Apologia Judt

Do note that I mistakenly linked to Judt's "Edge People" in my previous post, instead of "Girls! Girls! Girls!" as I meant. This has been remedied. "Girls!" is more a piece of narrative journalism than "Edge People," but the latter gives a better sense of who Judt is. If you do not already know about Tony Judt, read "Edge People" and then "Girls!".

I myself hadn't heard of Tony Judt until I learned he was dying. It is a tragedy I am particularly familiar with, to go on unaware of a great contemporary writer until they are dying or dead, to stumble upon a person I Should Have Read. The same happened with Art Hoppe, whose "Execution, 1957" is a phenomenal piece of narrative journalism and about which I would be writing except that it requires no defense. Jon Carroll, who writes about Judt here, is to blame and to thank for both bittersweet introductions.

Tony Judt is dying. He has Lou Gerig's disease. He writes about it in "Night," (which is quoted in Carroll's article but I will link to it in full here as if I have not given you enough to read already) which also serves as the introduction to a series of reflective articles that have been appearing both in the New York Review of Books and on the NYR blog. The NYR labels it as "memoir," and indeed it does not strictly qualify as narrative journalism as Judt is not a journalist. He is an academic, a scholar, a "public intellectual," as he derisively indulges the label. But I feel that "Girls!" in particular (and "Revolutionaries," to a lesser extent) incorporates enough storytelling in its non-fiction to be worthy of examination as a piece of narrative journalism. This particular kind of journalism is about writing from within the story, after all, and in "Girls!" Judt writes about sexual harassment in the academic world from the deepest point of immersion possible--his own life.

The elements of story necessary to narrative journalism are present and clear; there is a lede which relies on Judt's own unorthodox position--both as history chair at NYU and the only unmarried man under 60--for its grabbing power. It carries on to compound the intrigue with an attractive graduate student (the reaction being: he's the chair of history at a prestigious university--a sensitive position during a senistive time-and he goes for her? What?) and that constitutes the beginning. The end is similarly identifiable. The middle is, appropriately, in the middle. Beginning, middle, end: bam, it's a story.

But the reason "Girls!" is a good piece of narrative journalism and does not merely suffice as one is that there is an element of investigation--both of self and of the subject--wrapped up in the self-reflection. Judt is not just telling us about this one time he was chasing tail in 1992 and Oh Boy, is there a knee-slapper at the end of this one; we are going on the hunt for the Why with him.

And the reason "Girls!" is not just a good piece of narrative journalism but is in fact a great one is because when the piece departs from the immediate storyline we do not depart from Judt. After introducing his graduate student crush, he takes us straight to the 1960's as the beginning of the hunt. But we don't just go back to the 60's; we go back to Tony Judt, circa early 60's--hormones and all (and probably a way less cool pair of glasses). From there we can go on to cultural critique, indictment, and the typical Judt soapboxing, and when we start to wonder Hey, where'd that hot ballerina graduate student go, Judt drops an ancedote to bring the piece back to earth, to remind us what we're getting all red-faced about up in the zero-visibility cloud cover of abstract intellectualism. It makes a point, it tells a story, it leaves the reader's mind buzzing.

Oh, plus he totally gets the girl at the end.

Defense Forthcoming Posthaste

So that you all may read while I prepare my defense: www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/11/girls-girls-girls/

I never did understand how to construe the word "posthaste."

Personal Essay Responses

John: Your lede is a great piece of work because it plays with my expectations superbly in the space of a few words. It all centers around the phrase “leaving me with one elastic night that lords over my past like a thick, morning bayou mist.” Describing the night as “elastic” makes me understand how it stretches across that era of your life, and aside from it being a delightfully atypical use of the word, I am led to assume you'll ram the point home with a verb like “stretches” to build on the elasticity. But then, shock! For the night does not stretch but it “lords,” and the night takes on new dimensions of domination, transcending its elasticity to become nigh omnipotent. I love words. Also I am a complete sucker for intense descriptions like “thick, morning bayou mist.” Some people say descriptions like that are overwrought and allow the reader none of their own substitutive imagination, but I'd like to hear them say that when they read that phrase and their lungs feel like they're full of heavy damp air.

Myles: You write about something that few people are willing to confront, even though it is a reality throughout the country. The history of this country is so wrapped up in race that it often feels like it is impossible to grasp it, that it is too big to look at all at once—so it is better to just pretend it isn't there. Maybe we used to be a racially tense country, but that all got ironed out during the 60's, right? No—and because it is such a huge and hugely important subject, I'm glad you start out small, in your high school's locker room. You zoom us out some during the course of the piece, but by the end we're still dealing with relatively small parameters—your hometown and its neighbor. This is a good thing. We get no answers, even though you proclaim at the end that “Saint Joseph must change,” but hell, we're not going to get a systematic solution to American racial tensions in 900 words anyway. You've made us see, or reminded us of, the reality by the end of the piece, and that is sufficient.

