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IN THE WRITER’S WORLD | Future Past 30Oct08 Future Tense; Past Tenser "Douglas" by William Crist In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read God-knows truth about enzyte how many pieces either in the print press or the online one, all talking about the strange, crazy, unexpected financial mess we’re in—unfortunately (and usually) written by too many so-called experts who’ve had their heads up their butts for the last 20 years. I mean, really, like no one had an inkling this was all coming? No one had an inkling that crummy three bedroom bungalows in very crummy parts of L.A. were going to hit $1.1 mil; that burnt-out swaths of Brooklyn without subway service were going to break ground on new condos starting in the “affordable and friendly range” of one and a half mil? My favorite was reading in the NY Times Sunday Real Estate section (nicknamed “porno for space addicts”) about a young man who worked as a desk clerk for an airline, who had just scored his first NY apartment, and now, at the age of 27, was chewing on a $750,000 mortgage. (Gasp!) I mean, I knew things were a bit inflated, but no one questioned how a guy who was making, say, $45,000 a year, could handle a mortgage that would take him about 80 years to pay off? No one said, “Gee, isn’t this odd?” No one said it exactly the same way that no one questioned why more people now play the national lottery known as the Stock Market than any other form of gambling, because, frankly, they have no choice. In other words, a strange thought started occurring to a large number of young people (and not so young people) around 1980, just as Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, charmed his way into the White House: Namely, they had no future. Unlike for their parents (and not a whole lot of them, by the way), the idea of retiring under either Social Security (known as the Big Joke), or a regular government or union pension became unthinkable. In other words, they were high-flying out there in the big world with no net beneath them. This was scary. Insecurity itself. This was why Valium (one of the first “anti-anxiety” drugs) became known as Vitamin V. People were popping them like M & Ms. Suddenly a new group of young people came along known as Yuppies who were playing the American game faster and faster, because not playing it became no choice. You couldn’t Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out, like Timothy Leary advised in the 70s, because there was less and less to drop out to. In fact, the idea of dropping out became tinged with nostalgia, the same kind of nostalgia that now colors our Mafia family fantasies like “The Sopranos”: if the only true family you can create are Ba-da-bing guys from New Jersey who think concrete looks good in a tuxedo, what’s so bad about that? At least this family takes care of each other. In the real world now, there is no bottom at the bottom. And that’s where the dots start. We are now in a situation which makes the old Mafia protection racket look benign. You may remember this: Big Anthony told ya that if youse did not pay up, his pals would kick your face in. So Anthony was sellin’ you protection against Anthony. In the same way, our Real Estate and Wall Street shell games have been selling protection against themselves, since there ain’t no other game in town except them. It all began with the fact that if you did not find some part of the National Game to protect yourself with (either real estate, Wall Street, or a combination of the two) you’d be penniless fast; it went on raising the ante with both (or all three) situations until the cards eventually fell in; and now it continues with the Bail Outs, in which the foxes are not only asked to guard the hen houses, but are being fed the hens while they watch it. However, there is no alternative, because who else knows the hen house as well as the foxes do? I mean, every fox has to keep eating, so he wants the hen houses secure, too. This has meant that for the last decade +, a huge number of people, sadly, have been living with the “fact” that their home is their only security. It has also worked like a giant credit card that they can use to finance their futures, their kids’ futures, even their health. It only gets scarier as John McCain talks about “choice” and “portability,” and Obama keeps edging closer to the Right, because the “choice” (truth be told) does not allow a real choice. So we have this situation, and it is scary. And it all started when a lot of young people (young at least then) began to realize: “I have seen the future, and it is a big hole.” The question is, how are we going to fill it? The old joke always comes to mind: you borrow a $1000 from the bank, it’s your problem; you borrow a $1,000,000, it’s the bank’s problem. So a lot of us have been borrowing that mil, and reborrowing it, and reborrowing it. In fact, the mortgage-derivative engine has been, to a harrowing degree, running this country, stoking it with this fantasy amount of cash that became very real for a small number of players, and now, like the Coyote chasing the Road Runner, we are suddenly waking up and realizing . . . there’s nothing under us. This does not make the future look very good. Ah, the past. . . I’m afraid it wasn’t all that marvelous either. I am one of those few people who believe that the Golden Moments of Yesterday appear that way mostly through the halcyon lenses of nostalgia. A perfect example of that can be seen in a new exhibit called “Woman of Letters.” The woman here is Irène Nèmirovsky (pictured below), a Russian-Jewish novelist whose affluent, worldly family was forced to leave Kiev after the Bolshevik take over and eventually ended up in France, just in time for the Nazi invasion. In the meanwhile, Nèmirovsky has become a flourishing novelist, and had converted to