The Amateur

by Wendy Lesser

  I had been expecting the panel to represent racial, gender, geographical, and other forms of distribution, as indeed it did, including two African-American women poets—one young and well educated, one middle-aged and street smart—one Latino poet who also worked as a legal-aid lawyer, a gay male poet and translator, a lesbian poet (I’m counting only those who made their preferences explicit), a southern white male poet with impeccable traditional credentials, a northeastern white male poet with impeccable experimental credentials, a midwestern bookstore owner who happened to be quite familiar with poetry, and me—a white, middle-aged, female Californian. But, as writing this list of adjectives makes clear to me, these categories hardly encompassed our real identities. We had all been chosen for our tastes and our personalities, which were both lively and various. Thanks largely to the intelligent management of our NEA Literature Program “handlers” (I use the word in the most complimentary sense possible), the mix worked.

  The NEA people did none of the choosing of manuscripts—in this sense, the process was absolutely free of government influence, or of any administrative cronyism. But they did shape the process: not to favor a particular manuscript or writer but to control the discussion as a whole. I was dreading the three-day panel meeting (I find it a good policy to dread all meetings, and then I can very occasionally be pleasurably surprised), but this meeting, though arduous, was consistently fascinating and rewarding. The Literature Program staff had set it up in such a way that we panelists were on for two sessions, off for one, so in between haranguing each other about the virtues of free verse over meter, bare sentiment over technical wizardry, we got to take restorative walks on the grassy Mall, which almost directly adjoins the NEA’s building in Washington.

  The tone of our discussions only occasionally reached what would technically qualify as a harangue. Mostly we just said our piece and quietly voted. The NEA handlers had supplied each of us with copies of our own written comments on the selected manuscripts, so if you had to tally forgotten what you thought during the summer, your own words were there to remind you. This being poetry, our words tended to focus closely on other words, and many of those little comment cards would have been worth publishing as criticism. It was amusing to go around the table and see how the opinions lined up; the alliances were never predictable. The two most experimental poets, for instance, had been selected by the NEA staff to back each other up, but they were the two most often in near-shouting disagreement. I found myself most frequently agreeing with the young black woman poet, and she with me. Nobody consistently backed his or her own ethnic or gender category, to the extent that these things were evident in the poetry—but then, even when it seemed obvious, we were only guessing at the writer’s identity.

  In fact, the most amusing incident in the whole three days of judging had to do with this kind of guessing at identity. One of the other judges had discovered in her first-round reading a series of linked poems written from the point of view of a young Asian refugee. The style of the poems was simple, pure, and direct. Each of the unrhymed lines began with a capital letter, as they tend to do in the work of novice poets. The imagery was rich—not only with the feel of the home culture’s visual wealth but with street scenes from the American city to which the immigrant girl narrator had been transplanted. The story she told, of lost family members and painful mistreatment, was heartrending but somehow never sentimental. The whole manuscript had the feel of real experience transmuted into true art, and I loved it the minute I read it. As we went around and discussed it, it was clear that many other people liked it as well, though for varying reasons. Some felt the poetry was good but a little too stilted; some wondered if the sentiment became sentimentality in the hands of such an obviously young and inexperienced poet; some felt we should give the award to her just because she had suffered so much; and so on. Then the discussion came around the table to the middle-aged black woman poet.

  Let me backtrack and say that on the starting day of the panel, when this woman first entered the room—forty-five minutes late, nearly six feet tall, and wearing a hat and cape of indescribable complexity—I shivered with anxiety. Oh, no, I thought, she’s going to derail the whole process with some kind of endless political rhetoric. (Coming from Berkeley makes you prone to anxiety attacks like these.) As it turned out, she was one of the best, fairest, and most intelligent panelists I have ever served with; but she was scary. She had, she confided to me on one of our lunch breaks, been thrown out of her high school for telling a bunch of the other girls that she was really an alien from another planet—and making them believe it. This story made sense to me after I saw her in action on the panel. She could make anybody believe just about anything. (At the end of our three days’ work when we asked each other, just as a game, how many of our favorites had gotten fellowships, most of us had about two out of three; she had sixteen out of nineteen winners.) Moreover, she had a perfect ear for the music of poetry and could read aloud her selections with insurmountable effectiveness. “No fair!” I interrupted her during one of these renditions. “You could read the phone book and make it sound like it deserved a prize!”

  Anyway, it was her turn now to comment on the Asian refugee sequence, to put in her two cents about whether this pathetic but talented young girl deserved a prize or didn’t. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think this was written by any young Asian girl. I think it’s probably some white male screenwriter giving us his girlfriend’s story, or some such thing.” Those of us who were in favor of the poem gasped at this, in disbelief or despair. “I’ve read it over and over again, trying to figure out who wrote it, but I can’t,” she continued. “And finally I decided: Hey! If he can fool me, more power to him. No matter who wrote it, it’s a great poem, and I’m for it. “We all laughed at her then; the response seemed so typical, if atypically wrongheaded.

