I think Anglo-American fiction since World War 2 has largely failed to capture the zeitgeist of life in the UK and US because the literary big guns tend to come from privileged backgrounds (in the UK they often went to boarding school before Oxbridge). White collar kids will never understand blue collar life, whereas working class kids can easily get the nuances of high culture when they're exposed to it. Dickens grew up poor and became rich, which is why all aspects of society was open to him. Your Rushdies, DeLillos, Amises and Barneses all grew up comfortably middle or upper class and thus there is a whole aspect of society forever beyond their ken. And when rich kids do try to slum it it's never really convincing. Similarly I think this is why all the Iraq movies I have seen have been terrible. I watched Green Zone last week and it joined a long list of dreadful pictures which are very good at giving you lectures and very poor about telling you anything of value about Iraq. Green Zone was nearly as bad as Lions for Lambs and that's saying something. But there are a lot of other godawful Iraq movies out there from the Brits, the Americans and even the French. Admittedly The Hurt Locker wasn't dreadful but I didn't love that picture the way everyone else seems to have done. Perhaps film is a poor medium for telling the complicated story of Iraq or perhaps the cloistered elites who run the film industry just don't understand what it's like to be a grunt on the ground. As I say, you'll never really understand blue collar life unless you grew up in that world. ...
House to House, a book I read last week, however, does feel authentic and captures well not just what battle is like but also the class war that exists in the army between the private soldier and the officers. With a few exceptions officers are seen as a spoiled, effete cadre, while the real killing and the real dying is done by ordinary guys not too long out of high school from all over the US; guys who seem to share only one thing and that is the modest circumstances of their background. House to House is the non fiction story of the Battle of Falluja in November 2004, told not from a tactical or strategic perspective but through the eyes of a staff sergeant in the unglamorous US Second Infantry. SSg David Bellavia is indeed a blue collar guy but no ignorant grunt. Hailing from upstate New York Bellavia was a theatre major in college until his production of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, rewritten to give the assassins' real motives for their attacks on the US presidents, was halted by Sondheim's lawyers. One thing led to another and Bellavia found himself in the US Army and then at the dreadful Battle of Falluja when 100 US troops were killed, 1000 injured and up to 1000 insurgents killed or captured. House to House is only the story of what Bellavia saw and experienced and does not go into the alleged use of white phosphorous, the attacks on civilians, or indeed the ultimate futility of the Rumsfeld strategy in Iraq from 2004 onwards. It is however a gripping, terrifying account of private soldiers and their NCO's moving through the town of Falluja, house by house, street by street and sector by sector, all the while coming under fire by dedicated mujahadeen of various factions. If you want to know what modern war is like I'd avoid the movie versions and the accounts by officers and pick up House to House instead.
33 comments:
This looks like a good book.
I didn't think Hurt Locker was anything wildly special either- certainly not much better than an episode of Generation Kill.
Channel4 had a good documentary series recently about the SAS with footage of secret missions in the 1970's in Yemen. What I was surprised to see was the range of men from all class backgrounds some of them doctors deliving babies in a bid to win confidence with the local people.They were not army psycho grunters that i had always imagined.
I was hoping Green Zone would be alright as Matt Damon is lush. Shame!
This sounds like another one to add to my list. I have a cousin that was in Iraq not long ago, (off and on right out of high school), and he was showing us some pictures. We'd ask questions as he flipped through them and sometimes he'd just tell us there are some stories we don't want to hear. I figured he was probably right.
Frankie
When my little brother was in Iraq he worked with the SAS quite a bit. I'm not telling tales out of school if I say that he encountered the full range of SAS personality types, from the headcases to the real intellectuals. He was impressed always with their sheer confidence but sometimes he worried when that confidence descended into hubris.
Glenna
I think generally it was more unpleasant than we can possibly imagine.
"White collar kids will never understand blue collar life, whereas working class kids can easily get the nuances of high culture when they're exposed to it."
