Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye

by Florence King

Uttering the word class out loud is most unwise but the published results of the endless surveys we take invariably manage to say it loud and clear. Anyone who wants to think like the elite—or pretend to when pollsters come around—need only study these upstairs-downstairs bulletins.

  Pick a survey, any survey—say the one on attitudes toward breastfeeding done for the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition in Washington. I got this from one of those obscure little newspaper clippings that I file accordingly after a week or so of carrying them next to my heart in my polyester breast pocket:

  Support for breastfeeding varies with education and geography, the survey found. For example, only 44 percent of those with less than a ninth-grade education said working mothers can breastfeed, compared with 71 percent of college graduates. Support for breastfeeding among employed mothers was highest in the West, lowest in the South [read shack trash]. The strongest support for employer-provided breastfeeding facilities came from college graduates, men, single people, and those with incomes of more than $15,000 a year.

  If you want to watch Americans throw democracy and equality to the winds and enshrine them at one and the same time, get tapped for jury duty and listen while one side eliminates Catholics who went to college and the other side eliminates Protestants who went to high school, until there’s nobody left but twelve people incapable of understanding the case. That’s the jury.

  Thanks to “Democrazy,” the so-called quality of life we hear so much about is best described with my angel mother’s favorite expletive: It’s a “double-asshole, shit sandwich, five-alarm turd sonofabitch.”

  If you agree but prefer to express yourself more loftily, you can say “I am an anti-Sharawaggist.”

  Sharawaggi is a Japanese word meaning irregular or asymmetrical. It entered European languages in the seventeenth century as a landscaping term to describe the kind of garden that the Age of Reason abhorred: wild, overgrown, undisciplined, “natural-looking”—the opposite of the sculptured gardens of Versailles.

  In human terms, Sharawaggi was defined by Sir Harold Nicholson as “a dislike of correctness.” In the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century, says Nicolson, Sharawaggi became a fad, not only in gardening but in etiquette and personal behavior—the Byronic version of “let it all hang out.”

  Sharawaggi has overtaken America. The idea that nobody is better than anybody else has given rise to the belief that it is impossible to give offense in a democratic society. The habit of personal restraint that marks civilized societies has been so thoroughly eroded by egalitarianism that we are coming to resemble revolutionary France as described by Norah Lofts: “Manners and morals had so far declined in the last ten years that theaters in poorer quarters had been obliged to post notices asking clients de ne pas faire vos ordures dans les loges.”

  The popularity of video tapes as well as the whole “couch potato” movement is directly related to a widespread reluctance to sit in a dark movie auditorium with the Sharawaggists while they yell and fart and carry on loud conversations. At baseball games the “bleacher creatures” scream obscenities so loudly that it carries over into radio and television sound, creating yet another free-speech crisis that has rallied the midgets and dwarfs of the American Civil Liberties Union to a defense of Sharawaggist rights.

  They might have rights but they don’t have a way with words. One of the most striking manifestations of Sharawaggi in today’s life is the decline and fall of profanity. My mother was a muleskinner cusser in the great tradition of the U.S. Cavalry, capable of dazzling cascades and ingenious combinations, but the bleacher creatures’ rotely chanted repetitions of “fuck” demonstrate conclusively the democratization of the foul mouth.

  And then there’s the full mouth. In both shows and commercials, characters on television chew and talk with their mouths open, suck on teeth, dig out lodged food with a fingernail, and make lip-smacking noises that sound like a cow trying to pull her foot out of a mud hole. They also indulge in on-screen belching, ear digging, nose picking, and scratching.

  Once upon a time, back in the dear dead days before everybody got “sensitive to the needs of others,” teachers like Miss Dove used to break children of these habits by marking them down in a wonderfully subjective category called “citizenship,” but now we tolerate such actions without protest lest we be accused of setting arbitrary elitist standards.

  Kissing scenes are virtually indistinguishable from eating scenes. It’s disgusting to look at wet tongues and listen to slappy sounds, or to see a long band of spit stretching from one mouth to the other like a suspension bridge glistening in the dawn. The popularity of old black-and-white movies may be due less to a chi-chi interest in “film history” than to the reason that dare not speak its name: the relief of knowing that the movie we are about to see was strictly censored.

  Sharawaggi has also invaded politics. Someone is always getting briefed or de-briefed but fewer and fewer public figures know how to behave. During the Iran-Contra hearings, Representative Dante Fascell asked witness Robert McFarlane, on-camera, if he needed a “pit stop” before continuing his testimony. Bathroom humor is such an obvious and longstanding example of Sharawaggi that we need not dwell on it, but the Iran-Contra affair and the last few years in general have given us another: compulsive nicknaming.