  When we had done all our work, we got to learn the identities of the poets we had selected. (“You would be amazed, maybe even horrified, if you knew how many famous names you’ve already eliminated,” one of the staff members told us encouragingly along the way, when we were stumped about whether we were favoring highly polished poems over the work of inspired newcomers.) Among those we had chosen, it turned out, were the son of a friend of mine, a critic against whom I held a grudge, and a nationally prominent feminist poet—none of whom I had recognized in the blind selection process. The general shortage of well-known names on the NEA lists was partly, we learned, due to elimination: if you’d already won three NEA fellowships in your lifetime, you could no longer apply, so many of the best older poets were ineligible. One of the more famous names to reach our final list was that of a white male poet, author of several published books—and of the heartrending refugeegirl series. When we heard his name announced in conjunction with our cherished poem, we all shrieked in surprise and, a little, in chagrin. Only the Sister from Another Planet could sit calmly and quietly, Cheshire-cat smile adorning her face. She had been right, or as close to right as makes no difference; and she was the only one in the room who had given him the prize for purely literary reasons.

  I can’t say I was completely happy with the final list of thirty-eight names we came up with. No one on the panel was. We had all lost a few of our favorites, given in to the group judgment when we felt that we alone had been right. Still, I was significantly less unhappy than I had expected to be. Given the desperation of our task—to cull thirty-eight winners out of 1,247 manuscripts, rewarding only about three percent of the applicants for NEA fellowships—we had done the undoable in a respectable way. We were, in a way, like the ordinary person who walks down the streets of a city giving quarters to the first ten homeless people he meets, and who then has nothing left to give after the first block. It was not our fault that there was not more money to give away, or rather, it was only our fault insofar as we were voting citizens of a country which had decided to spend more on its military bands than its overall arts budget.

  On the last day o
f the panel, while the NEA computer was tallying up our final vote, a large group of us—all but two of the judges, I think—took a long walk over to the Vietnam Memorial. It was a beautifully clear, sunny day, the grass glistened with recent sprinkling, and the trees rustled slightly in the breeze that cooled us on our stroll. When we reached the remarkable black wall, which begins quietly at ground level and then surges up as you walk by its side, I was as moved as I always am by this great piece of public art. And I remember thinking that I could now add to my list of Successful Government Processes (a list that had previously contained only one thing, the selection of Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Memorial) another item: the NEA poetry panel I had just served on. Given the doubts I had about every element in the process—bureaucratic procedure, committee work, true disinterestedness in the evaluation of poetry, the just deserts of hungry artists, even the nature of philanthropy itself—I felt we had come through with flying colors.

  ON PHILANTHROPY

  ne December, seven years into the Reagan era, I started asking people whether or not they gave money to beggars. This was a question which had not troubled me, at least on a conscious level, for many years. Like most residents of Berkeley (perhaps like most residents of any modern American city), I had long since developed a slight frown and a quick shake of the head to shrug off all requests for spare change.

  What startled me out of this condition, that December, was a brief encounter in a parking lot not far from home. My little boy and I were crossing from the video rental place to the office supplies store when we were stopped by a heavyset, middle-aged woman. “Excuse me, ma’am, can you spare a quarter?” she said. I did my routine headshake and hustled on.

  “What did that lady want?” asked my son, who was then two and a half years old.

  “She wanted money,” I said.

  “Why did she want money?” he persisted.

  “Because she’s poor.”

  “What’s poor?”

  With that, my assumptions were brutally jarred out of their comfortable, long-inhabited positions. What I had just done, I realized, was to teach a small child to be hardhearted. I was creating a monster of unthinking selfishness—or, alternatively, I was presenting myself as a monster of selfishness in the eyes of an innocent, innately tenderhearted child.

  Suitably shamed by this encounter, I began to ask my friends and relations about their responses to begging. One California friend, who is in general prone to charitable acts, said he usually tried to give something, though he exercised some discrimination: “For instance, I don’t give to the smoking poor.” My New York friends, perhaps spurred to a consistency of action by the more profound evidence of need in their city, all seemed to give in one way or another. “If I have any change in my pocket, I give it,” said one. “If the request is fairly original, and if it’s not aggressive, I generally respond,” said another. “I carry five quarters in my pocket whenever I go out, and I give to the first five people who ask that day,” said a third. “I carry five one-dollar bills whenever I leave the house, and they’re usually gone by the time I get to the corner,” said a fourth. (I informed her she was paying over the market rate.)

  Finally I asked my husband, “Do you give money to beggars?”

  “What is this, a Christmas question?” he growled.

  “No, I’m really trying to find out what people do.”

  “No, I don’t give money,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I was a panhandler once too,” he began, “and I know—”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, what’s the philosophical rationale for not giving? I don’t give either. But why don’t we give? What’s our justification?”

  My husband paused. “Because the government should be doing that, not private citizens,” he said.

  “Yes,” I sighed, relieved at rediscovering the familiar reason.

  But my satisfaction didn’t last long. A couple of weeks later, this time just before Christmas Day, I was again walking with my little boy on a shopping street near our house when a raggedy, bearded man in a soiled watch cap asked me for money. I snatched at the second chance. “Yes,” I said, “just a minute,” and I reached into my purse and pulled out two quarters. “Here,” I said.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he responded—verily, as it seemed to me, tugging on a forelock. “Merry Christmas to you, ma’am. And Merry Christmas to your little boy, too,” as he bent down, benignly but still rather frighteningly, over my son.

