I have sat through the cursing of Reagan, the cursing of Thatcher, the cursing of privatisation, the monorail, the uranium industry, the woodchipping industry and, especially, the cursing of ‘America’. America as the ‘hot bed’ – hot bed of racism, hot bed of violence, hot bed of religious fundamentalism, hot bed of world pollution, nuclear threat …
‘I only recently found out what a hot bed is,’ I remember saying recently at a dinner party in a Political Friend’s home, hoping that would pass for my contribution to the collective cursing of America.
No one took the slightest interest in what a hot bed was and the look of the guests implied that I was not giving enough fervour to the cursing.
Part of this particular curse had to do with a collection of signatures and bike ride against US oppression in South America. I thought for a dreadful moment that I was going to have to ride a bike dressed up as Uncle Sam and be pelted by bystanders as I rode by. As I listened I realised that you could buy your way out of the bike ride by sponsoring a rider.
It seems that we were being asked to give money to the hostess and she did the riding for us and gave the money to the cause.
The other guests were merrily signing up and paying money to the cause, probably to buy weapons for some group or other out in the jungle thousands of kilometres away from the dinner party. As the clipboard with the sponsorship sheet on it came closer I excused myself and went to the toilet.
In the toilet I stood there relieving myself and staring at a tasteful Cuban poster of a woman with an AK-47 rifle in her hand.
Over the years I had seen that poster in many houses.
Now, I am against US oppression anywhere or anyone’s oppression anywhere. But at that moment I was more against being forced into a political act at a dinner table than I was against oppression. Why wasn’t I back at the club?
By the time I returned to the table the cursing seemed to have subsided but the hostess looked down the clip board and said, ‘Now, has everyone signed?’ She looked up, looked back to the clipboard and looked at me. ‘No, you were out of the room.’
To sign it would make me a wimp in my own eyes. To not sign it would cause a fissure in the dinner party and I would be a wimp in their eyes. I know we are told not to worry about ‘what other people think’ but I’ve found it useful to take this into consideration and at least to confound what other people think of you.
I read it intently as if I was simply formally following my father’s advice about the small print. It said, ‘Write your name clearly in capitals and sign in the space provided.’ There was a column for the amount of the donation.
Pen in hand, I paused. ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I only recently, after all these years, found out what hot bed means.’
This time the dinner table looked at me en bloc. I put down the clipboard and pen, as if having finished my deed of solidarity, while I explained what a hot bed was, enjoying what was probably to be my only moment of attention at that dinner party.
‘A hot bed is a seed bed with a layer of manure on top of it. Over the manure is placed a layer of glass or plastic to cause artificial fermentation and heat.’
Having given this information, I wiped my mouth and put my napkin over the clipboard and moved it and my plate as if that was now all done and finished with.
The dinner party conversation made nothing of the hot bed definition and moved on impatiently to other, deadly serious matters.
To ensure that the clipboard finally moved out of my evening I helped clear the table and on one of my trips to the kitchen I placed the clipboard in the laundry out of harm’s way.
Over coffee and Noble Rot Riesling in the other room someone said to the hostess, ‘How many sponsors have you got now?’
She said, ‘I’m not sure. I’ll count …’ She looked around for her clipboard. ‘Where’s the sheet?’ she said, looking directly at me.
I shrugged and looked about me as if the clipboard was suspended somewhere just nearby in midair. She gave me a bad look and went off in search of it.
She came back with it, saying, ‘I don’t know how it got to be in the laundry.’ I suppose that she looked at me when she said this but I was not looking at her or at anyone. I was reading the vintage history of the Noble Rot.
She counted up. ‘Seventeen,’ she said, and then frowned and looked back to me. ‘And you make eighteen – I thought you’d signed?’
She handed the clipboard back to me, again with the casual assumption that I would be glad to sponsor gun-running to some rebels I’d never met. What if I signed and lost my US visa? But what if I didn’t sign and was never invited into the real world of families and friends and political discourse ever again?
I pretended not to have a pen and went over to their writing desk, saying, ‘Would there be a pen over here somewhere?’
The host said there should be a pen there somewhere.
I shuffled papers while waiting for the conversation to move on again. I read their American Express bills and, after a proper lapse of time, left the pen and the clipboard, unsigned, there on the desk and rejoined the dinner party, hoping that the courteous after-dinner waiting time of one-hour-after-coffee would pass quickly and I could catch some late piano bar.
Before the courteous-one-hour was up, the family’s six-year-old girl, named Tom, came out from her bedroom, sleepy-eyed.
She bumbled about for hugs and after the adults had paid their appropriately excessive attention to the only child of the family she went to the writing desk. But her mother obviously felt that even more attention should be paid to the six-year-old and asked Tom to show everyone how well she could read by reading out the names on the sponsorship sheet. Tom read out the political preamble and the print-your-name-clearly-and-sign-in-the-space-provided instruction and then went on to read the names.
