Miss Lonelyhearts

On December 3, 1994 the comic Adam Sandler introduced his “Chanukah Song” on Saturday Night Live. It was so popular that, in perennial appearances during the holidays, Sandler performed the song with new lyrics, all of them about how Jewish-Americans have endured, and prevailed, during the Christmas Season, pointing out how American culture has been enriched by Jews.

When you feel like the only kid in town
Without a Christmas tree
Here's a list of people who are Jewish
Just like you and me

Those first two lines are what informs the rest of the song – the feeling of isolation from, and resentment towards, the prevailing – Gentile - culture. Ever since I first heard the song, I have had the overwhelming feeling that it was an anthem of pain – the outcry of a Jewish kid growing up in a goyim world.

One name you won’t find on Sandler’s list of Jewish people is Nathanael West, author of the novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.(1) Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in 1903, his short-lived career as a novelist (just nine years) was beset with misfortune. His second and fourth novels, among the best writing of the 1930s, sold fewer than 2,300 copies in his lifetime. When his fortunes at last turned in his favor and he was enjoying happiness in marriage and success as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he was killed in a car crash.

In his monograph on West, Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote:

West received little or no education in the Jewish religion, and although he was probably circumcised, he was never confirmed in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. During his years at Brown [University], West threw off what he could of his Jewishness, and suffered for the rest. "More than anyone I ever knew," his friend John Sanford later reported, "[he] writhed under the accidental curse of his religion." West had nothing to do with any organized Jewish activity on campus, hung around the snobbish Gentile fraternities, and was intensely anxious to be pledged and intensely bitter that he never was. "Nobody ever thought of [him] as being Jewish," a college friend has said, but apparently the Brown fraternities did.

West's first novel, The Dream of Balso Snell, seems to have been first written in college, but he rewrote it and in 1931 he managed to get it privately printed in a limited edition of 500 copies. The book listed "Nathanael West" as author and thus marked West's official change of name. He had spent much of his class time at Brown doodling "Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein," which was the name signed to his [Brown literary magazine] contributions, but even that had turned out to be not Gentile enough. West explained to William Carlos Williams how he got the name: "Horace Greely said, 'Go West, young man.' So I did." West's anti-Semitism was now considerable. He referred to Jewish girls as "bagels," and avoided them.

West's personal life in the East was no more successful than his literary career. Balso Snell was dedicated to Alice Shephard, a Roman Catholic girl who had gone to Pembroke College with West's sister Laura. He was secretly engaged to her from 1929 to 1932, then publicly engaged, but they never married, although West had bought a marriage license and carried it around with him for several years. His poverty was the explanation given out, but in Sanford's opinion the engagement foundered on the religious difference.

West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts is a unique achievement in American literature. By interjecting interior states into its action of a newspaper columnist exiled to providing advice to the lovelorn (or the otherwise disenchanted), West takes the reader in the opposite direction of contemporary “realistic” writing, away from Hemingway and toward European modes, from Baudelaire through Kafka to the Surrealists. The novel's protagonist, whose name is always “Miss Lonelyhearts,” becomes so overwhelmed by the misery expressed so clumsily in the pile of letters he receives every day that he becomes ill both physically and emotionally. Miss Lonelyhearts becomes an alter ego, it possesses him and, eventually, destroys him. It doesn't matter that, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, Miss Lonelyhearts overestimates the veracity of the letters to him and ascribes disproportionate importance to them. As the son of a Baptist minister, he is predisposed to regard the suffering in the letters, and the moralizing responses they provoke that he publishes in his column, as demonstrations of Christian love and forgiveness. So it is not exactly surprising that, just as he is attaining a kind of Christian grace in his attitudes toward his subject, it leads him directly to disaster.

But West does offer his hero a real chance for human - not divine - salvation in the character of his fiancée, Betty. He has a transcendant idyll with Betty at a country farm in which West's language becomes suddenly explicit and expressive of the physical beauties of the natural world and the conditions of living in its proximity:

He sat on the porch and watched her work. She had her hair tied up in a checked handkerchief, otherwise she was completely naked. She looked a little fat, but when she lifted something to the line, all the fat disappeared. Her raised arms pulled her breasts up until they were like pink-tipped thumbs.