Not trying to pick a fight here, but coming from a comfortable middle class upbringing, I was wondering why you think this to be the case. Surely if it can work one way it can work the other, no?
Brian
What are you talking about? Of course you can pick a fight! What, you think I'll take the huff or something?
No, my reasoning is this: if you come into money then you'll get exposed to high culture and gradually learn all about its nuances; but no one can really deliberately make themselves poor. I remember reading George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and was struck by how false it all was. Orwell was slumming it and it seemed completely fake. Orwell just didnt understand what it was like to be grindingly poor. Even in The Road to Wigan Pier he didnt capture it. Similarly with DeLillo, Amis, Barnes, Rushdie etc. their working class characters seem like cariactures.
I suppose a middle class kid or a rich could sabotage their entire life by coming a meth addict, alienate his entire family, live on the poverty line, go to jail etc. and then after maybe a decade of this they would be able to write about the underclass. No writer that I know of - except maybe William Vollman - is prepared to suffer so for his or her art.
Brian
Perhaps I should make clear that of course I make an exception for genius. James Joyce was a genius. Salman Rushdie might in fact be a genius. Martin Amis, IMO, is not.
Have you had a look at this book on the Vietnam War that's out recently, Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes? I keep being drawn to it, partly because it has a beautiful cover, and then warned off it by various people. But I heard him interviewed on my friend's radio show and he sounded quite interesting. I don't know where he'd fall in your qualifications because he was a Rhodes scholar and all that, but he also really was in the jungles of Vietnam. On the other hand, he was an officer. Anyway, people keep picking it up before I get a chance to and telling me I wouldn't like it, apparently because it's too much a guy's book and it's, well, all about war. I really don't know what else they might have been expecting. I have a feeling that I would find it very interesting because he was a lit guy before he was a soldier.
I take your point about the middle class not getting the working class, I think. But I am also not sure that anyone who hasn't grown up in upper upper class really knows how one who's been born to it thinks. I read a quote by Lewis Lapham recently, or maybe it was Lapham himself, that said we all think we would act differently than the really wealthy but that's just because we haven't had the experience of being the really wealthy. For some reason, I finally understood that.
For some reason I am not utterly convinced that geniuses are the only ones who can write credibly of classes other than their own. I'd agree that you can't write them from afar, but in the U.S. it seems to me that the classes are a bit more porous than in England. I wouldn't say that I grew up working class, but I did go through high school in a pretty working class sort of town and I mean that my next door neighbors were working class, not some othe part of the community. And income wise, we were probably often below them, not above them. And of course my parents generation had gone through the Great Depression so it's not as if the spectre of true want was something beyond their imaginations. DeLillo is the only American you cite, but what about Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or James Baldwin? I mean, who are the big guns of American fiction, post WWII? I'm not even sure I know anymore. And as for the writers of Iraq, I doubt that they've even revealed themselves yet. I imagine they are still synthesizing what they know.
You're not alone on THE HURT LOCKER. A good movie, but not as good as everyone said it was. Not what I would consider a Best Picture movie, though it's worth it not to see AVATAR win.
I think the issue with people who are well off going slumming is in the back of their minds they know they can go home to their comfortable existence any time they want to. Even if they choose not to, it's a choice. Those who are poor don't have the option to (essentially) snap their fingers and not be poor anymore.
I was never poor, though I grew up working class. My father was a grocery clerk and my mother worked at my aunt's restaurant. I never appreciated how close to the bone some things had to be cut until I got older and was able to see things in context. Then I was laid off for a year when the dot com bubble burst, and got to understand first hand how fine the line is between doing well and not doing well at all.
Dana, I think that at least 95% of America should by now understand how fine that line is and show some compassion towards those who step over it. The other five percent are those incorrigibles who can never learn from anything--not experience, not history, not what's happened to their next door neighbor.
Seana
You sound pretty wc to me. I dont know much about the Vietnam Books. I read that one We Were Soldiers which impressed me but thats about it.
Maybe they need more time to digest, but then again. Look at the best sellers of 1948. The Naked and The Dead, The Young Lions etc. etc.
