Public Works

Hannah Arendt distinguished between three forms of active life.

1. Labor. These are the everyday chores that one needs to do to sustain life: procuring food, sweeping the floor, brushing your teeth.

2. Action. This is political activity, coming together in public to decide who we are as a community.

3. Work. Work isn’t the same thing as labor because the effort is directed toward making something that’s durable such as the Washington Monument or a dog house.

Arendt was critical of modern capitalist democracies and communist countries because in her view they both devalued work and reduced politics to the management of labor. We busy ourselves with producing, and even things that should be durable, such as schools, roads and houses, become merely functional and expendable. No flourishes are added because you’re just going to throw it away anyway. She believed such an overwhelming emphasis on the mundane and everyday robed modern society of meaning and a sense of belonging and purpose.

The ancient Egyptians had the pyramids. The ancient Athenians had the Acropolis. The ancient Druids had Stonehenge. The ancient Mayans, Aztecs and Incas had their grand public works projects. Cambodia had Angkor Wat. Arendt also includes works of literature, music and art. All of these things help shape a society, give it form, and inform citizens of who they are.

We have our works, too, despite the modern devaluation. When I was living in West Virginia, I often felt deep appreciation for the Civilian Conservation Corp when I visited one of the state parks and saw all of their enduring efforts, the cabins, the walkways, the administration buildings, picnic pavilions. The structures were far more than merely functional. They were meant to enhance our enjoyment of the parks and to encourage us to visit frequently. The massive effort that it took to create the Mist Trail in Yosemite is like that. We allocated the resources and countless workers spent months and years to built it so that year after year thousands and thousands without any special mountain climbing skills could get up there and see the view. Why? Because that’s who we are. We appreciate the experience so much that we’re willing to do that even though the end result wasn’t practical or necessary. It wasn’t about making anyone rich or putting food on the table. Walking up the Mist Trail is like going on a pilgrimage. The Golden Gate bridge isn’t merely functional. It’s a thing of beauty. It inspires awe. And now, hardly anyone could image San Francisco without it. I think the effort to reach the moon was a grand public works project. The Cold War might have spurred us on, but who was thinking of the Russians when they watched Neil Armstrong make his giant leap? It was a spiritual event that brought us together.

I suspect Trump’s wall is tapping into this cultural need and urge among his base. It might not be practical, but in their view, it will be a lasting monument to who they think we are as a society. Sadly, it would be a monument to racism and nationalism. It would say, “We are over here, and you are over there. Now stay over there.”

I don’t want to see the wall built, and if it is built, I think we’ll need to take it down at some point in the future. But maybe there’s another more positive grand public effort that will help define us and give us a common goal.

Rachel Carson, Not Silent

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was far more than a best seller. It was a cultural event that helped change the way we view technology, the application of science and potential long-term risks of new seemingly helpful products. Carson not only warned us that if we destroy the environment, we will destroy ourselves, she also taught us that there was a powerful short-term profit motive driving a lot of scientific research. She was not a radical who wanted us to give up modern conveniences. Carson thought we should look at what we were doing in a sober, rational way.

American Experience: Rachel Carson not only summarizes Carson’s most famous book and its impact, it also examines Carson’s life filled with triumphs and tragedies.

Carson, born in 1907, was a promising and ambitious student at a time when girls were expected to find a husband, have children and take care of the home. Her first love was writing, and when she went to college, she majored in English, but a trip to the ocean kindled a love for marine biology and she changed majors. She finished her masters in biology and began working on her PhD when her father died. It was up to her to support her mother and a couple of younger siblings. So she dropped out of school and started looking for a job.

Luckily, Carson found one that was well suited to her. She was hired on at the United States Fish Commission, which later was combined with other departments to form the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Carson was to read scientific studies, correlate the findings, and write papers and pamphlets for a general audience. The job combined her love for writing and her love of science.

Carson was able to support herself and her family, but she soon had the urge to reach a wider audience. She submitted science articles to popular magazines, and she eventually wrote a book, Under the Sea, published in 1941. World War II was getting underway, and the reading public wasn’t much interested in Carson’s book, so it sold less than 2,000 copies.

Ten years later, Carson published another book, The Sea Around Us. She feared the Cold War would undermine interest in her new book just as war had overshadowed her first effort. However, that turned out not to be the case. Some of the chapters were published in the New Yorker, and The Sea Around Us landed on the best seller list and stayed there for months. Under the Sea was then reprinted, and it, too, landed on the best seller list. Carson had two best sellers at the same time.

The royalties afforded Carson the ability to quite her job and focus her attention on writing books. She also bought a vacation home on Southport Island, Maine, a little cottage by the water so she could examine sea life more closely. Dorothy and Stanley Freeman were her neighbors on the island, and they became friends. Carson had never dated, never married and was not a social person. She was lonely, so the Freemans provided much needed companionship. Carson became especially close to Dorothy, and the two women began exchanging letters two and three times a week when Carson was not on the island. Many of them were basically love letters full of expressions of affection and tenderness.

