Week 2 - Sunday
I laze around, bathe, prowl the house in a skimpy and loosely-tied dressing
gown admiring glimpses of my lithe nude body, sprawl, read, belatedly answer
some e-mails.
A sarky reader wants to know if it isn't inconvenient that half the staff at
my workplace have dashes instead of names. Yes, it's annoying, instead of
saying, 'Good morning, Susan,' or 'Good morning, Jane,' I have to go, 'Good
morning, - ' and just leave my mouth hanging open for a few seconds.
Another sarky reader asks if I ever did filing for the previous Home
Secretary - for foreigners or those like me who have taken to avoiding the
news, he recently lost his job for accidentally setting several thousand
convicted murderers and rapists free - although this also seems to be
official policy.
...Vaguely apropos of this, yesterday a copy of the Mary McCarthy-Hannah
Arendt letters arrived from a second-hand bookshop in the middle of America courtesy of Amazon Marketplace, which comes close to justifying
the internet and the jet engine and credit cards and the modern world in
general. In another life when I have more time or discipline I want to write
an essay on McCarthy. She was one of the better novelists of the 20th
Century, I think, and a luminous critic, and was at the centre of the
intellectual life of her time, but she's been rather in eclipse since her
death - which is par for the course, except it's been almost twenty years
now and there's no sign of a revival yet.
Her books are brilliant and most of them remain - I'm trying to avoid the
word 'relevant' because I don't want to sound like the kind of theatre
director who sets Hamlet in a video game arcade, but her concerns are still
current. She was of the left but satirized it cuttingly. The dopey left
remain wary of her. One might have expected the intellectual right to have
embraced her the way they have Orwell, but a lot of the old guard knew her
personally and remember the scathing wounds she inflicted, and besides she
slept around too much for their taste, although not with them. But it's high
time she was revived by the sensible left and people who just love
literature and the intellect. At heart she was an old-fashioned moralist and
small-c conservative, an intellectual elitist, interested in Nature and the
Natural, deploring mass culture and the effects of industrialization - a
radical fogey not unlike The George.
One of her recurring themes is the inability of the left or liberals or
modern society in general to judge people and find them wanting. In The
Groves of Academe, written in 1952, an incompetent college teacher
tries to avoid dismissal by falsely claiming he's the victim of an
anti-Communist witch-hunt. He lies, blackmails, drags students into his
schemes and is altogether loathsome, but those members of the faculty who
would oppose him are paralysed by the pity and neurotic guilt they feel
towards him, because of his straitened means and impoverished background -
and the very fact of his wickedness: 'At bottom...she was conventional,
believing in a conventional moral order and shocked by deviations from it
into a sense of helpless guilt toward the deviator. In other words, she was
a true liberal... who could not tolerate in her well-modulated heart that
others should be wickeder than she, any more than she could bear that she
should be richer, better born, better looking than some statistical median.'
An idealistic Russian girl, Domna, eventually overcomes this, saying:
'One has only to look at Henry to imagine the matrix that formed him... a
nasty and narrow environment... I detest the social order which sprouts
these mildewed souls - all that should be changed, for everybody... But
there is also in each individual the faculty of transcendence; there is in
each of us a limited freedom. I myself have been poor and I am not
sentimental about poverty - poor people must be judged, like the rest of
us... Everybody who will judge himself has the right to judge others and to
be judged also. This abrogation of judgement you practice is an insult to
man's dignity. Everybody has the right to be judged and to judge in his
turn.'
This 'Everybody who will judge himself has the right to judge others'
(which, by the way, came four years before Camus's The Fall with
its 'judge-penitent' protagonist) is a precept McCarthy exemplified her
whole life; famously merciless in her judgements on other people, she
subjected her own motives and conduct to the same pitiless scrutiny. The
other maxim she might be said to embody is 'The unexamined life is not worth
living' - although as several of her novels about the self-lacerating
intelligentsia show, it is much bloody simpler.
In a letter to Arendt she writes the following regarding her novel Birds
of America , probably her masterpiece:
'I have the sense, maybe subjective, that the worm of equality is not only
eating away at the old social and economic foundations but at the very
structure of consciousness, demolishing the "class distinctions" between the
sane and the insane, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad. To be
concrete, I find that I feel guilty and awkward in the presence of a
psychotic person, as though I ought to conceal my sanity in the interests of
equality with him.'
Is this neurosis widespread? Is this a key part of the modern madness? I
don't know. Personally I've never felt guilty towards any bugger. I have
judged myself and found me perfect, and the rest of you, frankly, need to
pull your socks up.
...Why am I banging on about this now? Is this the time or place? Probably
not. But more tomorrow, maybe, and then it'll be out of my system.