David Warsh: 'The Book of the Grotesque'
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
I returned to the office Saturday from a reporting trip to read a week’s-worth of the four English-language newspapers I follow. The fat was back in the fire, what with the so-far anonymous whistle-blower and President Trump’s July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,
Having watched a couple of hotly contended soccer games on television while in Europe I had been thinking about referees and what we expect of them.
What caught my attention in those couple of hundred pages of newsprint I read yesterday were the lofty claims in which the various stories were situated. I always wince at The Washington Post’s portentous flag: “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Financial Times’s “without fear and without favour” is suitably restrained. The Wall Street Journal’s presentation is the least heavily inflected; the NYT’s the most strident these days. {The NYT’s motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print’.’)
It was a two-page house ad in the Saturday Sept. 20 NYT, under the headline “The Truth Has a Voice,” that brought me up short. “Capturing the full story on every story we report takes diligence, persistence and an unwavering commitment to the truth,” the advert copy began.
In this case was the truth was that of gender equality. The ad stated, “New York Times journalists have long reported on the specific challenges and inequalities women face – and the strides women have taken towards change. We are committed to covering gender inequality, whether elevating women’s voices, debunking misconceptions or producing deeply-reported stories on pressing issues.”
It concluded, “Your support of today’s independent press is and investment in tomorrow. Thank you.”
On the page opposite, NYT gender editor Jessica Bennett put it this way: “We want gender coverage to exist across sections, platforms and subject matter. It is a lens through which we cover the world. It’s all part of our larger mission to pursue the truth, shine a light on overlooked stories and hold power to account.”
What struck me was the tension between competing views in the ad behind its definite and indefinite articles: “the” truth. vs. “a” lens. The NYT’s “Truth” campaign has bothered me from the beginning, because of the immodesty of its claims. The boast of “truth” goes far beyond what most journalists know themselves to be pursuing: a provisional, partial kind of truth, the best that can be said quickly.
The NYT ad yesterday reminded me of the prologue to Winesburg, Ohio (1919), by Sherwood Anderson, a book of 21 short stories I read as a copy-boy at the City New Bureau of Chicago, in 1964. I looked at the hundred-year-old book again this morning. It seemed as germane as ever. Winesburg is in the public domain; the prologue is 1,200 words long. I am appending it here:
. The Book of the Grotesque
The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer’s room and sat down to talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking about.
The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during his long life, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called “The Book of the Grotesque.” It was never published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The book had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn’t, I suppose, for the same reason that he never published the book. It was the young thing inside him that saved the old man.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer’s book.
David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
David Warsh: 'The Putin Show' is scarier than you think
The confrontation with Russia is becoming more alarming. Kathrin Hille, reporting from Moscow for the Financial Times, describes how cellphone operators are offering free ringtones of patriotic war songs, intended to evoke the defense of Moscow in 1941.
"The government-led drive, named Hurray for Victory!, comes as Moscow enters the homestretch in an impassioned and increasingly shrill campaign to commemorate the end of the Second World War.''
Meanwhile, The New York Times, as part of the rollout of its redesigned magazine, commissioned Soviet-born Russian novelist Gary Shteyngart to hole up for seven days at the Four Seasons Hotel on 57th Street in Manhattan with the main Russian television networks on three screens. In “‘Out of My Mouth Comes Unimpeachable Manly Truth:’ What I learned from watching a week of Russian TV ‘” Shteyngart concludes,
''When you watch the Putin Show, you live in a superpower. You are a rebel in Ukraine bravely leveling the once-state-of-the-art Donetsk airport with Russian-supplied weaponry. You are a Russian-speaking grandmother standing by her destroyed home in Lugansk shouting at the fascist Nazis, much as her mother probably did when the Germans invaded more than 70 years ago. You are a priest sprinkling blessings on a photogenic convoy of Russian humanitarian aid headed for the front line. To suffer and to survive: This must be the meaning of being Russian. It was in the past and will be forever. This is the fantasy being served up each night on Channel 1, on Rossiya 1, on NTV.''