Dana
Yes thats precisely my point. They're only pretending and with a click of their fingers its all over. I remember Orwell talking about a cup of coffee he refused to drink because a mosquito fell in it. That seemed pretty precious to me. Similarly when I read a lot of the fictions of the New York literary elite about people in "fly over" America I roll my eyes at the tin ears they have and the fundamental lack of understanding about this part of the country.
Well, I'm pretty working class now, that's for sure. But what I mean is that my mother came from the aspiring professional classes of Southern California and my dad from the farming life of northern Illinois and met what was at that time the social blender of the military. They both ended up with masters degrees and my dad's jobs were white collar after the military. But the middle, middle class and the working class overlap to a large degree, I think. Or did. I think maybe you're talking about the upper end of the middle class. Maybe the abilitiy to send your kids to private school and fund their college educations at elite schools is the real dividing line.
Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom is coming out at the end of August. He's a writer who came out of the Midwest, lives in Manhattan, and sometimes Santa Cruz. So in some ways his life is of the fly over variety, but his memoir The Discomfort Zone is very much about that Midwestern life and though it's amusing, it's not mocking.
I wonder if it is easier to write a good novel about a war that there is more consensus on and that more of the country feels directly involved in.
I read and truly enjoyed House-to-House. Your point is well made, Adrian.
Unfortunately further readings on Bellavia have convinced me he is a true space cadet.
Matt
Uh oh.
Tea party activist? Birther? Someone who thinks Glen Beck has tapped into a universal truth? That kind of thing?
Seana
It does in America for sure. In the US unless you're from say Knoxville TN or West Virginia you are not looked down upon because of your accent. In the British Isles however accent largely betrays background and the working classes find it harder to break through.
I don't know if you really mean what you say about Anglo-American fiction's failure to capture the zeitgeist since WW2. It's a little too broad don't you think? I think the zeitgeist in the UK is pretty different than the zeitgeist in the US, for instance.
Also the "working class" in the US operates pretty differently within the social/economic/political architecture than it does in the UK. The middle class is much larger and quite varied in the US and has produced more than a few great fiction writers from both economic ends of that class.
And, in my reading, there are definitely a few writers who have captured the zeitgeist for the US pretty well who aren't necessarily from the top of the food chain. Joseph Heller came from humble beginnings, didn't he? And I think "Catch-22" qualifies. Ken Kesey grew up on a dairy farm - and "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" also qualifies.
There are other examples, too.
I also feel that, while you sound reasonable with your Orwell example of why you think upper class people can't write convincingly about the folks in steerage, you might as well say men can't write women and vice versa. As you know, it's a novelist's job to write in voices other than their own and the more talented do it better no matter what class they're from. For me Orwell, gifted as he was in fictionalizing political ideas, he may not have had as much talent - in this regard - as he needed to transcend his class position.
Anyway, jumping from novels to films on the matter is bit unfair, don't you think? You do hint at this, but Hollywood in particular has always had trouble portraying war from anything but a heroic POV. Sure there are some exceptions, particularly more recently, but generally, it's all bad guys versus good guys and the good guys win. This is one of the reasons Coppola had to make "Apocalypse Now" partly on his own dime - his presentation of that war was much more complex than most movie audiences at the time were used to.
Still, I've recently seen a couple of movies on the Iraq War that might be worth looking at. They are not typical "war movies" per se though they are definitely about the war.
I'm talking about "Taking Chance" and "The Messenger."
Mal
Well I think Heller captured the zeitgeist of the USAAF on Corsica pretty well, but I'm less convinced by his US novels. There's a bit in Closing Time where he talks about - I think - the Port Authority Bus Terminal as a cesspit of hell which it might seem to be for someone who didnt take a lot of buses, but I always found it a perfectly acceptable place.
Heller's good though because he did grow up in pretty miserable circumstances so at least he has a chance, rich people, I believe have no hope at all of reading a convincing novel about soceity. I think William Vollman is possibly a good counter argument against this sweeping statement. But anyway you're right the class system in the US is certainly more fluid than England.
