Reading for My Life Page 8

  But the Church yields to history. The drama is played out among spider monkeys and coconuts, near a pyramid, looking at stelae that aren’t quite Mayan—a little Olmec here, with the jaguars; a little Toltec there, with human sacrifice; some Yeats, and Calderon to terrify us—as we sink past that “brain coral” in which we see “the skull of the earth,” with which skull we play ball games.

  Living in Heresy

  The heresy here is Gnostic and Manichaean. There is a “divine spark” and “a library in a jar.” Culture and love are both “secret.” The demiurge is a tourist. The angels go south and are devoured. The “messenger” reports to a CIA machine. Holliwell is afraid to look at the sun. In the absence of evil—to an anthropologist, nothing is evil, including himself—we have history: snakes, feathers, lizards, jewels, a fanged cat, a wooden cross, a unicorn, and death without mercy.

  Mr. Stone kicks the brain around; we live in heresy; Satan prevails; A Flag for Sunrise is the best novel of ideas I’ve read since Dostoyevsky escaped from Omsk.

  Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Jim Sleeper’s In Search of New York

  I. The Way We Are

  We live in this imaginary city, a novel that needs a rewrite, where the only politicians not in jail probably ought to be, except for Ruth Messinger, and all of them are Democrats; where the unions don’t care, and the schools don’t work, and the cops deal drugs, and the mayor has his own foreign policy, and I can’t leave home without stepping over the body of a runaway or a derelict. We didn’t elect Felix Rohatyn to anything, but the Municipal Assistance Corporation is more important than the City Council. Nor did we vote for Steinbrenner, Trump, or the rest of the bullies and crybabies who bray on our battlements and wave the bloody pennants of their imperial, omaphagous selves—and yet Mort Zuckerman will have his Zuckermandias at Columbus Circle, his finger in the sun, on the same Coliseum site from which Robert Moses before him dispossessed an entire neighborhood; and because none of these heroes ever takes the subway, there’s no one to shoot them. Maybe we need Jeremiah more than we need Tom Wolfe or a bunch of disappointed intellectuals.

  But Wolfe and Dissent have written their New York novels anyway. Wolfe, the parajournalist, looks pretty much the same as always, still grinning at us out of the nimbus of his double-breasted signature white suit, a vanilla-colored Mau Mau. Dissent, on the other hand, has had a format facelift and for the first time in thirty-three years you can read the socialist quarterly without an OED magnifying glass. In both their novels, the underclass is the stuff of dreams, the return of the repressed, a kind of historical black magic. They disagree, of course, on whether this is a good thing.

  Listen to Wolfe: “You don’t think the future knows how to cross a bridge? And you, you WASP charity-ballers sitting on your mounds of inherited money up in your co-ops with the twelve-foot ceilings and the two wings, one for you and one for the help, do you really think you’re impregnable? And you German-Jewish financiers who have finally made it into the same buildings, the better to insulate yourselves from the shtetl hordes, do you really think you’re insulated from the Third World?”

  Dissent wants this very same Third World—2.5 million “newcomers” since 1965—to be an energizing principle. In diversity we’ve always found our jumping beans. From the abrasions of culture on culture, we rub up a public philosophy and a civic space. Surely these new immigrants, this ethnic muscle, will rescue us from a mood grown “sullen, as if in contempt of earlier feelings and visions” and “a peculiar kind of social nastiness” (Irving Howe); a “trained incapacity to see the city as a human environment or as anything more than a machine for generating money” (Marshall Berman); “a way of life not much better than jungle warfare” (Ada Louise Huxtable); and “a world devised in its entirety by Dostoyevski’s Smerdyakov” (Paula Fox).

  It’s odd that Wolfe is so much better than Dissent on the details of class animus. And he knows exactly where to look for them. Whereas Dissent can barely bring itself to mention cops, Wolfe goes underground into the criminal justice system, where the hatred is naked. If Dissent is too polite these days to call anybody an out-and-out racist, Wolfe has been to some fancy dinner parties and taken notes, like St. Simon, and bites the hand that scratched his ears, like Truman Capote. It’s equally odd that Ed Koch, who certainly deserves it, is all over the pages of Dissent, while Wolfe entirely ignores him. A New York novel without Koch is like a court without a Sun King. Even Danny Ortega took time out to rub Crazy Eddie’s lucky hump.