There was no wind to disturb the pull of the earth. The new green leaves hung straight down and shone in the hot sun like an army of little metal shields. Somewhere in the woods a thrush was singing. Its sound was like that of a flute choked with saliva.

Betty stopped with her arms high to listen to the bird. When it was quiet, she turned towards him with a guilty laugh. He blew her a kiss. She caught it with a gesture that was childishly sexual. He vaulted the porch rail and ran to kiss her. As they went down, he smelled a mixture of sweat, soap and crushed grass.

It is, of course, terribly ironic that Miss Lonelyhearts should be undone by Christian love. West's efforts to divest himself of his Jewishness, his having studied medieval Catholicism at Brown and his aborted engagement to a nice Catholic girl, led him, in his last months in Hollywood, to achieve the comfortable life of a successful screenwriter (even while attempting, with The Day of the Locust, to exploit that experience through a fictional attack on Hollywood). He had at last married a nice Gentile woman and was on his way home from a camping trip with her when they both died on Ventura Highway. West's remains were returned to New York where they were buried in a Jewish cemetery.

(1) Sandler’s ever-expanding list of people who are Jewish includes David Lee Roth, James Caan, Kirk Douglas, Rod Carew, Dinah Shore, and The Three Stooges.

Adieu Philippine

Already, as early as 1964, John Simon could pronounce that "the New Wave is waning." The French New Wave, that broke upon the international film scene sixty years ago with the first films of Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), and François Truffaut (The 400 Blows), found itself, a mere five years later, petering out. Jacques Rozier, now 92, is four years older than Godard, who, if not the heart of the movement, remains its soul. Rozier made his feature debut in 1962 with Adieu Philippine, a film whose style is much less purposefully structured than either Chabrol's or Truffaut's, or indeed as purposefully anarchic as Godard's. It has a documentary, slice-of-life feel, following a young man on his last few days of freedom before his enlistment in the Army and being sent to Algeria. He is helped in his celebration by two young women, who are more than willing to enlist in the cause of his final fling.

The film opens, after informing us of all of the grands prix the film won in '62 and '63, with a title that reads "1960 sixième année de guerre en Algerie". Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini ) is working at a Paris TV station. He runs into two girls, Juliette (Stefania Sabatini) and Liliane (Yveline Céry), outside the station, anxious to see the band performing inside, and he escorts them quietly into the studio. Later, they meet, like all teenagers did, over sodas. Michel gets the girls a tryout for TV commercials that end after numerous takes fail to produce the desired results. With the day of his enlistment looming, Michel manages to get fired from his job (during a live broadcast, he ruins the shot by walking in front of the camera - and I thought I saw Jean-Claude Brialy behind the camera) and he leaves impulsively for Corsica. The girls follow him there.

Because so much of the film looks and, more noticeably, feels improvised, the lack of direct sound becomes a bigger impediment than it would otherwise have been. There is an air of exhilaration about the film. A good example are the scenes in which Michel, with three of his friends, buys an old car and takes it for a joy ride. It's the most literal illustration of a "joy ride" I've ever seen. Rozier indulges in some self-indulgent "filmic" touches that deliberately call attention to themselves, like the boys riding along vocalizing the melody of a waltz as the camera bounces from behind the car (where we can't hear them) to beside the car (where we can). They slow down to follow a pair of girls walking beside the road. Then we see them inside, one in the front seat and one in the back.

At one point, a scene of Juliette and Liliane walking along a Paris street (looking for a pay phone from which to call Michel) is interfered with by two men not in the film who are unaware of the camera recording them. Rozier left them in the film perhaps to remind us of how close to life he wanted to get. But as the actresses proceed along the boulevard, pretending not to notice the camera pointed at them from a passing voiture, plenty of passers by notice it. Filmmakers frequently used this type of shot, and still use it. But it looks especially spontaneous in Adieu Philippine because of a certain rawness of intent. The film was probably planned down to the smallest detail (François Truffaut certainly recognized this), but it feels so masterfully unplanned.