It might an interesting to look at the winners of the last 30 or 40 Booker Prizes and see how many of them went to private or boarding school. I havent done this but I'm willing to bet that its much higher than the average (in the UK only about 5% of kids go to private school and less than 1% boarding school).
Hey maybe I'm wrong so if you can point me towards a novel written by a member of the upper classes that convincingly portrays the working classes without condescension I'll eat my words. How about that?
Okay, I'm packing to take my sons camping right now (there's a working-class vacation for you) and I would like to get into this, but right now i'll just say this attitudewas really summed up in Good Will Hunting - everyone felt the goal was to, "Get out of here."
Middle and upper class people think working class people want to, "get out of here," and go somewhere better. And, of course, some do, but there's usually so little weight given to what that really means - leaving your family behind - that it rings false.
I think that's an interesting sort of litmus test, John, although I may be misunderstanding what it's testing. I know I was one of those kids who wanted to get out of there, and probably most of my adult friends now felt that way as kids. And of course it was partly flight from the family, although I've actually always been pretty close to mine. But a lot of people I knew from high school did not have that desire at all. And while I may have looked down on them at the time, though I think it was a more a sense of disconnection than condescension, it's interesting that I've recently been back in touch with some old high school friends, some of whom have never really left town. We are reassured by each other's existence I think at this point. And I have wondered what I was rejecting so vehemently back then. But someone pointed out that it's a time when you need to define and separate yourself--you can welcome the old life back in once you don't feel like it's going to engulf you.
I might buy the argument about the Booker Prize, but that's not the zeitgeist prize, either.
But I see I took your post from the wrong way - that there weren't any writers from the bottom of the spectrum who'd capture this spirit of the times because the field was dominated by like of Amis and company.
Though part of my point is that, in the US anyway, the zeitgeist isn't really defined by a "working class" POV.
Still, there are people from other classes that can capture it without having been from it. Mailer's "Naked and the Dead" pretty well describes characters from almost every rung of US social ladder. Mailer was from a prominent Jewish family in Brooklyn. Kurt Vonnegut didn't come from rags either but his work had captured the big Z as well.
It's funny you mention Vollman. I thought of him, but I'm not familiar with his work.
John
Yeah I'd go along with that. I also hate Hollywood potrayal of working class people as trailer trash all the fucking time.
Did you ever see that boxing movie with whatshername. She gets paralysed...uh I cant remember the title right now, but anyway the way they portrayed her family was outrageous. To Hollywood screenwriters it seems anyone from a poor background is immediately alcoholic, conniving and stupid.
Seana
Yes, but its the very idea that it would be simply ghastly to come from the background and would want to stay there that annoys John and me. Matt Damon went to the Cambridge Latin School but he plays some kid from Southie. What the hell does he know about Southie? Nothing. And his movie proves it.
Mal
In my book Mailer was a VERY smart working class kid. He became a private soldier in the infantry which is an interesting choice for someone who graduated early from Harvard. I read in a memoir that he did this deliberately (not becoming an officer) because he wanted to write the great war novel and he felt that officers were cut off from the men.
I think the class, clan and family loyalties of South Boston are probably very different than anything you'd find in California. Maybe Hispanic culture, but I don't think that even for most of them it's so embedded in place as it is on the East Coast. Partly of course, because so many Mexican people were deprived of their land in the past.
I remember that it was my friend's little sister who had lived in San Francisco all her life who pointed out that rebelling against my suburban past was something of a cliche.
I'm not a Mailer scholar. But was he a "working class" kid? His father was an accountant and his mother ran a business. When I think of working class in the US, I think of people who worked in factories on the south side of Chicago.
Anyway, I was pretty impressed with his book - and more impressed when I understood how young he was when he wrote it.
There was also a strong movement after the Second World War in the US to eliminate working class culture - the most obvious being McCarthyism and the fear of communism, which included any kind of union activity. In America the goal is to get out of the working class, not make working class life better.
