...It was, for him, the biggest of all emotions, the great all-inclusive chord...
...The whole notion of an impending conflict between capitalism and socialism tends to obscure rather than clarify the actual alternatives in the modern predicament, which lean toward more capitalism or more socialism but not to a decisive historic choice between the two...
...That may explain why young Kramer takes "no interest" in left-wing politics...
...that sympathy for the downtrodden is not like the other elements of socialist fundamentalism and has not diminished and has, on the contrary, remained entirely accessible to the modern imagination...
...He knew that South Madrid was unhealthy not just in the sense of physical disease...
...It was like Zealot and Masada...
...It was rich and colorful, now open to satire, now to frank weeping, now to anger...
...He is a marvelous journalist (and in his essay correctly celebrates journalism, meaning hard research and reporting, as a component of literature...
...This isn't right...
...As Dickens and Balzac were to London and Paris, GaldOs was to Madrid...
...To the readers of Joyce and Bellow, Wolfe's point may seem hard to credit...
...Kramer might have prattled on about Masada and God and indulged a religious streak, though probably not in words like these...
...Was researching the slums easier in 1897 than it is today...
...And this word prompts a private rumination: Kramer had no interest in left-wing politics, and neither did his father...
...We may have reached a place where, due to the general rise of productivity and wealth, we are at last materially capable of eliminating the worst sorts of poverty—only to find that we no longer have the will...
...Something that is mostly remembered, but not exactly experienced in the present...
...Perhaps someone will argue that, far from having diminished, sympathy for the downtrodden has grown since the days when grandfather waved his red flag, as shown by the very welfare measures whose incorporation into the modern state has vitiated the old either/or choice between capitalism and socialism...
...our hearts are smaller...
...But Wolfe is not especially interested in grand emotions or, for that matter, even in character...
...What is this half-remembered thing, the socialist shade from the past...
...In that case, he looked downward, too, at people who were too oppressed and too wretched to be respectable workers like himself, at beggars and the utterly poor, and to some extent even at the people who had sunk into the bottom criminal class—at prisoners and the pathetic lumpenproletariat who were the bane of his existence...
...An out-of-date notion...
...In the case of Dickens and Zola and many a lesser writer, the motives and emotions tended to be sympathy for the downtrodden...
...Conscience is a historical construction...
...He went accompanied by police...
...Today no one seriously believes that an altogether new society is close at hand...
...The fading of left-wing fundamentalism about history and economics is not to be regretted, given that it comes on the heels of social progress and that, besides, certain of the old hopes lent themselves too easily to disastrous uses...
...I realize that readers are already rushing forward to complain that a debonair journalist with conservative instincts like Tom Wolfe can hardly be made to stand for the whole of modern literature...
...And among the grand emotions that do not especially engage him are, it must be said, the old-fashioned table-pounding sentiments of social sympathy...
...and elsewhere in his inconsistent mind, he might have preached the evils of capitalism and the destiny of the proletariat...
...He quotes Lionel Trilling, who said that the great nineteenthcentury novelists wrote studies of character as influenced by social class...
...Compassion was his guitar...
...Yet socialist ideas in their modern form, lacking something of the old simplicity, do lack some of the old appeal, too...
...GaldOs is exactly the kind of writer that Wolfe has in mind when he speaks of the nineteenthcentury city realists...
...We do not have Zola or even Eugene Sue...
...Has this idea, too, lost its contours, faded into the past...
...His book required, as per Wolfe's injunction, months of research...
...For instance, we might cite the kitsch-ification that followed from false leftisms of the past...
...Finally, he subscribed to a set of moral values and instincts regarding society, a kind of moral sociology...
...And when you read such a writer, it is hard not to conclude that emotions and themes like his have indeed withdrawn from the center of modern literature...
...We might speculate that greater wealth has erected stronger walls around the middle class, such that certain kinds of concerns no longer press upon the ordinary writer or reader (though that seems less and less true...
...Yet in their house, when he was growing up, the word socialist had religious overtones...
...Socialism's meaning is vaguer...
...He didn't ascribe all problems to the enemy class...
...but the sharpness of their contours has dropped away...
...It was secular, even antireligious...
...Let me cite, just because the books happen to be on my table, an example that grandfather wouldn't have known (though his Spanish or Cuban immigrant neighbors might): the novelist Benito Perez GaldOs (1843-1920...
...Wolfe ascribes Kramer's sentiment to his father, but since even father "had no interest in left-wing politics," a reader might suppose that father's socialism, too, was merely half-remembered and that, in the Kramer family, grandfather, the oppressed immigrant garment worker (taking a wild guess about Kramer family history), was socialism's truest tribune...
...Of course you are going to insist that your children grow up in poverty...
...today we have the district attorney...
...But mostly I wonder if the feeling of compassion and solidarity isn't somehow connected, at a deep level, with the other original elements of the socialist idea—with the expectation of a new stage of history based on a new kind of economy...
...Yet to spell out the original Kramer family socialism is not so very difficult...
...Yet the life of cities (Wolfe argues) has not appealed to the greatest of the modern novelists, mostly because the elite intelligentsia looks down its nose at popular fictional studies of vast social themes and prefers topics that are more intimate and inaccessible...
...Grandfather, we might suppose, did find himself now and then at left-wing meetings...
...192 • DISSENT...
...Grandfather—let us imagine—upheld essentially three doctrines, beginning with one about 188 • DISSENT Changes in Literary Outlook history...
...The difficulties and dangers of penetrating into Madrid's "evil-smelling" southern districts were such that Gaid& was obliged to disguise himself as a doctor from Municipal Hygiene...
...Maybe they felt that compassion and solidarity were linked to the laws of history and were therefore hardheaded and authentic, not softheaded and false...
...He felt that a more cooperative and egalitarian society than that based on sweatshop exploitation not only could be created but was, in fact, inevitable...
...It is seen as an idea from the dusty past...
...And to return to the question of socialism and its doctrines, it does seem that the third component of grandfather's left-wing imagination, his sympathy with the downtrodden, has indeed gone the way of socialism's historical and economic ideas—at least among the leading literary and popular writers...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