  But there are many oddities. Neither New York novel has much of anything to say about drugs or organized crime. Both mention Alexander Cockburn.

  II. Vanities

  Sherman McCoy is a thirty-eight-year-old Yalie who decided to sell bonds on Wall Street instead of going into his father’s good-bones law firm. He made almost a million dollars last year, but when he sits down on his oxblood Moroccan leather swivel chair in front of the tambour door of his faux-Sheraton TV cabinet, he’s still broke because of his $2.6-million tenth-floor Park Avenue duplex, a Southampton house on Old Drover’s Mooring Lane, a wife who decorates her interiors with Thomas Hope chairs, three servants, a handyman, club dues, car insurance for the Mercedes, and private school tuition for cute little Campbell who, “supremely ladylike in her burgundy Taliaferro jumper and white blouse with a buttercup collar,” bakes bunnyrabbits in the kitchen and writes short stories about sad koala bears.

  Sherman also has a bimbo. Wolfe’s no better than Bill Buckley at heavy-breathing, so he borrows from his betters. Poor-white-Southerntrashy Maria—faithless wife and merry widow—slinks right out of a 1940s detective novel into Sherman’s nerveless arms: “Her medium was men… the way a dolphin’s medium is the sea.” At the wheel of Sherman’s Mercedes, at night on an off-ramp in darkest Bronx, Maria will hit, run down, and run away from a young, black, fatherless “honor student” of the nearby bombed-out Projects, and Sherman will be blamed.

  This malefaction will excite a black demagogue, the Reverend Reginald Bacon of Harlem; a white, Kunstlerlike attorney, the radically chic Amos Vogel; an English reporter for a Murdoch-minded tabloid, the alcoholic Peter Fallow; a Jewish DA up for reelection in a Bronx that’s 70 percent black and Hispanic, the publicity-hungry Abe Weiss; a Jewish assistant DA who’d rather be an Irish cop, the horny and impoverished Lawrence Kramer; assorted Communists, “the lesbos and the gaybos,” welfare bums, and fluffy-headed TV nightly-news anchorpeople.

  Poor Sherman. In his rent-controlled love nest, he’s menaced by the landlord’s hired Hasidic muscle. (“These… unbelievable people… could now walk into his life.”) When the cops (“insolent… Low Rent…animals”) come to take him to the Bronx for his arraignment, they are driving (“the brutes from the outer boroughs”) an Oldsmobile Cutlass! When he looks down from his tenth-floor co-op, a black mob is howling for his blueblood. (The Other is gaining on him!)

  Only Tom Wolfe could descend into the sewers of our criminal justice system and find for his hero a white victim in a city where Bernie Goetz gets six months, John Gotti and Ray Donovan walk, Robert Chambers blames the victim, and Ellen Bumpurs and Michael Stewart are still dead. Only Wolfe could want to be our Balzac and yet not notice the real-estate hucksters and the homeless nor send a single one of his characters to a concert, movie, play, museum, Chinese restaurant, or all-night delicatessen. So the women are Tinkertoys, the blacks corrupt cartoons, the sex silly and the homophobia tedious, the politics a surly whelp of Evelyn Waugh and Joseph de Maistre, and the author less amusing than he was when he trashed modern art. Nobody’s perfect.

  But on several subjects, all but disdained by Dissent, Wolfe can really sweat our socks.

  III. The “Delirious Professions”… Fear… (and)… Shoes

  By the “delirious professions,” Paul Valéry meant “all those trades whose main tool is one’s opinion of one’s self, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you.” In other words, Creative People, who in New York are not
merely artists and writers, actors, dancers, and singers, but journalists, editors, critics, TV and radio producers, anchorpeople and talk-show hosts, noisy professors of uplift or anomie, vagabond experts on this week’s Rapture of the Deep at the 92nd Street Y, even (gasp) advertising account execs and swinging bankers and Yuppies in red suspenders on the Stock Exchange. Each is asked every minute of the day to be original: unique. Only then will they be lifted up by their epaulets to Steinbrenner’s box in the Stadium sky, there to consort with city presbyters the likes of the late Roy Cohn, where you can’t tell the pearls from the swine.