The scene shift to Corsica is abrupt and unsettling. At first, the holiday makers seem frantic in their holiday making. Michel locates the oily producer who stiffed them in Paris, but he escapes. But Corsica - those horrible stony beaches and the constant buzz of cicadas! Michel drifts leeward from Juliette to Liliane. The girls' friendship is momentarily tested but, in a night scene that opens the film's closing coda, they laugh at how seriously they have taken things. But suddenly Michel reminds them that he is serious, and how seriously he regards his last days of liberty, and the girls grow silent. The moment at last arrives when all the fun must come to an end. The mood of the film's final ten minutes is tinged with an unexpected sadness. It reminded me of the end of Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday, when the holiday is over and everyone gathers up their things and departs. The awful hurry of departure, that only allows time to reflect once one is safely aboard. Then, the ship is underway, and the girls run to the very end of the quay, waving their hats until they're too far away to be seen.

Thematically, a rough American equivalent to Adieu Philippine is Nancy Sivoca's 1991 Dog Fight, about a young man in San Francisco in 1963 on the eve of his departure for Vietnam. Cinematically, Rozier's film is far superior, and is completely lacking in the quite layered ruefulness imposed on the American film by its historical context (it is also the night before JFK's assassination). In 1960, the French had already quit Vietnam and although the Algerian War was a comparable disaster for France, Rozier's film conspicuously avoids any foreshadowing and wisely omits the heavy-handed scene ("3 years later") when River Phoenix limps back into Lili Taylor's coffee shop.

I read that one critic compared Adieu Philippine to Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. I see only a superficial resemblance. It reminded me, however, of a short novel by Cesare Pavese called The Beach. It, too, depicts the dalliances among a group of friends that ends on a wistful, plaintive note. Stanley Edgar Hyman called it "the comic ghost of a tragic love story." Adieu Philippine is unlike every other New Wave film I've ever seen, even if it hasn't the heft of Truffaut's or Chabrol's or Godard's first works. Perhaps it's unfair to hold Jacques Rozier to such a high standard. But I enjoyed the company of Michel and Juliette and Liliane and felt an unexpected pang at the film's fin.

I first heard of this film in 1976 when I found a copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films in a college library. Sadoul thought enough of it to include it in his survey. I thought then, 12 years before I joined the Navy, that the title disclosed an alluring subject - something to do with the allure of the Far East and perhaps an exotic woman. Now that I've at last - 45 years hence - watched the film, coincidentally sitting in the middle of a Philippine island province, perhaps I can finally admit that its allure worked, but that in fact there is no "Philippine" at all in the film except an almond with two kernels that inspires Liliane to demand a pledge from Juliette, since they both fancy Michel.(1) Alas, the title's allure was just wishful thinking on my part.


(1) "Noun philopena ( plural philopenas ) 1. A game in which a person, on finding a double-kernelled almond or nut, may offer the second kernel to another person and demand a playful forfeit from that person to be paid on their next meeting. The forfeit may simply be to exchange the greeting "Good-day, Philopena" or it may be more elaborate. Philopenas were often played as a form of flirtation.
2. The occasion on which a philopena is forfeited; the forfeit paid.
3. A nut or almond with a double kernel, as used to set a philopena."

He Said, #Me Said

Sigmund Freud is one of those intellectual mountains that have to be scaled before anyone can call themselves an educated person. He is also one of my heroes. Whatever has happened to his myriad "theories" - which are nothing but empirical postulations based on extensive and documented study - about human psychology in the eighty years since his death, psychoanalysis is an important and legitimate field of scientific research largely thanks to Freud. Of course, it was not as Science that Freud's writings first attracted my interest almost 40 years ago. My mother had been the beneficiary of several years of psychoanalytic treatment, for reasons that are related to the point I wish to make.

In his great book, The Tangled Bank, Stanley Edgar Hyman examined four men, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, James Frazer, and Sigmund Freud, and their achievements as imaginative thinkers, as creative artists whose great leaps in the dark contributed immensely to our understanding of humanity and our history. Whatever their specific scholarly and scientific contributions to their various fields, they were brilliant writers - managing to communicate in clear German and English prose the most complex concepts and ideas.

One of the hallmarks of a genius is his ability to recognize when he has made a mistake and to at least attempt to correct it. One of the first theories put forward by Freud was based on the analysis of dozens of subjects, women suffering from some form of neurosis (or "hysteria" as it was called at the time). Freud discovered that one of the consistencies between almost every individual case was the sexual abuse of the women at an early age by a male family member, usually the father. The abuse was suppressed by the child, made into a great lifelong secret until the effects of its suppression, a traumatic childhood event, resurfaced in the form of neurotic mental problems in later life.

