Sickness very much getting the better of me in the days following Thanksgiving, I spent three days indoors and very nearly all the time in bed. Having a great number of books at my disposal, being in the family house, for whatever inscrutable reason I read Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality on Friday, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety on Saturday. I always enjoy Hitchens though his book was weak; but I positively hated the Stegner, and read it in a sour mood the whole day through. But on some reflection I thought reading Mortality as a prelude to Crossing to Safety inspired. Both were portraits, unintended no doubt, of the great modern escapism, the wisdomless life of stimulus and success, which every unhappy person today is trying, either consciously or unconsciously, to find some way to rid himself of.
When I say “unhappy person” I do not mean to include everyone; and I think Hitchens and Stegner are examples of people quite satisfied with the current arrangement – with some qualification, I suppose, as both are dead. They were both successful, and both worked at so being; they lived very comfortable lives and didn’t need to get their hands dirty. They started with not very much but they had some talent, and they found life was a spout of oil, to be burned for warmth and entertainment, and there was enough of it that at the end when death came they almost didn’t have to notice their own mortality, which for them was I suppose the point.
For that is the thing that is really striking about the book Mortality: that the one thing which refuses to make an appearance in its pages is – mortality. I am a religious man, but I am aware that the God who gave me this mortal life is under no obligations to give me more. Life here can be eternity enough. I thought I might get from Hitchens some kind of noble affirmation of the dignity of mortality; sort of like the Brad Pitt movie Troy, where Mr. Pitt explains to the sex-slave he is boning at the time that “the gods envy us.” Hitchens could pull this off with a little more Oxonian flavor: Brad Pitt meets William Pitt: limitation is the source of meaning; human life is precious because it stares into an infinite nothing; hence are derived our duties to its continuation and cultivation; we have an obligation also to fight error, particularly religious error which cheapens the value of a human life by placing its worth on the wrong side of mortality; and the truth once known discloses our moral obligations to life all the more clearly. Mortality, therefore, is the source of our meaning and of our morality as well. I was expecting at least something of this sort; I felt I had been promised something similar by the publisher:
Mortality is the exemplary story of one man’s refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament… Hitchens’s testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.
But lies in the commercial art world are what cheap energy is to the modern economy: a foundation for nothing lasting, but profitable and a foundation nonetheless. In truth Mortality is a set of columns for Vanity Fair, crudely patched together into something like a book. Broad margins, fourteen-point type, eight pages of unworked notes left after Hitchens’ death, and a postscript by his wife round the tiny book out to 104 pages, $22.99. The book should really be called Chemotherapy, but I take it that was considered a less grandiose title. It is a suggestive metonymy, however: modern people of a certain sort cannot possibly contemplate death. It would be far too unsettling. What you must do is focus on the trappings of death: the loss of your hair (including your chest hair, which Hitchens notes “was the toast of two continents”), the difficulty getting blood taken (none left), the inability to speak. Even these things suggest death too much: better to describe hospital life. Hitchens even notes that he disliked having flowers sent to his room – it suggested he might be dying.
Of course when he wrote the columns, one might say, he did not know he was going to die – he might have beaten the cancer! But this is more modernism talking. Of course he knew he was going to die. So do you. We just don’t know when. The idea that mortality is something you confront on a hospital bed, and only at the last extremity, is itself indicative of the mindless distraction of twitter culture: the mere fact that you may not die within the next twitter cycle does not mean that you won’t soon enough.
As is usual with Hitchens, he spends a great deal of time – even on his deathbed – dealing with things that are really quite beneath him. He spends another chapter (column, really) talking about the inefficacy of intercessory prayer. The Christian world should have learned this lesson when the Visigoths made a habit of raping nuns during their devastation of Italy in 410. This didn’t happen to the nuns because they forgot to “pray on it.” If the Christians didn’t learn this then, they’ll never learn it. Jesus even tells people not to ask for anything: “Your heavenly father knows what you need before you ask.” “Do not babble on like the pagans.”
Hitchens gives another column to the dumb Nietzsche quote “that which does not kill me makes me stronger,” which is like looking for deathbed solace from a Carrie Underwood song. Hitchens points out the statement is untrue, which is obvious enough. It’s another artifact from a culture that hates uncomfortable truths. But you see the problem of “things that don’t kill you, but make you weaker” clearly enough in nature. I have been impressed how risk-averse animals are, particularly around each other. But you figure out why: of course a woodchuck can’t kill a fox, but a fox is afraid of him nevertheless, because all the woodchuck has to do is bite through a fox’s leg, which he is quite capable of doing. The fox can’t go to the doctor to fix a problem like that. Animals are not necessarily equipped to kill; to wound is good enough. What doesn’t kill you weakens you for the thing that will.
