"The English are not just Americans who talk funny. They are really different from us."
--Duncan Gordon
Harold Bloom, The Sterling Professor of Literature and Whatever at Yale reviews a book about English anti-Semitism in the New York Times Book Review, focusing on the place and importance of Shylock and Fagin, the Jew. The editors of the Times tell us Mr. Bloom is "The most prominent--and the most formidable--literary critic and commentator in America today."
I, regrettably, have to argue the irrelevancy of Professor Bloom, and by extension, the aging editors at the Times, and possibly the ensconced faculty at Yale, and the faculties of most universities, and while we are at it, let's include the voters of the Academy of Motion Pictures, the voters for the Emmy awards and most other judges of what is important and notable in forging opinion and values in this country of 300 million souls.
None of this is said with any sense of triumph or joy--My father, who was closer to Mr. Bloom's generation and who grew up blocks from where Mr. Bloom spent his formative years, reading Shakespeare with the same intensity, loved the Bard and found him just a relevant as Mr. Bloom does. The power, the violence, the depths of emotion and the capacity for betrayal, passion and the personal connection to daily life experience rang out to my father just as vibrantly as they have for Professor Bloom.
But not for me. Shakespeare's language was as remote as Middle English for me and not worth the trouble. The stories, powerful in their own time, could not be as artfully interlaced as today's editing and cutting back and forth in time and place can so effortlessly accomplish. Shakespeare, no doubt would have envied the freedom wrought by the capacity for film editing.
Dickens I could sink into and get lost, as a child. Totally absorbed in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, these were the only books which could immobilize me during my hyperkinetic youth. The language, the characters were living friends of mine, when I was ten, eleven years old.
But no more: Dickens no long seems worth the time, the characters too cartoonish, too unidimensional.
That I cannot read and re-read Dickens as I once did may be my own failing: Maybe, it's the loss of neurons and synapses on my part. But these works, wonderful as they were in their time and for generations which followed, no longer compare in importance, power or artistry to what's out there now.
Compare Oliver Twist to The Wire. (You knew I'd get to The Wire.)
Does Fagin the Jew really approach the odious mother of Namond? Here is a mother whose income is provided by the slinging of drugs on the corner by "The Game." First, it's her husband, Wey Bey, who is an important part of the "Muscle" in a drug organization, who provides for her.
And when Wey Bey, is imprisoned, she is relentless in pushing her son to grow into a soldier and to stay out of school and to stay on the corner. She spends her days on the phone, talking to unseen friends, making arrangements for parties, for trips to New York to catch Broadway shows. When she hangs up, she lambasts her son, Namond, for not being hard enough, for not being man enough to do his duty, which is to provide for her.
And oh, is she a master manipulator, first telling Namond how undeserving and worthless he is, then lavishing pricey retro sports jerseys on him, as if to say, I love you after all. The classic abuser who beats his wife, saying it's only because he's so in love with her, this mother sings the same song--I love you so much, but you disappointment me so, I lose control. Stunned, surveying his cornucopia, Namond asks why. I will not send you out in public in anything less than the princely threads which are your birthright. It isn't long before she flips again, systematically destroying every vestige of self respect to which Namond clings. Ultimately, Namond is only rescued through the astonishing intervention of Wey Bey himself, who wrests control of his son from his mother.
In one of the most extraordinary scenes in Western literature, the mother confronts Wey Bey in the visiting room of the Jessup maximum security prison where Wey Bey will spend the rest of his life. She upbraids Wey Bey for enabling her son to evade his duties as a soldier in the drug trade. Wey Bey asks her what is so essential about the path she has planned for her son. She replies, truthfully and unashamedly, she depends on the income from the corner. But she also asserts the role of the soldier in the game is the essence of what it means to grow up, to be a man, to stand tall. She insists Wey Bey has shown his worth his whole life by being hard and loyal to the rules of the game and to the organization which supports it.
And Wey Bey, whom we have known through four seasons of the story, as remorseless an executioner as any, a man who carried out orders without questioning, who has instructed others the hard thing to do sometimes is to not ask the obvious question, but just to do what you are told to do, to kill and not ask why. This man who has managed to get through his unforgiving world by not asking questions, looks across the table in the prison's visiting room, into the eyes of the mother of his child and asks, in his own idiom, words to the effect, "And who would do what I did, if he had any other choice?"
He has asked the one question which must be the one question which could destroy him as he lives out what remains of his life in prison. He asks it unblinkingly, without wasting emotion, in fact with just a flicker of a smile, as if the answer is so obvious, it's hardly worth discussing.