From about 1946 to 1952 there was a real battle over this kind of stuff, but the working class lost. McCarthyism used fear of communism to throw a lot of union leaders in jail along with the Hollywood Ten. Then the blacklist and the introduction of TV and the whole image of fifties America, clean suburbs, Ozzie and Harriet and middle-class America was created. That suburban lifestyle didn't emerge naturally on its own after the war, it was created.
There isn't really an American version of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is there? America has The Catcher in the Rye.
Really, the only place in literature that you see working class American life is genre fiction - crime novels and the pulps.
Mal
Yeah you're right about Mailer. I meant more that he was an outsider. At Harvard he was always the fucked up weirdo trying to fight everyone. I think he carried that chip on his shoulder till the day he died.
John
Yes. Thats my point. Catcher is about a boy at prep school.
One of the reasons I love Jim Thompson so much is his take on working class life. Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee novels are like that too.
I liked your pal's gag at Bouchercon when that lady was going on and on about being at Stanford.
Oddly, I am only seeing the latest responses to this post in my email not here, but maybe they will show up here later.
John, you make me wonder what would have been the other alternative. I don't mean this in an argumentative way, I mean that, yes, the marketing of the middle class dream was complete here. I have a hard time thinking of a book or movie that makes working class life seem okay, and simply normal. Sometimes they are nostalgia pieces about warmth and family values, but I can't think of one that says, hey this is a good life and this is the one you should be happy to have.
Oddly, farm life doesn't seem to have such a pejorative cast to it. I suppose because farmers are so involved in Nature.
Speaking of nature, what happened to the camping trip? Or did you decide to do your own kind of Outward Bound thing? Give them a compass and a hunting knife and wish them luck?
I think maybe you've helped me figure out why I'm uncomfortable listening to a privileged white person play blues. I think it's the same dynamic, different accoutrements than a soldier.
I was at a friend's house this weekend. He's a very good singer/guitar player. He plays old-fashioned French songs that I really enjoy listening to, but he's also sings blues songs, which has always rankled me. He's a rich kid (ok, he's 33 years old) playing down this fact by serving us Hamburger Helper for dinner and drinking as much cheap beer as he can, and being a derelict. But he's got three houses he can live in for free. And it's not his circumstances that bother me. I like two of his houses a lot. I like nice surroundings. I grew up around rich people. My non-immediate family was / is very well off (not my own family).
Something about the downward translation doesn't work.
I'd been trying to explain to my partner that I don't dislike all blues music or white people singing blues. And now I can blame Adrian for putting the words in my mouth. Thanks for that.
And now I'm going to get House to House.
"... you make me wonder what would have been the other alternative..."
When Ayn Rand wrote her guide for screenwriters it included, "Don't diefy the common man," and she went on to say that Americans had no interest in being "common." I'm not looking for diefication, but a little respect would have gone a long way.
Here's maybe the most obvious example - in the post war years there was huge investment in universities; liberal arts, psychology, sociology, drama departments - all kinds of new programs. At the same time trade schools and community colleges were, if not cut back, certainly not funded with the same gusto. This was petty much an admission that a liberal arts education was more valuable than a trade.
Sure, people bought into this idea, but it was also heavily pushed on them by government and the media (especially TV and their sponsors).
I think we're actually seeing a correction to that now. Where I live, Ontario, there were quite a few universities expanded in the 60's and a few new ones started up but since then the only new university has been the Ontario Institute of Technology (with no liberal arts department) and there's been a huge expansion of community colleges, especially the trades.
And, we're back from camping, had a great time and it only rained one night (thanks for asking, I got that one last post in waiting for my boys to finish packing ;).
John,
So you all survived?
I guess I feel torn in more than one way when I consider higher education. On the one hand, the liberal arts have been taking a beating from the science and technology side ever since I was in college. On the other, I hate seeing the level of practical intelligence derided. I'm always in awe of people who can actually do things. There's a book that's been big here called Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford that I've been meaning to read for awhile now.
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