The illusion to be celebrated in both intercessory prayer and “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is control: you can control Providence by giving God some timely guidance about what you want to happen, and the idea of the Nietzsche quotation is that even when you feel like you’re not in control you’re actually just building yourself up to have even more control later on. Hitchens describes this also in a chapter about the similarities between chemotherapy – give him as much radiation as the body can possibly take, but not more – and the torture he underwent for journalistic purposes. Modern medicine likes the doo-dads suggesting control over the situation, and over death ultimately. They work until the day they don’t, as the case of the late Mr. Hitchens proves. All white males become dead white males someday. This brings me to Crossing to Safety.
I don’t consider myself to be under any particular obligation to read novels which feature white people going sailing – or yachting, or whatever they call it, they were not out searching to smite the enigmatic malignancy of it all in the guise of a white whale, I promise you – or complaining about tenure requirements, or saying things like “Pritchard says the Hudson Bay York boats never carried coffee, only tea.” Novels which feature white people doing all these things had better be really extraordinary. They should not conclude scenes with sentences so stupid and weird they make you wonder if the author had written the book to parody the kind of writing you find in creative-writing classes: “I moved my foot between Sally’s legs and fitted it like a bicycle seat into her crotch.”
Unfortunately, Crossing to Safety is such a book, and since it is my fate to continue to take words seriously, let us see what the reviewers have to say about this one:
“A novel brimming with wisdom on subjects as diverse as writing for money, solid marriages, and academic promotion policies [are these really that diverse?] – with page after page of superb descriptive writing… [especially note the bicycle-seat-crotch simile… breathtaking]” – Howard Mosher
“A quiet reexamination of what, close to the end, seems to have made life not only worth living but happy and almost fulfilled. Mr. Stegner has built a convincing narrative, has made survival a grace rather than a grim necessity, and enduring, tried love the test and proof of a good life. Nothing in these lives is lost or wasted, suffering becomes an enriching benediction, and life itself a luminous experience.” – Doris Grumbach
I really don’t know what book Doris was reading, but I’ll be sure to look out for it at the Strand. I’m sure her review copy can be found there. As for Crossing to Safety, it is an account in the first person, by a writer whose awesome writing is attested to by literally every single literate person in the novel (“You could study for years and not learn how to do what you do. Right from the first paragraph of your first story, you know how. Now you’ve done it again. In a week. My God, it takes me a week to get my pencils sharpened and my rump comfortable in the chair. I envy you. You’re an instrument that blows no blue notes” (52), and on and on, really the sycophancy almost gains dignity by parodically being written entirely by himself), mostly about a pair of friends of the writer, a husband who is a disappointment to all and can never do any better than teach literature at Dartmouth, and a tyrannical wife, who believes she is in control of everything and dies at the end, intent on retaining control to the very last second. And even afterwards. In fact, the shadow of her insanity is to remain on the wall of the cave even after her death:
“Know what she’s done to guide me? You’ll never guess. Don’t even try. She’s made a list. Women here and in Hanover it would be okay for me to marry. Five names, listed in their order of suitability.”
The refrigerator came on with a behind-the-scenes whir. I felt the warm gush of its exhaust against my ankles. “You’re kidding,” I said.
“I am not kidding. Want to see the list?” (306)
I will add “white people thinking they are in control” to the list of non-obligatory novel subjects, along with white people yachting and discussing tenure. Unfortunately, this woman is really the subject of the novel, which starts and ends with her death. Reading her story, I waffled between a vague sadness – “Can it really be the case that there is no redemption at all for these rich people? That they go all the way to the end with their stupid schemes and formulae and never live even once?” – and utter frustration that no one ever sets this woman (and her husband) right – I mean, all the way to her god-damned deathbed, for real? Artistically, you can’t succeed in a format as massive as a novel with immature characters who never get any kind of correction, just as you can’t make an effective two-hour movie with a baby who never stops crying. After about the first half-hour, you’re ready to get up out of your seat and yell, “Is someone going to do something about that BABY?”
The focus on tenure, on writing for money, even on keeping marriages together at the cost of all spiritual integrity – keeping up appearances and knocking under to the pressure (“she’s the mistress of the implacable silence,” her husband says, explaining why he won’t confront her) – is, pace Mr. Mosher, the utter absence of wisdom, the horrid meaninglessness of bourgeois life, the frantic following of every social convention because there is nothing else. The book, all in all, is “The Death of Ivan Ilych” without the light. “The life of the Langs and Morgans had been most straightforward and most according to custom and therefore most terrible.” Page after page of Ivan Ilych could be used to describe the Langs and the Morgans. Ivan Ilych’s house is their life:
In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there were damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes – all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class. His house was so like the others that it would never have been noticed, but to him it all seemed quite exceptional.