It's a moment of such layered meaning and revelation to be truly breath taking. Nothing in Shakespeare or Dickens can even approach it.
It is a moment in American literature which could not have occurred in British literature, at least not in seventeenth or nineteenth century British literature, because the Brits really revel in mystery, magic, the other worldly, the super worldly. They cannot separate religion from government, for Chrissake.
But Americans create their best literature when they look the real world unflinchingly in the eye. They do not need to pull a magic sword from an enchanted stone, nor do they need a Hogwarts, when they have the Mississippi.
Huck Finn looks across the raft at Jim, the slave, who Huck has been taught by everything the South holds dear, the proper action is to return Jim to slavery, but Huck looks into himself and knows he cannot do that to Jim, no matter how appalled he may be by Jim's outrageous desire to be free. And Huck accepts he'll go to Hell for it. Match that Dickens.
But now we have The Wire. And, strangely, it is the product of a committee--The Wire is literature which is a collaborative effort. There are different writers for various episodes, actors, directors, cinematographers, all the crew which bring characters and stories to life.
If there is any lesson in all this, it may be there is more power in the creative efforts of a community than in any individual.
I realize, I've just spoken heresy, but there it is.
And I realize, there are individual artists who do not depend on others for their fresh and untainted vision. Bob Dylan is only the most obvious example. The Noble Prize committee will never honor Dylan. But that just fits what we see from the Academy Awards, the Emmy prizes. Winning an award, is of course no achievement. It says something about the powers that be but nothing of the powers of creation which really animate our life on this planet.
There is no surprise those who hand the awards back and forth among themselves have not seen the shift from Shakespeare, Dickens, T.S. Eliot to the new. These are folks who have built careers, reputations, their own relevance on the masters of the past. It's understandable they would be blind to the new, to forces which displace them. Even the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures, the judges of the new collaborative art form are mired in an old literature, an art form which always has an eye on the bottom line. Ditto for the Emmys.
While I'm at it, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Jesus Christ, Superstar, and miniseries like Band of Brothers would all make my list for the new "Canon."
Band of Brothers, like every project involving Stephen Spielberg, is grievously injured by the mandatory descent into maudlin sentimentality, but the fact the scenes which mar the work cannot destroy it, only attests to its overall value. The nauseating scenes of Richard Winters wracked with regret at having to shoot a youth in an SS uniform were almost enough to make one lose faith, but, the series survives it. The scenes between the medic and the French nurse are not quite as much of a turn off, but they dim the luster of an otherwise brilliant work.
Of course, having just extolled the virtues of group effort, it is true, there is virtue to a single point of view and David Webster's Parachute Infantry provides an unsentimental and superior vision of the same experience. Webster's point of view however, is that of the earthworm in the trench and the Band of Brothers series has the virtue of being able to see the same story through different eyes, and to shift focus from the troops in the foxhall to higher levels of command.
Even the overwrought and mostly imaginary episode, "Why We Fight," depicting the liberation of the concentration camp is so powerful, it works beautifully. Strangely, the title is a bit of an oxymoron, given the point made early on in the episode, the soldiers who liberated the camps had no idea what the camps were, and had no interest in the monstrous evil which had been behind the enemy army which was trying to kill them. It was enough the Germans were trying to kill them. They hated the Germans enough to kill them. The "Why" was something that was pasted on later. The discovery of the camps and the evil those camps revealed only added luster to what they had already accomplished, but it had not been a motivator. There was no "Why" there.
But back to Shakespeare and the Brits. Yes, there has been a pervasive anti Semitism rife in British society, a particularly nasty variety because it is oh so genteel.
But, so what? The Brits, like Shakespeare, have become pretty irrelevant. They were made irrelevant by their own self consuming racism, cynicism and selfishness.
No country has ever, to my knowledge, fought a war like the American Civil War to liberate an underclass. Certainly not Britain.
The Brits fought some bloody wars in the name of God (the crusades, to name just one series) Country (you name it) but those were, like most wars, fronts for money and power interests.
There were British abolitionists, but there was never a British war like our Civil War. And there was never a British Civil Rights movement like ours. They simply never faced internal evil as directly and as thoroughly, in all parts of society, as we did, and as a result, they could not gather the strength we did from such an effort.
And that is where our strength really derives, in all those differences.
It's no accident we have a Kansas white woman and a Kenyan Black man producing the most interesting, if frustrating, political leader in the world.
We are not just Brits who talk funny, thank God.
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