Editing George Gilder
DECTER, MIDGE
Books Editing George Gilder By Midge Decter In the late 70s I was working as an editor in a publishing house whose special claim to fame was that it made serious profit from serious books. I was...
...And the women in his world unman Sam by means of AFDC and the welfare system...
...In his introduction to the reissue of Visible Man (ICS Press/Discovery Institute, 240 pages, $16.95), George tells a rather different story from the one I have just related...
...I argued that it was time for him to present himself not as the provocateur suggested by that baldly ironic race-conscious title but as his true self, a uniquely gifted and serious social critic...
...In his introduction, George doesn't quite say that I thereby doomed the book to failure, but the suggestion is in the air...
...She does not depend on him to support her and the children...
...One of George's signal qualities as an analyst of the welfare culture is his respect for the underclass- far removed from the contempt welfare reformers display when they continually assert that their policies will have precisely the effect they intend...
...Now everybody from the president of the United States on down to the most pious community worker is prepared to condemn it...
...In part, George was simply way too far ahead of the cultural curve...
...I signed and subsequently edited two of George's books...
...As it was, the book fell down a deep well, having received among the major media only one dull and truly witless review in the daily New York Times...
...But at the same time Sam cannot stay sober for too long, cannot reliably show up for work, cannot stay out of fights or out of jail, cannot resist the need to punch out his women, and certainly cannot support his children...
...Nor is the responsibility of the welfare system for this crisis a controversial idea these days...
...But it may also have been true that George had been too quick, too breezy, and much too brief in fleshing out the central idea in both books-that young men who are not required to marry and look after women and the children they bear will remain a tribe of "naked nomads...
...The irony here runs deeper than the fact of a fond stepdad with a shiv...
...For the tragedy of Sam's life is that unlike his stepfathers, he is being progressively unmanned by women, particularly Beverly, his 16-year-old "wife" and the mother of his children...
...Or perhaps his memory has been colored by his annoyance at me for our disagreement over his title-which is a story he does tell...
...When the book was written, crack cocaine was not yet in the picture...
...Visible Man is a lively, sometimes even amusing, sometimes touching, sometimes infuriating, sometimes harrowing, often sad and ultimately hopeless, account of a young black named Mitchell "Sam" Brewer...
...It is a tall order...
...George had already published two small books that should have been works of major importance on the much agitated subject of the relations between the sexes...
...I was new to book publishing, not yet totally disabused of the old romantic notion that it was an industry dependent on relations between writers and editors...
...George himself, I would venture to say, does not know precisely how we should go about filling it...
...Quite the opposite...
...Sam is an impediment to Beverly, a danger to her livelihood...
...Sam was strictly a dope and alcohol man...
...Having lost his already feeble capacity to stay calm enough and sober enough to turn up for work, he is reduced to begging her for quarters and half-dollars for beer...
...The second, Wealth and Poverty, was a bestseller-possibly the company's biggest up to that time-and served to establish George as a thinker to be reckoned with...
...That indeed is the source of his ultimately uncontain-able violence against them...
...After all, by that time the problems of, as well as the problems for everyone else created by, young black men of the inner cities were already more than perfectly "visible...
...And Sam himself was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in Dannemora for rape...
...What keeps Visible Man both fresh and jolting, even today, is its precision...
...But otherwise, the whole world is now acquainted with many different versions of this same sad story...
...Born out of wedlock, palmed off on an aunt while his mother was off here and there with a series of husbands, he was not, shall we minimally say, given the best of send-offs...
...Visible Man, you see, is a true story about how the welfare system and its culture emasculated and destroyed a charming and even in some respects capable young black called Sam from the slums of Albany, N.Y...
...Among the poor, female domination of work is the problem, not the solution...
...Even those who continue in the old fashion to invoke the term "racism" in explanation of the social crisis embodied by the likes of Sam can barely suppress a yawn as they do so...
...Midge Decter is the author of three books and hundreds of essays...