There is all kinds of terrible pretentious conversation, on the “theological meringue” of Dante’s Paradiso (I don’t even want to know what that means), on Satan really being the hero of Paradise Lost (wow, never heard that one before, brilliant. Mention it to your undergraduates next fall! They’ll be amazed!), things like that. I proffer the relevant passage, from Ivan Ilych’s deathbed:
Fedor Petrovich inquired of Ivan Ilych whether he had ever seen Sarah Bernhardt. Ivan Ilych did not at first catch the question, but then replied: “No, have you seen her before?”
“Yes, in Adrienne Lecouvreur.”
Praskovya Fedorovna mentioned some roles in which Sarah Bernhardt was particularly good. Her daughter disagreed. Conversation sprang up as to the elegance and realism of her acting – the sort of conversation that is always repeated and is always the same.
Stegner, on the other hand, seems to be mighty impressed that he became the sort of person to have such conversations, and so the book is littered with discussions of precisely this sort. Again, Tolstoy sums up the entire lifestyle of the Langs and Morgans with just contempt: “When they had gone it seemed to Ivan Ilych that he felt better: the falsity had gone with them.”
The truly terrifying thing about Crossing to Safety is that it represents the disturbing possibility that modern people have found a way to make falsehood in its various forms – the avoidance of real emotions, the obsession with meaningless social trivia, the denial of mortality – last right up until the very moment of death. Charity Lang (the name of the wife) refuses to have her husband watch her die in the hospital – she doesn’t like dealing with his weakness:
“I want to go gradually, a step at a time, in some kind of decent order. Is that too much to ask? I’m trying to do it right, and you won’t help me. Oh, it was just to avoid scenes like this that I… I don’t want to bother anybody. I don’t want a lot of crying and breaking down! I hate it! All I want to do is go away quietly while the family is together and enjoying itself.” (316)
“Because I can’t stand it when you break down!” she said. “I haven’t the strength. I’m trying to do it right. If you’d just let me do it my way it’d be best for everybody, it’d be ever so much better.” (317)
You might expect this kind of behavior from a teenager – in an old woman it is positively disturbing. Did you learn nothing from being alive? Modern technology and American wealth help to create people like this – who think they can avoid anything unpleasant, like mortality and grief. They want to engineer things so they can just “go away quietly” in utter denial to the very end. And they have modern medicine to help them in this quest for pleasantness and control. Tolstoy, on the other hand, gives Ivan Ilych no place to go:
And his colleagues and subordinates would see with surprise and distress that he, the brilliant and subtle judge, was becoming confused and making mistakes. He would shake himself, try to pull himself together, manage somehow to bring the sitting to a close, and return home with the sorrowful consciousness that his judicial labors could not as formerly hide from him what he wanted them to hide, and could not deliver him from It. And what was worst was that It drew his attention to himself not in order to make him take some action but only that he should look at It, look it straight in the face: look at it and without doing anything, suffer inexpressibly.
This It of course is mortality, our final and utter submission to the fact that we are not the authors we think we are, but characters rather, in a larger story which is not the work of our hands. It is decisively absent as a topic of polite discussion in bourgeois society, and as Tolstoy shows, this is neither a new nor an American phenomenon. But the modern American threatens to bring ever more technological artillery to the cause of distracting us to the very end with a false sense of control. I fear that future generations may be worse, more distracted, more superficial, than even Stegner’s, which, please God, was bad enough. We would be better served with writers who offer us more than distraction and superficiality – ones who can look at It. To quote Stegner:
It was her death. She had a right to handle it her own way. [What individualistic nonsense, borrowed from a society obsessed with owning and possessing. “She was death’s” is more accurate.] But I felt sorry for Sid, a reluctant stoic, and I dreaded the coming hour or two when I would be alone with him. I was the person he was most likely to confide in, and I feared his confidence and had on tap no word of consolation or comfort. (297)
Their later conversation, recorded in the book, only proves his fears of his own inadequacy too true. As I have written before, I believe there is really only one religion, because there is only one truth. If you have something to say to a friend in such a situation – and not some canned blather about going to a better place, which dishonors our deeply human grief – then you have religion enough, regardless of your denomination. But to have nothing to say, after a lifetime of living and loving, in the face of great suffering brought on by obvious spiritual dishonesty with the most obvious facts of life – it is lameness in a friend, lameness in a man, and lameness in a writer. It is, to use Stegner’s lame phrasing, to be an instrument that blows only blue notes, or maybe even nothing at all.
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