There is a similar dynamic in the San Francisco Bay Area that I was reminded of while reading your article. San Francisco itself is on the Peninsula, on the west side of the Bay, and while it is of course a multicultural city the Peninsula taken as a whole is more affluent and more white—taking San Rafael on the other side of the Golden Gate into account, this is especially true. The East Bay, by contrast, is a relative concentration of poor blacks, especially in the cities of Richmond and Oakland. Even San Jose to the south, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has a prevalence of Asians and Indians. Anyway, I was once listening to the blabbers on some local morning radio talk show blab away about the blacks in the East Bay, and they were skirting a very obvious matter—that the East Bay blacks were by and large also the Easy Bay poor—until their astute guest simply came out and said so. The hosts, their pathological self-delusion shattered, could do nothing but agree.

Wow that was way longer than it should have been.

Andrea: In our workshop it seemed as though we came to a conclusion—or at least a group consensus of sorts—about everybody's piece. Our time focusing on your piece concluded with Marin urging you to narrow the focus of your piece down to your relationship with your father which you immediately resisted, saying you'd tried a dozen times already and would rather run from the prospect. I agree with her that the real story of your piece is that relationship, and I want to take this opportunity to echo her suggestion. This piece is about that relationship; it can't not be about it. Basically, if you're going to write about this experience that changed your entire relationship to pain (which is a phenomenal thing to say on its own, hence slanty-worded emphasis), you are going to have to address that paired relationship, the one with your father. This isn't a biography of him, so at least you don't have to take it on directly. But maybe try to catch a glimpse of it in your own peripheral vision (as we can sometimes see things more clearly that way) and then communicate that glimpse throughout your piece; stress how strongly your father's character is reflected in the way he calmly commands you to literally come back to life. Start with that scene, I say. Plunge yourself and your reader into the deep end from the very start.

Jessica: I was confused by your conclusion at first, and wondered if you left out the part where everything got fixed. But that's societal training, right? I'm not conditioned to accept when somebody simply accepts that they have a problem; it's got to get fixed. And therapy does that, right? This subtle subversion of our assumptions pervades your piece, and it is why I ultimately liked the piece. This story isn't really about your eating disorder, after all; it's about your experiences with therapy—namely, how it didn't work for you. Hell, you really own your problem; you figured it out yourself, and even tried working on it yourself. Figuring out that you had an eating disorder was the last thing you needed help with, and that really helps you to assert yourself over it and not make you a victim of your problem. It makes your conclusion possible, but maybe focusing less on the strict chronology of your disorder and more on your reflections on therapy from both a personal persepective and also as kind of a psychological institution would make your final verdict more convincing the first time around.

Simona: Your piece made me—a lifelong American citizen who had not been out of his country in any appreciable way until study abroad—feel the anticipation of coming to America. I already knew how it was going to end, of course, having grown up in this twisted country, hating all its faults and taking all the good parts for granted. Nevertheless, I couldn't help feeling like a five year-old Romanian child myself when reading your piece, and found myself relating to a sort of anticipation that I have never experienced myself. Without a doubt, your dialogue communicates these feelings most effectively. Maybe it is helped by the fact that from an early age we, as children of a nation of immigrants, are saturated with the archetypal immigrant's story and so my response is a trained one. Maybe I want a better sense of where you—and, by extension, I—are coming from, a sense of the place I am leaving behind. And of course I cannot wait to see how you heighten the tension and tragedy of the ring, and transform it into a truly powerful metaphor for your American experience.

Circumnavigational Process Writing

The idea for this piece sprouted entirely from the first line. That happens sometimes, you know; something sticks in your head and there's only one thing to do with it. Before you know, it's spiraling outwards into 900 words. Speaking of numbers, I have no idea how to treat them when writing. I've long thought they look better when written out, but when confronted with a number like 300,000 that takes so long to get through either way, I haven't a clue. Speaking of things looking better a certain way, I don't use quotation marks to signify dialogue, because I think they look weird and break up the flow of a sentence's aesthetics, so I use a capital letter instead to signify the start of dialogue. I also don't separate it out from the structure of the paragraph. I know it looks like a typo. I know it's easy to get halfway into a sentence of dialogue and not realize—I like it that way. People I consider Real Authors do this sometimes; admittedly, they do it better than I do. Maybe it's just a phase, maybe I'll grow out of it. Or get better at it. Some young people experiment with their sexuality while they're finding their place in the world; I swear off quotation marks.