  Ollie North, Bud McFarlane, Cap Weinberger, Bob Schultz, Dick Secord, and Don Regan not only spoke of each other this way but were referred to as such in formal news broadcasts. Arkansas Representative Dale Bumpers, among many others, has referred to England’s prime minister as Maggie Thatcher (which fits like Chuck De Gaulle), and Hugh Sidey of Time devoted an entire column to Librarian of Congress Dan Boorstin. Strangest of all was “Bob” Bork—so called even by those who loathed him.

  In its purest sense, nicknaming is an elitist ritual practiced by those who cherish hierarchy. For preppies it’s a smoke signal that allows Bunny to tell Pooky that they belong to the same tribe, while among good ole boys it serves the cause of masculine dominance by identifying Bear and Wrecker as Alpha males.

  The current fad for political nicknaming is something very different from affectionate tags like Stonewall and Old Hickory, which are not precisely nicknames but noms de guerre or sobriquets. It is also different from the legacy of James Earl Carter, whose diminutive was more of a Southern quirk than an American trend. It is a war against dignity itself. In the race to Sharawaggi we have traded the backslap of the first name for the verbal goose of the nickname.

  Correctness, or at least a yearning for it, is back if you look closely enough. I don’t mean Miss Manners. She’s an open advocate, and in America the real clues are always subliminal. I mean the Planters Peanuts commercials set in the 1920s.

  There are two of them at this writing. The first shows a young father or uncle and a little boy of five or six at a baseball game. Both are wearing shirts and ties, and the man, like the other men around him in the grandstand, wears a visored cap like the one Robert Redford wore in The Great Gatsby.

  The pair are like no father and son in any commercial with a contemporary setting. The man is thoughtful of the boy, asking “Can you see okay?” and “Want some peanuts?” but we sense that he is not frantically into fathering or worried about quality time. He has an air about him. As for the little boy, he’s so polite and soft-spoken that he makes me forget my longstanding affinity for Good King Herod.

  The other commercial shows a young mother with her son and daughter at the beach. Like the men in the background, the little boy wears a bathing suit with a top. Seeing the peanut vendor, he runs off as his mother calls out “Harry! Wait for your sister!” The little girl catches up and the two children race down the boardwalk, passing a starchy, gray-haired grande dame dressed in hat and gloves, with her handbag looped decorously over her wrist. In the background is a huge summer hotel where, we suspect, the grande dame is ensconced.

  The commercials ostensibly aim for our taste buds by asking us to remember how good
roasted peanuts were sixty years ago, but most viewers can’t remember that far back. The purpose of these minidramas goes beyond conventional nostalgia. What they do is make us yearn for Planters Peanuts by making us yearn for the correctness of days gone by: the days when respectable people did not go out without a hat, the days when boys were expected to look after their sisters, the days of empathic fastidiousness when men were as self-conscious about their chest hair as women still are about their leg hair.

  Subconsciously revolted by a long large dose of Anything Goes, Americans are flirting with inconvenience and discomfort. Fountain pens and men’s suspenders have made a comeback; I would not be surprised to see a return to the straight razor and pants with button flies. Anti-Sharawaggists in increasing numbers are chomping at the bit to get at restraint.

  9

  THE AGE OF HUMAN ERROR

  Last year a New York publishing house put the following notice in the trade journal Publishers Weekly.

  Harper & Row prides itself on the quality of its texts, but in a recent reorganization of the production department a crack developed into which OSCAR AND LUCINDA fell. As a result, many copyediting errors and omissions appear in the book which were discovered only after the book was already available for sale.

  We are now printing a corrected version of the text … . We are making every effort to supply wholesalers with this corrected text edition to assure our retail customers immediate access.

  Harper & Row will pay freight on the return of the defective first edition … . Harper & Row will pay freight on replacement orders and will honor the original purchase discount … .

  All original editions of OSCAR AND LUCINDA remaining in our warehouse have been destroyed. Harper & Row sincerely regrets the inconvenience this problem might cause our customers and the disservice this has done to this very fine novel.

  The same thing could have happened to one of my books. For the most part, copyeditors are free lancers who wander around New York working here, working there, with no central clearing house to separate the wheat from the chaff. A good copyeditor is a pearl beyond price and I have had the good fortune to cross paths with a couple, but as any writer will tell you, they are rare birds.