  I felt awful. If anything, I felt worse than when I hadn’t given. And that, I realized then, was the impossible situation we had now arrived at. When things get bad enough for some people but not others, when there are poor people in the streets asking you for money, you can’t win either way. You can be a malevolent Scrooge or a disgustingly self-congratulatory Lady Bountiful, but you can’t remain innocent. No course of behavior is the correct one.

  Dickens himself, I think, understood a great deal of this. That’s why his philanthropist figures make us so uncomfortable. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1981 stage production of Nicholas Nickleby, for example, tried to stress the enduring social problem over the temporary individual solution by filling the stage with shivering waifs as Nicholas and his family went off to their singularly particular happy ending. A 1987 episode of the television show The Equalizer did the same thing: after Robert McCall had saved one homeless family from life in a Times Square flophouse (his self-defined job being merely to protect individual victims), the camera focused its closing shot on a wistful little face, the face of one of the many children still living at the drug-ridden hotel. This type of thing is well-intentioned, but it assuages even as it means to question. Leaving the theater after Nicholas Nickleby, or turning to the (hardly less disturbing) eleven o’clock news after The Equalizer, we congratulate ourselves on having achieved the proper perspective on the problem. One philanthropist isn’t enough; more needs to be done. We can have our sentimentality and eat it too.

  In its original form, Dickens’s philanthropy is not so easily digestible; it festers and continues to disturb. Because what Dickens is questioning is not just the amount of good any one philanthropist can do, but the very act of philanthropy itself: the gesture of reaching out to save another by means of one’s own relative wealth. Inevitably, that gesture is somewhat creepy. This may not always be easy to see in the early and middle novels. With Bleak House, for instance, critics often like to contrast the “bad” Mrs. Jellyby (who collects for African relief while neglecting her own family) with the “good” Mr. Jarndyce (who adopts Ada, Richard, and Esther). But in taking this line such critics must be squelching their own instinctive reaction. Isn’t there something in the least bit squeamish-making about the way Jarndyce coyly approaches his philanthropic role, and something even more obviously nauseating about the way Esther Summerson devotedly renders him eternal gratitude? You may not be prepared to attribute this effect to Dickens; you may want to view it as an unintentional by-product of his salvational plots, a modern perspective superimposed on a Victorian device. But there is Great Expectations to contend with, if you try to hold that view.

  In that late, great novel, Dickens laid bare the corruption engendered by the most benign kind of philanthropy. The inexplicable trust fund that brings Pip to London and educates him as a “gentleman” not only cuts him off from beloved friends of his own class (Joe and Biddy) but also distorts his relationships with Miss Havisham (whom he mistakenly believes to be his benefactor, and whom he cravenly submits to as a result) and with the benefactor himself. When Pip discovers that the source of his wealth, education, and new class status is a transported convict, he is filled with disappointment and resentment; he almost hates the man who made him rich. This is not class snobbery alone. It’s a result of the discrepancy between what he feels a philanthropist should be (a higher type of person, reaching down to help the low) and what his philanthropist is (an even lower man who helped Pip climb to success
on his back).

  In questioning philanthropy as it has affected him, Pip unintentionally casts doubt on the whole enterprise in its more usual (opposite) form. There is something inherently dishonest and unbalanced about the granting and acceptance of “free” money, because the no-strings-attached grant always turns out to be tied quite tightly to the giver. One incurs a debt—of gratitude, of respect, of affection-on-demand—by accepting the gift. In Pip’s case it is possible to contrast the relatively honest exchange at the beginning of the novel, when the convict uses fear to extort food and equipment from Pip, with the much more corrupted exchange that takes place when the convict subsidizes Pip’s whole life. (What the convict gets, in this exchange, is the satisfaction of having created a gentleman.) In the first case the obligations end with the exchange: Pip carries away his fear, the convict his “wittles” and file. In the second case the obligations are so large and so irrevocable that they can never be paid off, by either party to the arrangement. The convict has made Pip’s fortune and ruined, in a sense, his life, while Pip, who at first despises his benefactor for not being someone else, can never fully make up for that initial failure of gratitude.

  The real problem with philanthropy is that it calls into question the character of both the donor and the recipient. “Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind,” Thoreau noted in the first chapter of Walden. “Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellowtownsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself.” But if selfish egoism is the flaw exposed in the recipient, something not too different also surfaces in the philanthropist, as Thoreau points out in the next paragraph: “Under what latitude reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,—for that is the seat of sympathy,—he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.” And to this amusing theory Thoreau appends a wry and typically ironic self-assessment: “I have never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.” Thoreau’s confession has the obviously intentional ring of a boast. In his very moment of rejecting philanthropy most deeply, of advocating a tend-your-own-garden technique, he manages (with his habitual Janus-faced approach to meaning) to echo the kind of public avowal of one’s own sins that typifies one form of present-day “philanthropist”: that is, the TV evangelist.