It is appropriate that they were testing the air raid/tornado warning sirens while I was writing this, because that is one sound that I closely identify with my grandfather's era. Schoolchildren diving under their desks in grainy black and white, as if that would protect them from a nuclear blast. Would it be better, in that scenario, to just sit there patiently and confront your firey radioactive demise with a bit of dignity? As far as my own subjective perceptions of dignity go, my grandfather didn't die a very dignified death. He didn't go out in a blaze of pointless glory, but he sure wasn't going to let a quaint concept like dignity get in the way of staying alive as long as possible. Up until his very last, the very last thing he was going to do was accept that he was going to die. On the occasions when we could understand his speech, he spoke almost exclusively of leaving the hospital. He was always asking what car we came in, to gauge whether there was room for him and the specter that loomed overhead. He treated the hospital like a prison, which it was in many ways, but he also treated his ailments—and by extension, his life—as a prison of their own. I think it is regrettably natural to have a hard time accepting that that is one prison from which there is no escape.

My Grandfather's World Was Round

The hardest part of my grandfather's death was that my grandmother kept forgetting he was gone. It wasn't that either of us had to relive some painful re-realization of his death every time she mentioned how well he was doing in the hospital in a show of false optimism and I had to tell her There is no need for that anymore he is so many ashes in a box now, but rather it trivialized his death. His death became a piece of rote information to be memorized, a name to be crossed out of our phone books, a slight alteration to reality easily remedied with the stroke of a pen. It was helped by the fact that I did not have a very grandfatherly relationship with him beyond the typical coddling shown by grandparents to their young grandchildren, and as I grew older that relationship failed to mature in kind and so was left behind. It might be more accurate—clinical, but accurate—to say I was more the offspring of his daughter than I was his grandson.

It was easy, then, to think about his death more analytically, less as the end of his specific existence and more generally, as the end of a family era, the end of a narrative, not just for my family but for all American families. He was an exemplar of the long string of traumas our country went through and his generation experienced in the early to middle 20^th century. Raised during the Great Depression, he watched Pearl Harbor from a Hawaiian hillside, served in the bloody Pacific theatre, and raised four boys and two girls during the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement and 70's counterculture. These experiences imparted a subtle but deeply-rooted cultural pathology upon my grandfather's generation; the older he got, the more polarized and entrenched he became, until he was a man who was frugal and stubborn beyond all common sense. He insisted on running the same washwright until he was 86 and saved every cent (sometimes by not paying his taxes), even while his business was running a net loss of a thousand dollars a month, while he was living in a home worth a million dollars with three hundred thousand dollars in paper Exxon-Mobil stock (from before it was Exxon-Mobil) stashed under the mattress, safe from only the dimmest of thieves. All this while Parkinson's was slowly claiming his facilities—and of course he snubbed medicine. What trumped my grandfather's dedication to common sense and practicality—virtues that cemented my his generation in our cultural consciousness as one of the greatest—was his desire for independence and self-sufficiency.

While he was in the hospital, cards and letters flooded in from customers charmed by his tenacity, expressing a deep compassion approaching familial love—as if he was their grandfather, too. My mother's reaction stays with me: that This is his family. His customers—not his biological family at home. I saw then how easy it was for him to not be particularly grandfatherly toward me, when he had not been particularly fatherly toward his children, beyond simply providing for them.

He had wanted to be an island unto himself. But his generation's concepts of independence are outdated; we are all too interconnected now. The pioneer culture has gone global; it looks now to bring people ever closer together and hurdle the old obstacles of space and time. The persona my grandfather wanted to put forward—of a self-made, self-sufficient man, unfettered even by a commitment to family—proved to be an illusion skillfully woven over the years but also frayed by age and frank obsolescence. Men like that have not existed for a long time, and they will never exist again in the incarnations we are familiar with. My grandfather's drive for independence ultimately failed in this society because Independence, as a concept, is inextricably tied to economic reality—and he owed people money. He owed the government; he owed a business partner. We are conned from an early age or forced by birth or necessity to owe people money just in order to exercise basic human agency, and we are made to believe these debts are all-encompassing. And so they become so. I think my grandfather saw this. I believe he felt alienated by the system, as I do. But his response was to ignore it. I have seen what happens when it remains ignored; there is a mess to clean up. If you are lucky, like he was, you won't have to clean up your own mess—but those that come after you will.

What died with my grandfather was a set of beliefs, experiences, and a brief quiet struggle with his lot in life, which nobody ever consulted him on. He shared much in common with his generation's men, in mindset and qualities. The general consensus—right or wrong, it doesn't matter—is that men like him advanced this country while they were young and hinder it now that they are old, as is the rise and fall of generations dictated by history. As is also with so many things in history, the math boils down to a net neutral, a zero. He is neither to be commended or condemned merely for existing for a while and then stopping—ostensibly to go do something better with his time—as it is the least any of us can do. It is all we can do.