Catholicism. Although she never denied her Jewish origins, and proclaimed herself to be a Jew, she still considered her Jewish heritage to be rather a quaint holdover from the past, something that she should never have been held to. So, in all truth, she “never acted Jewish.” This did not stop the Nazi’s from circling her in their noose francaise, and despite various machinations from highly placed friends, who valued her contributions to French culture, she was deported and later murdered in Auschwitz, along with her husband, Michael Epstein. Nèmirovsky’s name would have completely disappeared if it had not been for the publication in 2004 of Suite Francaise, her masterful novel of the German occupation of France, that had existed for more than sixty years as only a first draft in a closely written notebook, discovered by her daughters in an old family trunk. Suite Francaise has since been translated into 28 languages, and is described as one of the few true eye-witness accounts of this occupation in literature. Its discovery and publication has been compared to that of Ann Frank’s diary. But it is not Ann Frank. That is the strange rub: Suite Francaise is beautifully, sometimes even savagely written, but it never quite departs from a certain coldness of viewpoint, from a kind of rigidity and fear that holds it together, and it leaves the reader at its end wanting something more. And that something, naturally enough, stems directly from that fact that Nèmirovsky had planned this novel to be a first part of a trilogy or even quartet of books. And also, it’s a first draft. Simple as that. But another facet comes out to the reader, even if you don’t know Nèmirovsky’s whole story: that her sympathies are often not with the French, who behave with every stereotype of themselves (their meanness, provincialism, shallowness, close-mindedness, biting anti-Semitism, ruthlessness, and sexual wantonness), but with the Germans, who come off as capable of real honor, sensitive, and naturally wounded by the spiteful attitudes of their captives. Examples are bourgeois upper-class Frenchmen who will do anything to maintain their class superiority; a kind-hearted French priest who is pitilessly drowned by his young orphan charges as he sacrifices for them; a French antiques “queen” who in the midst of the war cares only about his collection of Sèvres china; an attractive, artistically-sensitive German officer billeted in the town house of an unhappily-married, well-bred Frenchwoman who secretly yearns for him; the jealousy of a thuggish French farmer who murders a young German whom he suspects has been making eyes at his wife. And nowhere in this narrative, except somewhere offstage in rumor, are there Jews. They’ve been expunged from the landscape. And that fact is now coming out to tinge how we see Suite Francaise, because the truth was Nèmirovsky was an openly, unapologetically, self-hating Jew. In fact, she could not understand why this horror was happening to her: she had real sympathies not so much for the Nazis as for the German culture that the Nazis glorified. She and her husband regularly socialized with Nazi occupation officers; she characterized Jews as being money-driven, or prone to Socialism, both qualities she despised. And as an artist, she wanted to represent high culture, something that the Germans, even the German masses, held closer to themselves than anyone. How could they be rounding her up, someone who just happened to be of Jewish origins but was no longer a Jew? She could easily be described as the Roy Cohn of her period and setting; Cohn, from a wealthy New York Jewish background who was secretly gay, hated gay men except as fleeting sexual objects, and died of AIDS while constantly denying having it. He was Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s protégé, pulled together the spying case against the Rosenbergs, and voraciously strove to hound gay employees out of government service, especially in the Army and the State Department. His feelings about being gay and Jewish were at best parenthetical—an “I just happened to be” attitude, if or when he ever acknowledged either group at all. Back to the present. I was at the opening last night for a show in which William Crist—one of my favorite artists—has taken part. The show is filled with beautiful things, but Bill Crist’s paintings really pop out and delight me. One woman said they remind her of Lucien Freud. My feeling is that they are fresher, less cynical, and more involving in their closeness to the real life of their subjects. Crist is an unabashed lover of the human figure, especially the male one. His predecessors were Eakins, Sargeant, and the Renaissance masters. His pictures draw you in because they involve themselves with the real life and stories of the subjects, not on an idealized, formalized basis, but in that literary idea that a picture contains a story within it: a spoken narrative within the very essence and feeling of the image. This is something you can’t fake, and Bill Crist never does. He should be a much better known artist than he is; the world needs to wake up to him. So here we have the future (God, first!), the past, and the present—at least for this moment. One of life’s discoveries is that both the past and the future become open to interpretation: we actually see them only through the moving lens of the present, and where that lens settles its concentration at any time. We have a mounting financial crisis that has been in the making for close to twenty years; and a longer past haunted by fascism. But for this current brief intersection of time, I’d like to leave what I know of the naked truth in Bill Crist’s very knowing hands.
See works by William Crist at the MDH Fine Arts in Chelsea through November 15 See “Woman of Letters” at The Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan through March 22 more about Perry Brass |