  Dissent isn’t interested in these people, these vanities and their white suits and their bonfires. When Dissent nods at the market, it’s merely to observe that “a multibillion-dollar, cost-plus, militarized economy virtually guarantees spectacular profits to investors in the West and South” (Berman). When it mentions the media at all, it’s only to complain of their role in a “bipartisan incumbent-protection society” and their “‘objective’ contempt” for politics as anything other than “sport” (Jim Chapin), or to make fun of Manhattan, inc. and Spy (Brian Morton). Where, for heaven’s sake, is an analysis of the Times? How come Newsday was the only daily to oppose the reelection of Al D’Amato (whom Irving Howe calls “picklehead”)? For Dissent, the “delirious professions” belong merely and anonymously to a “service sector” as remote from the new Third World as Mars.

  Yet these are the people, making images and taste and deals, who write the city’s zeitgeist, the heat waves and cold fronts and snow jobs and acid rain of our emotional weather. Without their complicity, there will be no change. Change needs better PR. Dazzle them—mostly male and mostly pale—into a militant sentience. At least take seriously their many failures of intelligence and character.

  And Wolfe can’t get enough of them: “They were moving about in an agitated manner and sweating early in the morning and shouting, which created the roar. It was the sound of well-educated young white men baying for money on the bond market.” Prestaggered cash flows! Convertible asset management! Capital-sensitive liquidity ratios! He’s got their number: “He was wearing a covert-cloth Chesterfield topcoat with a golden brown velvet collar and carried one of those burgundy leather attaché cases that came from… T. Anthony on Park Avenue and have a buttery smoothness that announces: ‘I cost $500.’” He obviously knows his way around the Post, where he found that the press are “fruit flies” and the TV types are print-dependent bubblebrains (although demonstrators only appear to protest the latest outrage when they’re sure the camera’s rolling) and “dancers, novelists, and gigantic fairy opera singers [are] nothing but court jesters” to the bond-selling “Masters of the Universe.”

  Wolfe knows, too, that his delirious professionals—“frisky young animal[s]… of that breed whose natural destiny it was… to have what they wanted!”—are scared to death, especially on the subway: “Into the car came three boys, black, fifteen or sixteen years old, wearing big sneakers with enormous laces untied but looped precisely in parallel lines…. They walked with the pumping gait known as the Pimp Roll…. They drew closer, with the… cool blank look…. Such stupid self-destructive macho egos.”

  It’s the attitude. Compare Wolfe’s to a lovely riff from Wesley Brown in Dissent: “A display of bravado by a young, indigo-skinned black male, moving through a crowded subway car like a point guard bringing the ball up court, sporting a haircut that makes the shape of his head resemble a cone of ice cream, and wearing barge-sized sneakers with untied laces thick as egg noodles, is immediately considered a dangerous presence whether he is or not.” By whom? By delirious professionals. On the subway, the First World and the Third coincide, at least until the express stop at Columbus Circle.

  They are afraid, too, that what they do is make believe; that their luck and charm will run out; that they will look in the mirror one morning and see, if not the other side of the room, then maybe something no longer brand-new and unique, someone found out, like Sherman. They will lose their co-op and our good opinion. As cops and press and mob close in on Sherman, his megabucks Paris deal on Giscard bonds is also falling apart, and his panic is palpable. (Nobody writing for Dissent seems to be afraid: angry, maybe, or tired, or sad, or contemptuous, but not scared.) Wolfe makes us sweat. As bad as he is on sex, he’s terrific on money and hangovers and…shoes.

  There are no shoes in Dissent. (There are two references to “shoemakers,” but that’s just left-wing atavism.) Whereas shoes are Wolfe’s big story, from “the Boston Cracked Shoe look” to Maria’s “electric-blue lizard pumps with white calf caps on the toes” to Sherman’s $650 bench-made half-brogued English New & Lingwoods with the close soles and beveled insteps. Shoes for Wolfe are character. Sherman’s dandified defense attorney wears brown suede shoes. Assistant DA Kramer wears Johnston & Murphy clodhoppers. A witness for the prosecution is partial to snow-white Reeboks, but they make him change into leather loafers for the grand jury. Ballet slippers or “go-to-hell sneakers” with Velcro straps, Wolfe’s gone that extra mile and worn them.

