At Large and At Small (9 page)

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I
never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor’s window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.

A few years ago, I was inching along with excruciating slowness on a book I was trying to write. It was clear that
the only way I would finish it was by surrendering unconditionally to my owl self. For several months, I worked all night, ate breakfast with my family, and slept from 9:00
A.M.
to 4:00
P.M.
The pages piled up as speedily as the Tailor of Gloucester’s piecework. The only problem was that even though my husband and I inhabited the same zip code, he was living on New York time and I had apparently
moved to Auckland. The jet lag on weekends was terrible.

I finished the book and promised I’d never do it again, except for occasional binges of three or four nights: just long enough to write an essay. I have kept my word. I am even more attached to George than I am to my circadian rhythm, so the trade-off has been worth it. And unlike most recovering alcoholics, I seem to be able to indulge
in a bender now and then without permanently falling off the wagon.

It is now 3:42
A.M.
Everyone here has been asleep for hours except my daughter’s hamster, the other nocturnal mammal in the family, who is busy carrying sunflower seeds from one end of his terrarium to the other. After Silkie completes this task, he will change his mind and bring the seeds back again. I will do more or less the
same thing with several paragraphs. Then, when the light breaks over Houston Street and the pigeons begin to coo on the window ledge, Silkie and I will retire. “And so by faster and faster degrees,” wrote Dickens at the end of his long night walk, “until the last degrees were very fast, the day came, and I was tired and could sleep.” Good night.

f all the serial killers who plied their trade in ancient Attica, Procrustes exercised the highest degree of professional ingenuity. “This man,” wrote Diodorus Siculus, “used to take passing travelers and throw them upon a certain bed. When they were too big for
it, he lopped off the overhanging parts of their bodies. When they were too small, he stretched them out by the feet.” In Apollodorus’s version, Procrustes had two beds, one large (on which he laid the short men, and hammered them until they were tall) and one small (on which he laid the tall men, and sawed them until they were short). Hyginus also belonged to the two-bed school, although he had
Procrustes stretch his shorter victims by suspending anvils from their limbs. Whatever the furniture arrangement, everyone agreed that Procrustes’ house was conveniently located on the road to Athens, and that when he offered his hospitality to footsore wayfarers, he was rarely refused.

Most later writers, including Plutarch, aligned themselves
with Diodorus, perhaps believing (as do I) that
a single bed for all comers was better suited to Procrustes’ one-size-fits-all philosophy. I like to think, in fact, that the host was the
only
man who was exactly the right size for his bed, and that his unorthodox etiquette was a way of enforcing a solipsistic conformity: It fits me; therefore everyone should fit it.

The Procrustean bed, Diodorus model, suggests itself with dispiriting aptness
as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There’s just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but
the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.

By the Culture Wars, I mean that peculiar development of the last two decades or so that takes culture—a multidimensional thing if there ever was one—and attempts to compress it to a skinny little line running from left to right. No matter how oddly shaped a book or a play or a poem
is—no matter how idiosyncratic, how ambivalent, how anarchic, how complicated, how big, how messy—it’s just got to fit that Procrustean bed. So out comes the handsaw, and whop! With a few quick strokes, it’s cut down to size and, as a kind of casual side effect, murdered.

Both armies in the Culture Wars are eager to recruit
new soldiers for this limb-attenuation campaign. Here’s how you enlist.
Without giving it much thought, you toe the party line—once. You think you’ve signed your name to a single page, but then you discover that a thousand pages of carbon paper lie underneath, transferring your signature with perfect fidelity to a thousand different documents. With your collusion, cultural politics have become, in the words of the eighteenth-century poet David Mallet, a

Tyrant! more
cruel than Procrustes old;

Who, to his iron-bed, by torture fits,

Their nobler part, the souls of suffering wits
.

You have lost your right to judge literary works on a case-by-case basis, and those works have lost whatever nuances were lodged in their overhanging periphery.

Reader, cast down your handsaw! You need not become a conscientious objector—there are plenty of ideas worth shedding
blood for—but if in every battle you look around and see the same people fighting alongside you, you should ask yourself whether you are demonstrating an admirable constancy or a Procrustean intransigence. I do not suggest that the attractions of a single set of marching orders are easy to resist. It is far more work to start from scratch every time you open a book than to let someone else make up
your mind before you read the first word. But if you start hacking the toes off your culture, you will soon look down and find that your own toes—those humble appendages, given to blisters and
bunions and ingrown nails, yet so essential to your balance—are unaccountably missing.

There are dozens of questions currently provoking skirmishes in the Culture Wars. I propose to discuss four elementary
ones, all concerning the literary canon. I do not expect everyone to agree with me, but I do hope to show that it is possible for a single person to entertain some ostensibly liberal views and some ostensibly conservative views and some utterly ambivalent views, and that such inconsistency can have a wonderfully dulling effect on the blade of Procrustes’ handsaw.

S
hould we read great books because
of their literary value or because they provide moral lessons—that is, because they teach us how to live?

When David Denby returned to Columbia at the age of forty-eight to audit two Western civilization courses he had originally taken three decades earlier, his literature professor told the students on the first day of class, “You’re here for very selfish reasons. You’re here to build a self.”
That’s a pretty clear summary of the moral-lesson school.

Here’s Hannah Arendt: “The trouble with the educated philistine was not that he read the classics, but that he did so prompted by the ulterior motive of self-perfection, remaining quite unaware of the fact that Shakespeare or Plato might have to tell him more important things than how to educate himself.” That’s a pretty clear summary
of the literary school.

My view is that being forced to choose between the
two is a senseless act of sadomasochism that injures both reader and book. College students—over whose souls most of the goriest battles in the Culture Wars are fought—are, by virtue of their youth, deeply engrossed in character building. Is it wrong to enlist the help of Shakespeare and Plato in this difficult task? But
if that’s all that young readers do, then narcissism (
Should I emulate Tybalt or Mercutio? If I liberate my soul from dependence on my body, as the Phaedo suggests, can I still have sex with Tiffany?
) trumps aesthetics, and great books are reduced, by a process that trims away all the most beautiful parts, to self-help manuals.

These days, it is mostly the people who consider themselves to be
on the cultural left who ally themselves with the self-builders, and mostly those on the right who accuse the self-builders of shallow egotism. This just shows how fickle the whole right-to-left spectrum is, for the self-building position used to be considered conservative. It was Matthew Arnold, that well-known revolutionary firebrand, who wrote “that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that
the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life,—to the question: How to live.” Whatever critical cycle we happen to have been born into, reading with only one motive in mind seems unnecessarily restrictive. However, to those who insist on a single path, I would recommend self-building. They will miss a great deal, but they will miss even more if their reading
is a disembodied intellectual experience that has been carefully divorced from their own lives.

People who have concentrated on self-building
haven’t turned out so badly. Consider the example of Vice Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s running mate, whose favorite book was the
Enchiridion
of Epictetus. Judging from Stockdale’s incoherence in the 1992 vice-presidential debate, I think it’s fair
to say that he didn’t learn much about literary style from Epictetus. However, he did learn something about Arnold’s “powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life.”

Stockdale first read the
Enchiridion
at the age of thirty-eight, when the navy sent him to Stanford to study international relations, and Philip Rhinelander, the dean of humanities and sciences, invited him to take his philosophy
course. Stockdale did so, received supplementary tutoring from Rhinelander, and found himself drawn to the Stoics. Rhinelander mentioned that Frederick the Great had always brought a copy of the
Enchiridion
on his military campaigns, so when Stockdale was sent to Vietnam, he took along the copy his professor had given him during their last meeting. In September of 1966, Stockdale’s plane was hit
by antiaircraft fire over North Vietnam, and as he was descending by parachute, knowing he was about to become a prisoner of war, he said to himself, “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.” I would venture a guess that this is the first time a parachutist has thought about first-century Stoic philosophy on the way down. Stockdale didn’t have his copy of the
Enchiridion
with him, but he hardly needed to, since by that time he had the book virtually memorized.

Epictetus, born as a slave in Phrygia and sold to Nero’s
secretary, is said to have once murmured quietly to his master, who was twisting his leg, “You will break it.” When the leg broke, he said with a smile, “Did I not tell you that you would do so?” Stockdale contemplated this incident during
seven years as a prisoner of war, four of which were spent in solitary confinement and two in leg irons. He also pondered the following passages, among others:

Work, therefore, to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns
the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.

Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to your ability to choose, unless that is your choice. Lameness is a hindrance to the leg, but not to your ability to choose.

Let death and exile, and all other things which appear terrible
be daily before your eyes, but chiefly death, and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.

Upon all occasions we ought to have these [words of Socrates] ready at hand:… “O Crito, if it thus pleases the gods, thus let it be. Anytus and Melitus may kill me indeed, but hurt me they cannot.”

It was in this way that, through more than fifteen episodes of torture,
Stockdale was able to preserve the
self that Epictetus had helped him build. When he was released by Hanoi in 1973, he was lame, just as Epictetus was when he was released from slavery in Rome, but, like his exemplar, he believed that his external suffering had failed to destroy his internal sense of freedom. I can think of worse ways to use literature.

S
hould the life of the writer affect our
valuation of the work?
In other words, if the writer was a stinker, do we boot the book out of the canon? Or, as
The New York Times Magazine
put it in an article about Herman Melville, “Forget the whale. The big question is: Did he beat his wife?”

No one will ever be certain, but according to family rumors, long suppressed by scholars who wished to protect his reputation, Melville chased his
wife, Elizabeth, around the table with a carving knife and once, when drunk, pushed her down the back stairs. At the very least, he made her so miserable that, in 1867, her family made abortive plans to help her escape her marriage via a feigned kidnapping. Even Hershel Parker, Melville’s most devoted biographer, admitted to Philip Weiss, the author of the
Times
article, “One of the great-grandchildren
told me a story that Melville came home once with a bag of oranges and ate them by himself in front of his daughter.” That’s not the sort of crime that lands a man in jail, but Melville’s daughter was
hungry
, and after you hear a few stories like that, it is no longer possible to think of Melville as someone you’d like to invite to supper.