There was another book in 1955, but then Carson was delivered some serious blows. The mother she had supported and lived with for decades died, and then a niece died at 30 from pneumonia leaving behind a five-year-old boy. Just when Carson was finally free from her role as caretaker, she had to take on the responsibility of another family member in need. Carson adopted the little boy. Carson worried she wouldn’t have the time or energy to write, but her concern about the use of DDT inspired her to keep working. However, just as she began writing Silent Spring, Carson was diagnosed with cancer. She was battling the disease all through the writing process, the publication and the subsequent media attention. She died in 1964, leaving her then 12-year-old grand nephew orphaned for a second time.

Gatsby Figures

Maureen Corrigan is a literary critic for the Washington Post and NPR. Her book So We Read On is an examination of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and its rise to fame. The book is informative and entertaining from start to finish.

As you might expect, Corrigan offers some literary analysis of The Great Gatsby. Many think of The Great Gatsby as a tragic love story involving rich people, and that’s true enough, but there is so much more. Gatsby was a poor boy who strived to better himself, like Benjamin Franklin. In his estimation, he was a nobody from nowhere, and he wanted to reinvent himself. As a young man, he fell for Daisy, a rich society girl who represented all the things Gatsby wanted to be. Gatsby’s adoration of Daisy was never simple or merely about romantic or sexual attraction. There was a great deal of ambition mixed up in Gatsby’s desire for Daisy. Corrigan reminds us that Fitzgerald does not describe Daisy as a great beauty. She isn’t remarkably intelligent, witty or insightful. She isn’t bubbling over with charm. So what does she have? A voice full of money. She doesn’t have to strive because she, along her husband Tom, were born in the club, the very club Gatsby wants or thinks he wants to belong to.

This is what drives him, and there’s something askew, not quite right about this representation of the American dream. There is something desperate about Gatsby. The conspicuous spending. The excess. His shady business dealings. But no matter how hard Gatsby tries, he’s always left on the wrong side of the bay where the new money people live. Daisy and Tom are always out of reach. Corrigan insists several times in her book that the green light isn’t as important as Gatsby’s reaching out for it. And what’s between him and that green light? Water, lots of water. Gatsby loses himself in his ambition and ends up dead in his swimming pool, something he thought and hoped was a symbol of his arrival.

And was being in that club really worth it? Gatsby was envious of Tom, but who was he without the money he never earned? He was an insensitive, racist moron who treated women like his playthings. And who was Daisy? She was someone who would run down her husband’s mistress and let someone else take the blame. And we shouldn’t forget that Jordan was a cheat. The Valley of Ashes reminds us that great wealth and high living comes at a great cost, and the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg represent an absent god who is powerless to do anything about the injustice. Myrtle is like the female counterpart to Gatsby. She is so desperate to escape poverty that she forgets who she is. She throws herself at Tom in the same way Gatsby does for Daisy. And this destroys her. Many think the novel celebrates wealth, money and luxury, but the story is actually a scathing critique of the rich. When we’re told Tom and Daisy are careless people, that’s far from a complement.

Nick survives to tell the tale because he floats effortlessly between these factions. He has no money, but he was born in the club just like his cousin Daisy. And he reminds us of that right at the beginning when he tells us about the wisdom imparted by his father, that stuff about how not everyone had the same advantages he has had. Nick might live in a small cottage, and he might still be working his way up the ladder on Wall Street even though he’s almost thirty, but he’s always welcome at the Buchanans. Corrigan tells us that contemporary readers pick up on clues that Nick might be gay, and she sees no reason not to give that idea some thought. Nick might be enamored by Gatsby more than Daisy ever was. There’s a scene in which Nick ends up in the bedroom of another man after a night of drinking, and there’s another scene in which an elevator boy tells him to keep his hands off the lever.

Corrigan points out The Great Gatsby has elements of hard boiled fiction and film noir. There’s Gatsby’s connections with gangsters and bootlegging. His name might have reminded readers in the ’20s of a slang term for a gun. And there are three brutal deaths in the novel. Like Sunset Boulevard, the story is told in flashback, and the main character will end up dead in a swimming pool. Gatsby is already dead on page one.

So why would Fitzgerald write such a story? Well, he was sort of a Gatsby figure himself. His family always had enough money to live well, but they were not quite in the club. Fitzgerald went to fancy schools where he never quite fit in. Then he went to Princeton, and he wasn’t a social success there either. He was reportedly an unpopular boy, and one of the reasons might have been he tried too hard, making him appear weak and needy. There was also a rich society girl who turned him down because he didn’t have enough money.

The Great Gatsby was never a popular novel in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. It only sold about twenty thousand copies. Scribner gave it two runs, but the second printing never sold out, so if you wanted a copy in the ’30s , you had to order direct from Scribner and a book would be retrieved from their basement storage room. Fitzgerald made his money primarily through the sale of short fiction to magazines in the twenties. He ended up broke, alcoholic and nearly forgotten, and his wife Zelda was confined to a mental hospital. His last royalty check came to about seventeen dollars, and someone did a little digging and found that most of this money came from sales to Fitzgerald himself. He sometimes ordered copies of his books for friends. At some point in the ‘30s, he read about an amateur production of a play based on The Great Gatsby that was to be performed at a nearby college. Fitzgerald showed up in his finery only to discover the theater was locked. The play was to be staged in an upstairs hallway, and aside from Fitzgerald, only the young actors’ mothers came out to watch. When he died at forty-four, his funeral was almost as sparsely attended as Gatsby’s.