  The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms. She had a tin ear and her initiative surfaced at all the wrong times. Finding my sentences too stark or unequivocal, she stuck in empty-calorie easements like “consider for a moment,” and whenever she came to a particularly violent opinion, she softened it with “alas and alack,” which sounds about as much like me as “goddamn sonofabitch” sounds like June Allyson. She changed my correct spelling and use of empathic to emphatic, confused waspish meaning peevish with the Anglo-Saxon meaning, completely missed and therefore “corrected” numerous puns and word plays, and for some reason that neither I nor anyone in my publisher’s office could discern, every time I wrote start, she changed it to begin.

  She had no sense of rhythm. I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides, but she added so many commas that I ended up with syncopated indigestion on every page. Worst of all, she fiddled with a parody in which the order of words was the whole point of the exercise.

  Besides being an idiot she was also a slob. Thanks to her erasures and different ink colors, the manuscript was a mess even before I started (began?) working on it. Going through a copyedited manuscript usually takes me a few hours, but I spent three solid days on that one. By the time I had corrected her corrections and restored my original sentences, it looked so awful that I refused to let my publisher send it to the printer, because authors have to pay for errors that we cause printers to make. The book was still on the disk so I reprinted the whole thing and copyedited the new manuscript myself.

  Every field has occupational hazards and this story sounds like a writer’s typical complaint. It is, but there’s a larger issue here. Writers like larger issues. We like making connections, going from concrete to discrete and back again, tracing cause and effect, finding meanings in things. Even while I was cussing a blue streak and entertaining a fantasy of collaring the copyeditor in my publisher’s office and beating the shit out of her in front of everybody, another part of my mind was working on what it all meant.

  Here is what I concluded.

  People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they’re all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error. Turn on the television news and the lead story will very likely be about what caused the latest wreck, crash, or act of war. It wasn’t technology—no, indeed, that’s doing fine. It was “human error.”

  This announcement is made with an air of relief, as if the anchorman were saying that things aren’t so bad after all. We’re all human, aren’t we? Anybody can make mistakes, can’t they? Nobody’s perfect, right? The trail of this insidious logic is unmistakable if you know your America. Since we’re all human, since anybody can make mistakes, since nobody’s perfect, and since everybody is “equal,” a human error is Democracy in Action.

  How do we punish human error? We don’t. How could we, when the virtues of thoroughness, exactitude, and quest for perfection are now called obsessive-compulsive behavior, signs of a repressed personality instead of a good character? Besides, chewing people out involves a “value judgment”—an exercise in elitism and consequently forbidden. Worse, chewing people out is un-Nice Guy. Wallowing in an excess of “sensitivity to others,” we let them resign instead of firing them, and then give them good recs because Nice Guys don’t blacklist.

  How do we excuse human error? Easy. The Human Erroroid has “problems”—an all-purpose American affliction that runs the gamut from affordable day care to low self-esteem.

  I know nothing about day care, affordable or otherwise, but I can tell you something about self-esteem. While the copyediting mess was going on, I was having another battle with my landlord over the dirty entry and hallway of my building. It’s a small-town, casual sort of place containing just four apartments, with none of the big-city amenities like janitorial service. The woman who used to clean it died some time ago, and in classic Southern fashion, the landlord never got around to hiring anybody else.

  I kept complaining, and finally he got some woman to do it. I don’t know where he found her, but the moment I set eyes on her I knew what was going to happen. She looked like one of those women who reads true confessions and goes around saying “The Lord will provide.” Her bucket contained plain water from the spigot out back, which meant that it was cold, and there was no sign of soap or cleaning fluid in it, just a faint whiff of Clorox. She was using a dirty mop, and she herself looked dirty—the opposite of what Marines call “table pussy.” In short, a case of low self-esteem.

  I listened to her desultory swishing. Thanks to the screech of the front door, which needed oiling, I could tell that she did not go outside and change her water. When she had finished and gone, I went out and inspected her work. The hallway smelled sour, and she had missed entirely the two things I had complained specifically about: the grease on the edge of one step where somebody’s garbage bag had dripped, and the banister railing that was sticky and disgusting to the touch.

  After discussing the cleaning woman with a neighbor, who said, “I think she has problems,” I called my landlord and offered him my deal: “You knock twenty-five dollars off my rent and I’ll give you the cleanest goddamn building in Christendom.” We agreed that I would scrub the hallway, entry, and banister once a month; and so, in the middle of the copyediting debacle, I went to work. When I finished, the smell of ammonia was so strong that the mailman had a sneezing fit, and later that day when the paper boy came to collect, he sneezed in my face.

  The moral of this story encompasses not only the copyediting incident but the whole American festival of human error, Nice Guyism, and trendy
people-to-people concepts. Self-esteem does not come from Self-Esteem Workshops, