Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye

by Florence King

  Much of today’s Helpism is nothing but old-fashioned “interference.” American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them. Resident grandmothers do it for free. My parents were so mismatched that the only thing they had in common was me, but they coexisted successfully because Granny’s imposing presence “interfered” with the kind of intimate privacy that neither of them was emotionally equipped to handle. When she died and they were alone together at last, all hell broke loose.

  Let’s face it. There aren’t many divinely happy marriages to interfere with, but there are plenty that could use a good buffer state. Plenty could use a built-in babysitter, too. The Day Care Hot Line would cool down fast if today’s working mothers were as carefree as mine was. The idea is afoot nowadays that all grandmothers are straining at the bit the “live their own lives.” They are told that they really ought to want to cruise the South Pacific, live alone in a high-rise apartment, and have affairs. What most of them really want is their grandchildren.

  Grandmothers don’t spoil children; tired parents do. The purpose of discipline is self-discipline, and its best source is the full-time, hovering presence of a grandmother. Granny set out to raise me to be a perfect Southern lady, but she could not have done a better job of raising a writer. Her constant nagging admonitions to “sit up straight … keep still … finish what you start” are what enable me to sit at the word processor for ten or twelve hours at a stretch. That’s what I call help.

  At fifty-two I have no need for the ministrations of the Menopause Seminar because I am not afraid of getting old. Living with Granny taught me that aging does not make women powerless objects of pity but colorful and entertaining individuals, and on occasion, fire-breathing dragons that wise people don’t cross.

  A real family consists of three generations. We could screw the Helpists out of existence if we stopped worrying about interference and being a burden on each other and regrouped under one roof.

  Thanks to my early conditioning, old people are the only people whose company I enjoy and seek out. To the best of my memory and knowledge, I never met an old person I didn’t like, or who didn’t like me. We’re a felicitous combination, so you can imagine how I feel when I receive, on the first of every month, a piece of mail containing a pseudo-compassionate Helpist ploy aimed at them.

  Those foremost practitioners of Thugee, public utility companies, have moved in on Christian charity. Listen to Virginia Electric Power’s version of the temporal act of mercy:

  Help us help someone you love. If you know an elderly or infirm Vepco customer who could benefit from our Third Party Notice program, please tell us.

  Elderly or infirm customers sometimes forget to pay their electric bills or, because of their illnesses, are unable to handle their financial affairs. To help protect these customers from losing their electric service because of past-due bills, Vepco offers the Third Party Notice program. We mail a copy of the disconnect notice to a third party—relative, clergyman, social agency, close friend or anyone designated by the customer. This extra notice does not mean the third party must pay the bill. It merely informs the party of the past-due bill so that he or she can take steps to assure continued service.

  Behold the Helpists in all their power-mad glory—they want us to help them hound old people.

  The prophet of America’s religion of Helpism was Dale Carnegie, whose landmark 1937 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, was the opening wedge in the promotion of personality over character. Today’s Helpists have gone much further. By their insidious pandering to hypochondria and fear of death, they have destroyed the old virtues and replaced them with mere good habits. Honor, duty, and steadfastness are now called diet, exercise, and non-smoking.

  Helpism’s modus operandi is very simple: find something that reminds Americans of death and go to the mat with it. One such subject is sleep.

  It’s said that Michael Dukakis gets only four or five hours of sleep a night. I believe it: he looks as if somebody started to embalm him and then stopped. Between success-driven maxims like “The early bird gets the worm” and the old puritanical fear of beds in general, we are the groggiest people in history. The latest victims of our national wakefulness are working mothers who do their housework at three A.M. Women used to be able to go back to bed after their husbands left for work, or take a nap along with the baby, but now they’re half-dead along with everybody else.

  About the only way left to shock people nowadays is to say, as I make a point of saying whenever I get a chance, that you need and get nine or ten hours of sleep every night. At least one member of your audience will start babbling about some article called “Do You Sleep Too Much?” (what other country would publish such a thing?), and before you know it, they’re all babbling about “sleep as escape from problems” and telling you to “seek help.”

  Nothing arouses American conflicts like the subject of sleep. Sleep is intimately connected with things we refuse to talk about, as well as the things we talk about constantly. Our contradictory attitudes toward sleep are the litmus paper for all of our contradictions as a people. There is nothing about sleep that doesn’t remind us of something else about sleep that triggers anxiety. Sleep is thus a gold mine for Helpists. Consider the number of How To/Are You/Do You books that a resourceful Helpist could extract from the following:

  “I don’t need much sleep.” The Tom Edison complex.

  “Napping in the daytime makes you feel worse.” The Gringo complex.

  “Don’t those people ever sleep?” The Wasp complex.

  “Secretary of State Darius McTavish went forty-eight hours without sleep.” The Awesome Responsibilities complex.

  “Despite having gone without sleep for forty-eight hours, McTavish appeared rested and relaxed.” The Omnipotence complex.

  “McTavish dozed for an hour on the plane.” The Common Touch complex.

  “Help someone you love fall asleep.” The Supportiveness complex.

  “Makes you drowsy so you can fall asleep.” The Rugged Individualist complex.

  “I don’t have time to sleep.” The Workaholic complex.

  “Don’t lose any sleep over it.” The Nine-to-Five complex.

  “We didn’t get any sleep last night!” That Cosmo Girl complex.

  “If the world blew up while you were asleep, you’d want David Truehart of Turn Over, America to tell you about it.” The Unthreatening Personality complex.

  “Sleep on it.” The Decisive complex.

  “It kept me awake.” The Concerned complex.

  “I slept like a log.” The Clear Conscience complex.

  “I slept through it.” The Anti-Intellectual complex.

  “Shall we wake the president?” The Leader complex.

  “There was no need to wake the president.” The Team-Player complex.

  “Secretary of State Darius McTavish died in his sleep last night.” The Quick ‘n’ Easy complex.

  Helpism’s first cousin is self-helpism. Speaking on the subject of giving advice, Catherine the Great said: “A strong mind is not suited for advising a weak one, for it is incapable of following the thoughts of the latter.”

  Today’s self-help authors will never have to worry about that. They make Ann Landers sound like Descartes.

  Honorable Intentions: The Manners of Courtship in the ’80s by Cheryl Merser contains a chapter called “The SleepOver Date” in which she assures men: “You will find that your new lover’s bathroom is a source of wonder and surprise. This, you’ll think, is the toothbrush she brushes her teeth with morning and night, and here are her cotton balls.”

  All self-help authors are obsessed with checklists, but Merser tops them all when she advises manufacturers of birth control products to include in their packages a checklist that reads: “Now that you have your Pills, have you thought of the following? Fresh coffee, towels, sheets, croissants, flowers? Is your date planned
with a free morning tomorrow? Did you buy candles, firewood? If you bought firewood, do you have a fireplace?”

  A fire without a fireplace would certainly be a night to remember, but unconscious humor is a fixture of this genre. In How to Find a Husband in 30 Days, Wendy Stehling couches her advice in a series of unforgettable tips:

  “TIP: When you are going to meet men, get dressed.”

  “TIP: THE RACE TRACK: During the week—anytime—stand at the paddock and ask if the bay horse is lame in the left foreleg.”

  Worse than the unconscious humor are the bold attempts at wit. Merser describes a cheapskate as “Penny, a member of the Pincher family,” while Gail Kessler’s How to Marry a Good Man recommends icebreakers like “How about coming over for a cup of hemlock?”

  At some point in every sexual self-help book we encounter a passage that lends credence to Santayana’s observation, “A life of pleasure requires an aristocratic setting to make it interesting or really conceivable.” With Wendy Stehling, it’s the reassurance that “Men aren’t looking for beauty and money, they aren’t even looking for a high IQ.” But that Merser should feel it necessary to tell her readers never to eat peanut butter straight from the jar with their fingers while their lovers are watching suggests that the English duchess who reputedly said “Sex is too good for the common people” was right.

  Self-help books are making life downright unsafe. Women desperate to catch a man practice all the ploys recommended by these authors. Bump into him, trip over him, knock him down, spill something on him, scald him, but meet him. That little fender-bender calculated to make him get out of his car and exchange phone numbers could turn into a twelve-car pile-up.

  Worse, self-help books are bad for dogs. Rare is the advice giver who does not recommend using dogs as icebreakers. Walking one’s dog in order to meet a man who is walking his dog requires a dog, whether one wants a dog or not, whether one likes dogs or not. As a result, the country is full of unhappy, unwanted, neglected dogs. I don’t care what people do to each other but I love dogs. Anyone seen reading a self-help book should be reported to the Humane Society at once.

  Many readers of self-help books are the kind of people who used to enter nunneries and monasteries in medieval times: passive, ethereal, low-sexed individuals unable to cope with the vicissitudes of ordinary living. Despite its brutalities and superstititions, the Middle Ages was an essentially well-adjusted era because it did not make its misfits worse by urging them to social and sexual triumphs beyond their capacities. That many Americans yearn for such a world was made manifest by the commune movement, which was less a political statement than a subconscious attempt by tender souls to revive the cloister.

  Self-helpism reaches its zenith in Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s guide to retirement, Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life.

  Devout Christians are not supposed to fear death, but that is precisely the dark thread running through this chapbook of altruisitic delights, which kicks off with: “Every day the average life expectancy of Americans increases by seven hours—two days each week, twenty-five years in this century.”

  A little later the point is made again: “It was startling to find that a person can lose as many as a dozen years of potential life by adhering to certain habits. We had never realized how much control we actually have over how long we might live.”

  And again: “ … a fifty-year-old man or woman today who keeps risk factors low can expect to live eleven years longer than contemporaries who don’t follow such approaches. Eleven years!”

  Given this eleven-year itch, it comes as no surprise to learn that the Carter Center at Emory University has a computer that can tell people how long they can expect to live. “It should be helpful and possibly even fun,” says Jimmy, “for participants to see just what they can do to extend their life spans.”