...Indeed, when George first lays eyes on Sam, he is lying in a forest of tubes in a hospital bed recovering from a serious stab wound administered to him by his mother's then-husband-the first of his stepfathers to be genuinely fond of Sam and in whose home he always finds a bed and a welcome...
...So what is this book so many found either too daunting or too off-putting to read in 1978...
...Precisely because this message went so much against the theology of the then-established cultural church on matters of both race and sex, I thought that George should have been more weighty and insistent-if you will, less entertaining-in bringing it...
...Which means that, whenever he is around, he is in her household on sufferance...
...Indeed, one of George's intentions in telling us about Sam back there in 1978 is now moot: to illustrate how little racial discrimination-for so long the pet alibi of civil-rights "leaders"-had to do with Sam's inability to pull himself together...
...Let no one imagine that originality of mind, that quality which is paid endless lip-service in the bastions of culture, is either recognized or welcomed when it is in fact the genuine article...
...George wanted to call the book Sam Beau, and I forbade him to do so...
...Nor does there seem to have been much gunplay, again at least not where Sam was concerned...
...and not least, is able to pluck the heartstrings of the cold-eyed but finally tender-hearted George Gilder...
...enjoys the concerned patronage of at least two attentive and long-suffering employers and several coworkers...
...So I took him out to lunch one day and told him so, and further informed him that what he needed as an author was me...
...his title itself might at least have become the object of some kind of heated public reaction...
...Once she has his first baby, Beverly brings in more money from the public coffers than he does from his job...
...As George makes clear, Sam is not the first in his family line to embody disorder...
...Thus, "government training funds, job preferences and other interventions must be channeled chiefly toward boys and men...
...Fighting, then, is the only way he can sustain his amour propre...
...I am aware of the importance of such young men to society," said a leading conservative intellectual to me when I complained about the general lack of response to the book, "but I don't like to read too much about them...
...And perhaps he was right...
...And one of my most ardent editorial ambitions was to get my hands on a young writer named George Gilder...
...but aside from earning him the undying and loudly expressed hatred of the women's lib movement, Sexual Suicide and Naked Nomads had been pretty much overlooked...
...Perhaps in the end, I am retroactively abashed to think, the ardor of my pursuit actually made little impression on him...
...In George's updated postscript to the new edition, we are told that in the end Sam sired three children, all of whom ended up severely disturbed and in foster care...
...He says he gave the book to me because I offered him $500 more for it than another publisher (and in the bargain also got the rights to Wealth and Poverty...
...A story that is truly told never loses its power to illuminate...
...He has grown up in an unloveliness that is consonant with his own...
...Paying close attention-at long last-to the adventures of Sam Brewer will not by itself yield any simple prescriptions for policy, but it would certainly set everybody to looking in the right direction...
...Moreover, in an essay about current notions of welfare reform that begins the new edition, George is yet again the trenchant thinker ahead of his time...
...That's an exciting prospect-almost, but not quite, enough to make me wish I were back in publishing...
...A naked nomad truly, living out the destiny George Gilder had so vividly depicted some years before...
...But the first, Visible Man, was a bewildering failure-a failure now being given a welcome new chance at life...
...In addition, George has faith that not too long after welfare has been overhauled, its erstwhile beneficiaries will have figured out how to "game" whatever is the new system...
...Such a tribe will be anomic at best and more than likely lawless and savage...
...Sam can sketch well enough to hold a job in the New York State Division of Historic Preservation...
...But he is right, of course...
...Far more important-and illuminating-is the message to would-be welfare reformers that George wishes them to take away from Sam's story: The problem of hard-core poverty today lies mainly with violent and disruptive men and boys, not with unemployed or undertrained women...
...In his view, the idea of sending welfare-dependent mothers to work-the notion at the center of all current proposals for undoing the welfare culture-is precisely off the mark...
...Sending welfare mothers for work training, says George, will only leave their children completely at the mercy of public institutions, and that is the very last thing they need...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 3