  What does this mean? More than you think. I’ve consulted Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, and Kurella’s Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers. I know more than I ought to about high-buttoned patent-leather boots, “Hungarian high heels,” the legend of Aschenbrodel, the toe-sucking (and later beatified) Marie Alacoque, foot-fetishists East (Junichiro Tanizaki) and West (Rétif de la Bretonne), not to mention vampirism, anthropophagy, and koprolagnia, and not even to think about “shoes of the fisherman” Christian symbolism. On one level, the meaning of shoes in Wolfe is upward mobility—we are what we feet—but there is of course a subtext. Not one, but two Primal Scenes in Bonfire make this obvious.

  The young men baying for money on the bond market spend most of their time with their mouth on a telephone and their shoes in a stirrup. Felix, the middle-aged black shoeshine man, “was humped over, stropping Sherman’s right shoe, a New & Lingwood half-brogue, with his high-shine rag… Sherman enjoyed the pressure of the rag on his metatarsal bones. It was a tiny massage of the ego, when you got right down to it—this great strapping brown man, with the bald spot in his crown down there at his feet, stropping, oblivious of the levers with which Sherman could move another nation, another continent, merely by bouncing words off a satellite.”

  But the Master of the Universe will be punished. Shoes in Wolfe’s novel are like guns in Chekhov’s plays; they have to go bang. Before Sherman is fingerprinted in the Bronx, he’s made to stand outside in the rain and soak his New & Lingwoods. And before he’s tossed in the holding pen, where surly men of color want to wrinkle his friskiness, he is made to remove his belt and his shoelaces, “like two little dried dead things.” His pants fall down and his shoes fall off and he has to shuffle: “The shoes made a squishing sound because they were so wet.” At the end of Bonfire Sherman changes into hiking boots, and we know why. Shoes are sex.

  IV. There Are More Than Three Worlds

  From Wolfe, you wouldn’t know that we’ve got one big problem with real-estate developers, and another with the homeless. For Dissent, these are strophe and antistrophe, as in an old Greek choral ode, with everybody moving right to left and back again. To be sure, Deborah Meier, the heroine of District 4, has important things to say about “teaching for testing” and alternative schools; and Maxine Phillips would like to pay for the care of our sixty thousand children who are abused or neglected each year by taxing cooperative apartments like Sherman McCoy’s; and Theresa Funicello is furious at “workfare,” wondering why “a black woman hired as a nanny for an upper class white family is a ‘worker,’ while a mother struggling under adverse conditions to raise her own children on welfare… is a parasite on society”; and Anthony Borden points out that 55 percent of all our AIDS victims are black or Latino, and so are 90 percent of our AIDS children, who never had a chance to say no to anything; and Gus Tyler looks at what happened to labor-intensive light manufa
cturing in this city (it went to Korea and Taiwan); and Michael Oreskes follows the garment industry to nonunion sweatshops in Chinatown or Queens; and Jewel Bellush explains the “room at the top” for black women in organizing hospital, school, and clerical workers; and John Mollenkopf can’t find a “good government” reform movement anywhere.

  Moreover, Dissent’s a lot more cultured than Wolfe. This novel has a chapter by Paul Berman on the sexual confusion and political ambivalence of those “prisoners of culture” who live below Fourteenth Street and therefore have to read Kathy Acker, look at David Salle, listen to Peter Gordon, and go to plays by Albert Innauratto; and a chapter by Juan Flores on the convergence of black and Puerto Rican cultures in “hip-hop,” by way of Bo Diddley, Joe Cuba, Frankie Lymon, doo-wop, capoeira, break dancing, and rap; and a chapter by Ellen Levy on group theater versus performance art. And then it’s Memory Lane: Michael Harrington, who may have less to be ashamed of than any other man of the left I know, admires Ruth Messinger and tries hard to remember when Crazy Eddie was a liberal. Morris Dickstein and Robert Lekachman feel bad and write agreeably about the Upper West Side and our favorite slumlord, hail-Columbia. Rosalyn Drexler and Leonard Kriegel go back to the Bronx (all that Art Deco on the Grand Concourse), and Kriegel finds a whole new Irish community Wolfe must have missed while soaking Sherman’s shoes. Alfred Kazin has fun spanking such avatars of agitprop as N. Podhoretz, A. Cockburn, H. Kramer, and G. Vidal, and then he gets serious: “When the great Reagan counterrevolution is over, what I shall remember most is the way accommodating intellectuals tried to bring to an end whatever was left among Jewish intellectuals of their old bond with the oppressed, the proscribed, the everlasting victims piled up now in every street.”