  Future historians will say that nothing so became the Carter life span as the extending of it. Their fitness program, described with the passion for detail that Jimmy brought to White House tennis court schedules, now fills their days. They jog, exercise to Jane Fonda tapes, watch their diets, buckle their seat belts, and fret. “The chances of being fatally injured in an automobile accident can be cut in half by the use of seat belts. Cut in half!” Jimmy cries out in the wilderness. In calmer moments, he is still the master of the sanctimonious sniff. Boasting quietly that he has never smoked, he adds: “Unfortunately, my mother, my two sisters, and my brother all followed my father’s example and became heavy smokers. The two who survive have broken the habit but the others died of cancer.”

  The Carters describe how they joined Habitat for Humanity and built houses for the poor. The experience was so satisfying that they looked around for other Helpist groups to join and listed their findings in the back of their book. It’s better to be a Pink Lady than to drink one, but if nursing isn’t your bag, “Special Olympics groups need many ‘huggers’ to encourage retarded athletes, and some hospital nurseries use volunteer huggers to stimulate low-birth-weight babies.”

  Altruism like this can’t be contained in one country, so the Carters went people-to-peopling in the Third World. This part of the book is more fun than a brother-in-law’s vacation slide lecture: “We visited homes and schools for children of parents suffering from leprosy.” That mission of mercy done, they climbed a mountain in Nepal, where Bubba spotted a Gompa (that’s a Buddhist monastery, not the man-eating tiger I was hoping for).

  Like Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby, the Carters have forgotten that charity begins at home. If they’re so hot to help somebody they need look no further than their daughter Amy. The pictures taken of her at her anti-nuke protest trial in Massachusetts leave no doubt that she needs a great deal more than the “supportiveness” her sap of a father bestowed on her misadventures.

  It was obvious that health, mental or physical, is not her long suit. The pasty skin, the blank eyes, the toneless voice, the stringy, greasy, half-black, half-blond hair, the just-plain-dirty look of her, all suggest not a return to hippie chic but the collapse of fastidiousness that presages a nervous breakdown.

  Amy Carter is well on the way to becoming that favorite American sickie known as a “poor little rich girl.” During the Depression thirties, we devoured endless news stories about unhappy Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress; unhappy Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress; unhappy Gloria Vanderbilt, the heiress heiress; and unhappy Brenda Frazier, the debutante who came out in 1938 and spent the rest of her life coming apart.

  Since then, inherited money has given way to fame as the source of fashionable misery, and beauty has given way to “correct” politics as the source of fame, so a new kind of poor little rich girl is in order.

  For a while it looked as if Jane Fonda would succeed to the crown, but she eliminated herself by developing staying power—staying out of the news, staying out of jail, staying married—so she’s a goner. Amy Carter is a comer, and it promises to be a long haul. I won’t live to see all of it, thank God, but I remember enough about her forerunners of the thirties to make some educated guesses about the milestones:

  She will acquire a Latin lover who will beat her up in the bar of the Essex House.

  She will have an affair with an updated version of Howard Hughes, who at this point seems to be Ted Turner.

  She will marry an impotent intellectual and testify at the annulment hearing about the perverted things he did to her feet.

  She will be photographed at the precise moment when her second husband, a famous athlete, throws champagne in her face.

  She will convert to Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, and Christian Science.

  She will be found wandering around downtown Istanbul in a state of amnesia.

  She will balloon up to two hundred pounds and starve herself down to ninety pounds with diet pills.

  She will be arrested for shoplifting.

  She will drop out of sight for several years and turn up as the wife of a lumberjack in Forks, Washington.r />
  She will make a comeback and host her own talk show. She will announce on camera that she is entering the Betty Ford Clinic.

  She will emerge from the Betty Ford Clinic to headlines announcing the “New Amy” and marry the famous movie actor from her therapy group.

  She will find him in bed with a man and slit her wrists.

  She will say “At last I’ve found happiness” when she marries the Long Island vet.

  She will be photographed throwing herself into the lumberjack’s grave and commune with his spirit in the National Enquirer.

  She will sue the plastic surgeon for the bad face-lift.

  He will write Ironing Out the Wrinkles: How to Survive Professional Lawsuits.

  She will get another face-lift and take up with a beach boy young enough to be her grandson.

  She will write Help Yourself to Youth.

  The beach boy will write Once in Love With Amy: How to Make Love to an Older Woman.

  His book will be withdrawn by the publisher the day after Amy is rushed to the hospital with a ruptured vagina.

  Lear’s magazine will run “Ten Lubrication Aids for the Woman Who Wasn’t Born Yesterday.”

  It will be expanded into a book called The Problem With a Name: The Sahara Mystique.

  Amy will pass to her reward and her executor will write Putting Your Affairs in Order: How to Prepare for Sudden Death.

  7

  NICE GUYISM

  I was shopping for groceries at Gulpmart, the Friendly Store, when a woman slithered up to me at the frozen food bin and whispered, “I love you. Pass it on.”

  She explained that she had been inspired by Hands Across America, and had decided to launch a verbal version of same.