I stared deeply into my Noble Rot.
‘Helen,’ Tom said, pointing at Helen, ‘David,’ she said, pointing at David, and so on around the room.
Finally, she pointed at me. ‘He’s the only one not on it.’
Again the clipboard came to me. This time I put it, unsigned, on the floor and gradually edged it well under the sofa, where it might be to this day.
Oppression may have triumphed because of my foolish, fatal act of social perversity. But I felt that to curse without good faith could bring down on me something far worse, and given the fragility of my life, I wasn’t going to risk that.
The Rich are Different – the Story of a Literary
Quotation and Advice on Knowing the Rich.
My Magazine Sub-Editor Friend called me at the club to check on the correct wording of the following quotation: ‘The rich are different from you and me’, because she said that I knew about F. Scott Fitzgerald, had shaken the hand that knocked down Ernest Hemingway, and was myself a friend of the rich.
She was editing a piece that used this quotation.
‘Is it “different from you and me” or did Scott Fitzgerald say “different from us”?’ my Sub-Editor Friend asked.
I knew in a vague way that there was something strange about this quotation and I asked for time to recall what it was and to do some checking on it in the club library.
One thing that is strange about it is that it is usually quoted as a couplet. The first part of the couplet, ‘The rich are different …’ (which is from Scott Fitzgerald originally), together with a second companion statement, ‘Yes, they have more money’, which is attributed to Hemingway.
What is also strange about it is that it is remembered not so much because Fitzgerald said half of it but because Hemingway had him say it in a story.
And there are two quotations, independent of each other but related.
Fitzgerald said the first part of the quotation in a barely-remembered short story called ‘The Rich Boy’, published in 1926. In the story the narrator says, ‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.’
‘Thanks,’ my Sub-Editor Fri
end said.
It is more complicated than that, I told her before she could hang up.
Hemingway attributed something like it to ‘Scott Fitzgerald’ in the very well-known story ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, published in Esquire in 1936 and later made into a film (1952), in which the quotation does not appear.
I put Scott Fitzgerald in inverted commas because the Hemingway story is fiction but with a character called Harry talking about a Scott Fitzgerald who writes. This character’s name changed to Julian in later versions but more of that later.
Hemingway’s character says, ‘He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me”. And how he said to Scott, “Yes, they have more money”.’
A very small point: the quotation does not really begin the Fitzgerald story.
Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald hold on to the term very rich because they were themselves, or thought of themselves, or wanted to be thought of, as ‘rich’, if not very rich, but ‘very’ is lost in the now often-used quotation.
The Hemingway story is about a writer (very much a Hemingway style of man) ruined by a rich wife.
‘Well, thank you,’ said my Sub-Editor Friend.
It’s more complicated than that, I said to her before she could hang up.
Scott Fitzgerald was hurt by the use of his name in the story and wrote to Hemingway.
‘Please lay off me in print … when you incorporate it in a book would you mind cutting my name … Riches have never facinated [Fitzgerald was a poor speller] me, unless combined with the greatest charm and distinction.’
Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald saying that he would use whatever material he damned well chose to but grudgingly agreed to change the name.
However, the story, unchanged, next appears in Best Short Stories of 1937.
When Hemingway’s editor at Scribners, Max Perkins, requested a deletion of Fitzgerald’s name from the story which was about to appear in book form, Hemingway shortened it to ‘Scott’. Perkins pushed him and it was deleted completely when The Fifth Column and The First Forty-nine Stories appeared in 1938. The character became Julian. Readers who know about the background of the two authors know that Julian is Scott Fitzgerald.
Years after the story appeared, Hemingway wrote to a friend saying, ‘Poor Scott: and didn’t he know that the man in The Snow’s of Kilimanjaro [Hemingway couldn’t punctuate] would have spoken of him, or thought of him, exactly as he, Scott, would have mentioned actual things, cars and places?’
I am not sure what Hemingway meant by that, except that he felt it was a fair presentation of what Fitzgerald ‘would have said’ or maybe a fair presentation of what a character in a Hemingway story would have thought Scott said?
However, in 1955, fifteen years after Fitzgerald’s death, nineteen years after the story was written, Hemingway still thought about the story and considered revising the story again to put Scott’s name back in.
‘Thanks, it’s been interesting,’ said my Sub-Editor Friend.
It’s more complicated than that, I told her before she could hang up.
Some claim that Hemingway didn’t ever say the second piece of the quotation anyhow.
According to Max Perkins, Hemingway was once at lunch with him and Mary Colum. Fitzgerald wasn’t there. Hemingway said, ‘I am getting to know the rich.’
Mary Colum had then retorted, ‘The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.’
Who is Mary Colum?
Mary and Padraic Colum were writers and critics, intimate friends of James Joyce, and Max Perkins.