Freud called his theory, "The Seduction Theory" and his research into the subject was published in 1896. Not long after he posited this theory, however, Freud decided to amend it. He decided that the claims of sexual abuse made by many of his female patients were actually admissions of sexual fantasy: that the women had childhood fantasies of a sexual nature that they later regarded as inappropriate, suppressed them, and that, when the women reached maturity, these fantasies resurfaced as remembered events in their childhood.

Freud's alteration of his original theory has been interpreted by some scholars and psychologists as an act of moral and intellectual cowardice. They argue that Freud knew that his Seduction Theory would cause enormous controversy in genteel European society, especially among men who were fathers of daughters. They argue that, faced with an awareness of the controversy that his feminine neurosis theory might bring about, Freud decided to backtrack and redefine the basis of his theory.

The change in Freud's theory was tied to his broader "Oedipal Theory" that applied to both women and men. Children engage in sexual fantasies that involve the adults in proximity to them. With boys, it is the mother who invariably becomes their first object of sexual desire, and it affects their whole sexual lives. One-third of the subjects in his initial Seduction Theory study were men. But Freud then argued that it was the mother, not the father, who was the seducer, in fact or in fantasy, for both infant boys and girls. The simple fact that his theory was named for the character from classical Greek drama reveals the extent to which Freud's theories were embraced as confirmation of existing poetic concepts. Artists - poets, playwrights and novelists, painters, sculptors and architects, even composers - found their oldest understanding of human behavior reinforced by Freud's rich metaphors and symbolism.

With the establishment of women's rights and the rise of Feminism, however, the most serious challenges of Freud's theories have come to the forefront. And his alteration of the Seduction Theory, and its underlying motivation, has come under serious scrutiny. Some now see Freud's suppression of evidence of sexual abuse by the father as simply his reluctance to challenge the patriarchal structure of turn-of-the-century European society. His theories that sexuality and sexual desire (the "libido") were at the root of nearly all human behavior had been controversial enough. Now that his theories were becoming established as scientific fact, he didn't want to further threaten the status quo. So he came up with a different interpretation of the cause of adult neurosis.

Whatever the true reason for the change of Freud's theory, accusations of sexual abuse are by now taken much more seriously. The #MeToo movement has effectively ended the careers of powerful men - from A-List actors to Hollywood Mogul producers to senators - based on accusations alone, on what "She said." Some of the critics of the movement, forgetting about the impact of this Moment in our sexual history, wonder why the accusers waited so long to bring their charges forward, citing the legal statute of limitations. The statute exists because eyewitness testimony is fraught with errors even when it is fresh in the memory. Over time, especially over several years, such testimony is subject to further errors from the interplay of memory and experience.

Yesterday a woman who has brought charges of sexual assault against a nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court asked that before she subjects herself to a public hearing in which the accused will be present, the FBI should investigate her claims. Not to corroborate her story but to establish her veracity. According to the protocols of the #MeToo movement, the nomination should be withdrawn and another candidate selected. If the career of Minnesota senator Al Franken could have been ended by accusations of misconduct alone, then why is this Supreme Court nominee still under serious consideration? Of course the process has become "politicized" - it was politicized from the beginning. Everything is politicized now. Justice Kavanaugh's nomination is toast. Stick a fork in it.

[Postscript September 21, 2018.

Since making the above post I have heard two arguments in support of Justice Kavanaugh. The first came from a group of "Republican women" who were careful not to denigrate the woman making the accusation of attempted rape against Kavanaugh, but attacked "the Democrats" for waiting until the eleventh hour to produce her letter. Then they said that every man shouldn't be held responsible for acts they committed when they were 17, inferring that attempted rape is an act that all men commit at that age.

The second argument was that simply giving Kavanaugh's accuser a hearing will encourage other women to come forward with similar accusations every time a man is nominated or runs for public office, inferring that the accuser is an opportunistic liar

My answer to both of these arguments is NOMINATE/VOTE FOR WOMEN ONLY. They can be trusted because they don't have penises.]