And The Wall Street Journal has an essay by Andrew S. Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, an aide in various capacities in the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Weiss writes,
''[T]he Ukraine showdown is even scarier than you think: Mr. Putin is making it up as he goes along…. Almost single-handedly, [he] seems to be dragging much of the West into a New Cold War. He’s winging it, and when things get difficult, he tends to double down.''
Weiss describes an “extreme personalization of power” following Putin’s return as president, in 2012. As the Ukraine crisis intensified in late 2013 and 2014, Putin narrowed his circle of advisers and placed them on a war-footing, valuing loyalty over worldliness.
Blindsided when events in Kiev spun out of control last February and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Moscow, Weiss says, Putin had only himself to blame for having backed a leader who simply panicked when the going got tough.” So, on the “spur-of-the-moment,” Putin annexed Crimea.
''Why on earth would Moscow want to take over a money pit like Crimea at a time of slowing economic growth and plunging oil prices? On the fly, Kremlin propagandists came up with a mantra that they invoke to this day: the new authorities who replaced Mr. Yanukovych in Kiev were illegitimate because they had staged a coup d’état with Western backing,''
Putin followed his invasion – “the most audacious land-grab since World War II” – with a “sham popular referendum” and formal annexation. Then came more “damn-the-consequences, trial-and-error improvisation” to sow unrest in southeastern Ukraine: seizures of government buildings by Russian-speaking separatists, led by Russian “facilitators.” And after the situation escalated to outright war, Putin sought a ceasefire, obtained it on advantageous terms, and then violated it with an unexpected surge of fighting around Donetsk and Lugansk.
''Mr. Putin’s highly personalized, profoundly erratic approach to government tmay be even more dangerous than most Western governments are comfortable admitting. How can the Ukrainians or dogged western leaders such as {German Chancellor Angela} Merkel possibly search for a diplomatic solution if they are dealing with a leader who is making it all up on the fly? … Kiev doesn’t know what Mr. Putin wants; even Mr. Putin doesn’t know what he wants.''
Notice anything funny about this narrative? Putin is always the impulsive actor, never the one who is acted upon. He is never reacting to anything that NATO or the Americans do.
There is nothing here about NATO expansion. Nothing about the brief 2008 war with Georgia. Nothing about the continuing controversy about who fired the shots on Kiev’s Maidan Square, nothing about the phone call by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, taped by the Russians at the height of the crisis; nothing about the Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Black Sea. Nothing about the sanctions imposed on the Russians since the crisis began. Nothing about the Ukrainian army offensives in the southeast. Nothing about the Ukrainian vote to join NATO that may have triggered the January offensive. Nothing to note that all this is happening on Russia’s doorstep. Is it any wonder Putin is “doubling down”?
The scariest thing of all is that it may be Putin who has been telling the fundamental truth all along: NATO expansion in Georgia Ukraine is unacceptable to him and Russia is willing to go to war to rule it out. He’s been improvising, all right, but often in response to probes – Ukrainian, European, U.S. For a fuller argument along these lines, see Gordon Hahn’s illuminating commentary on ''The American Education of Vladimir Putin, ''by Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill, which appears in The Atlantic for February.
Meanwhile, a friend, who knows the territory well, writes,
''I think it was Napoleon who said your adversary gets a vote in all battles. Putin is a complex, dangerous, possibly paranoid man. We in the West act in ways consciously or unconsciously that can affect his actions. Could he still be winging it? At times, he could. I agree with Weiss that Yanukovich surprised, possibly astounded, Putin when he caved. I also think the oil price collapse and ruble meltdown caught him completely unaware. His finance people were not prepared and he fired them. Same for many of his agricultural folks. Was that winging it or just having to react to tough times? We in the US did not have to fire Bernanke to right the ship in 2009. There seems to be a purge mentality in Putin that comes from “Soviet man.”
Whoever started it, Putin is now thoroughly buttoned-up in a defensive posture. What’s more dangerous than a Russian bear? A wounded Russian bear.
.
David Warsh, a long-time economic historian and business columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.