So how was Fitzgerald revitalized? Well, it started almost immediately after his death in 1940. Fitzgerald had been part of a circle of literary friends, and many of them still had influence. They began rereading his stuff and giving him high marks in newspapers and magazines. Then World War II broke out, and someone had the idea that soldiers should be given books to read. They began producing inexpensive and portable paperbacks that were meant to be passed from one soldier to another. Corrigan found out that someone connected to Scribner was on one of the selection committees, and Max Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor, was still alive and working at the publishing house. Perhaps through their influence, over one hundred thousand copies of The Great Gatsby were printed.

Interest in Fitzgerald and his novels steadily grew throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and by the ’60s, The Great Gatsby was one of those novels nearly everyone had heard of.

Like many, I first read the novel as a teenager. I’ve always been fascinated by Gatsby, and by Scott and Zelda. When I was young, I probably couldn’t have articulated a reason why I found Gatsby interesting. But in my own way, I was a kind of Gatsby figure. I was never obsessed with being super rich. Even in my youth, I knew you had to be born a Vanderbilt to be a Vanderbilt, but I wanted to belong to the upper middle class. I wanted an educated, worldly family. I wanted liberal parents who appreciated learning and art and sons who happened to be gay. Basically, I wanted Elio’s life from Call Me By Your Name, and I had watched enough Public Television during high school to know there were people like that out there. I could get by without chauffer driven limousines and mansions, but I wanted to drive a BMW. I wanted my parents to own a house in the country with a guest cottage or a room over the garage that I could use. I wanted a studio in Greenwich Village. I wanted to be invited to spend weekends at beach houses and woodsy vacation homes. I wanted smart, civilized conversations about literature and art with nice people who were interested in and accepting of me. I wanted something I couldn’t have, and it took me a while to appreciate and accept who I was. In fact, I’m still working on that.

Grey Gardens Prequel

Most fans of Grey Gardens know about the origins of the documentary. In the summer of 1972, Lee Ratziwell, Jacqueline’s sister and Big Edie’s niece, was making a movie with a few of her friends in East Hampton, and she introduced the filmmakers to Big and Little Edie. The Maysles brothers were part of that project, and they were impressed by the Beales. They cut the film in such a way as to make the Beales the primary subject and showed the results to Ratziwell. For whatever reason, Ratziwell shut the whole project down and confiscated the film. The Maysles returned a couple of years later after obtaining financial backing and made their own independent film, Grey Gardens (1975).

I assumed Ratziwell had her film destroyed, but apparently not. It resurfaced a couple of years ago, and Ratziwell, now in her eighties, agreed to release it. That Summer came out in May, and it’s already streaming online. I watched it last night. Grey Gardens is one of my favorite things, so I had to watch it as soon as I could. I had to.

The film is book-ended with contemporary footage of photographer Peter Beard, who was part of the original project. To be frank, I found this footage to be superfluous and dull. But three fourths of the film focuses on Big and Little Edie. If you love Grey Gardens, I recommend you watch this film.

It’s both wonderfully familiar and oddly different. Big Edie is already moving quite slowly due to arthritis, and she sings a little in her cracked and aged voice as if it’s still 1935. Little Edie is forever fussing with her costume for the day, and her trademark headscarves are on full display. They both chatter constantly and eat ice cream straight from the carton. But their house is full of people. Ratziwell is often there, and she is overseeing the continued restoration that started some months before. Workmen go back and forth, and at one point, city inspectors show up.

The condition of the house was shocking in the original documentary. It was in worse shape in 1972. There’s even more garbage and clutter, and most of the interior paint has faded and peeled, making the rooms dingy and sad. The second floor deck, the one that affords the ocean view, is quite dilapidated in 1972. It even looks unsafe, so rebuilding it must have been part of the renovations.

I’ve often wondered why some of the Beale’s wealthy relatives didn’t help out more. I knew about the clean up effort paid for by Jacqueline in the early ‘70s, but judging by the condition of the house in 1975, they only went far enough to prevent the place from being condemned by the city. Why not clear out all that trash and pay someone to come in and clean once a week? Why not pay someone to mow and cut back the weeds once a week in the warmer months? Take care of at least the basic stuff? But neither Big or Little Edie seemed to like having strangers in the place, and they were nitpicky about what could be carted off. Every ratty chair and broken plate was a treasure with a story attached to it, and they were in love with every tree, vine and weed. I was startled by one scene in which Ratziwell was conferring with a couple of workmen, and Little Edie rushed in and sharply questioned what they were talking about. It’s as if Little Edie suspected her cousin of a conspiracy. I know from personal experience that it’s sometimes hard to help loved ones who aren’t rational.

That Summer is another fascinating look at the Beales. I appreciate Lee Ratziwell for finally allowing us to see it.