It might be, then, that Hemingway lifted the remark from her, attributed his statement, or the spirit of his statement, to Scott and gave himself Colum’s good line.
In its justice, legend has given the quotation to Scott but, with the amorality of legend-making, has deprived Mary Colum of it (although she gets the line back in literary history if not in literary legend).
I don’t think yes-they-have-more-money is a very insightful remark anyhow, even if acceptable for a lunch table laugh. I think many of us would make the same joke if confronted with the line, ‘The rich are different’, and I think some people who do make the joke are not alluding to the literary quotation but are reinventing it. The implication is that money is the only thing that makes the rich different from you and me. I don’t think this is true.
Are the very rich ‘different’? I think that ‘having more money’ – if you have enough ‘more money’ – can make you different. Not necessarily more companionable, or more loveable, but certainly more powerful.
It also makes them different because it gives them access to experiences to which many of us do not have access. It isolates them from other experiences. It releases them from some of the human conditions. Scott Fitzgerald is also correct in saying that money combined with other human characteristics also changes those characteristics – qualitatively – generosity, for example, or a passion or an obsession of a rich person, because it can be pursued to the full, can itself become a unique manifestation and become a matter of great public curiosity. Hemingway himself, in the story ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, believes that a rich woman could ‘ruin’ a male writer. The story in part is about the destructiveness of wealth. Fitzgerald’s observation about the rich from his near-forgotten short story is more complex than the Hemingway–Colum wisecrack (although it is about the ‘born’ rich – another category altogether).
Fitzgerald in his nearly forgotten short story goes on, ‘They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them …’
‘Thanks a lot,’ said my Sub-Editor Friend.
‘One more thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘If you ever want to backtrack the Andy Warhol quotation about fame you may be interested to learn that Scott Fitzgerald said in 1925, “Nowadays … almost everyone is a genius, at least for a while …” ’
‘Thanks – must go now.’
I went into the club bar to tell my fellow members the story of the quotation.
The Protocols of Art.
The Book Launch
At a book launch remember that authors are in fact launching their previous book. It is no good assuming you’re safe because you cannot be expected to have read the book being launched. When you meet the author he or she will expect you to say great things about his or her previous work. You will find the titles of the author’s previous work in the new book opposite the title page under ‘Other books by the author’.
At a book launch remember that you will meet authors ostensibly there to honour their colleague but who are quietly or not so quietly launching their most recent book. Anything you can say which is comically derisive about the author being launched will be hugely appreciated by these authors. They are there to steal praise away from the book being launched, to deflect the public gaze.
Having Something to Say
It is fashionable to suggest that a work of art demonstrates some aesthetic theory with the suggestion that theory after all is more interesting than art or is an art itself. If you don’t know any theory, practise saying, ‘I like the hermeneutical gaps.’ You can be daring and suggest that theory is merely belated description of what all good advanced art is already doing.
It is fashionable to say that a work is something else other than what it obviously is, so a film is likened to a comic strip. A painting is called a narrative. A dance performance is praised for its architectural qualities. All artists, regardless of art form, currently want their work to be likened to a video clip.
It is a good thing to say to artists that they ‘take risks’. It means that they have risked making fools of themselves but you avoid saying whether they have.
With well-meaning ideologically motivated art you can say, ‘You’ve made a really powerful statement’, which means that they may not have made art but they got the ideological
line right. Or you can say, ‘Oh God, I know exactly how you must have felt.’ Better still, look into their eyes, maybe even take their hand, and say, simply and quietly, ‘You are very brave.’
It is still accepted as praise in most circles to say, ‘The work forces us to inquire into the roots of our bourgeois hypocrisy.’
Artists divide into those who want to make pure art and those who ‘have something to say’. Those who say they are making pure art really think they are ‘saying something’. Having ‘something to say’ is a bit suspect but ‘saying something’ is acceptable. It is better if what is being said is not spelled out – that is called having a sub-text. Everyone knows that art is not supposed to ‘give answers’ to Big Questions. But it is still the secret wish of artists to be seen as ‘having a few answers’.
When artists say, ‘Let’s cut the crap – what do you really think of my work?’, they are lying. That is a trap. If you fall for it you will be abused or physically beaten. As The Edinburgh Review in 1825, and Gertrude Stein, said, ‘Praise, praise, more praise.’
Authors
Authors are incurable romantics and feel that the art of writing is still too mysterious to talk about and they go to many festivals and conferences to say this. They still pose as solitary and reclusive but are always looking for a good time and the company of journalists. They are anti-commercial but need money, lots of it, and believe that their writing should speak for itself but they seem to give endless interviews.
Theorists (see later) see authors as curable romantics, to be demystified, even dethroned. Fiction can only exist, the theorists say, within a context of discourse – that is, fiction only makes sense when explained by criticism and theory (see later). Criticism and theory are not to be confused with book reviewing (see later). Serious authors are simply those who give pleasure to a certain minority sensibility.
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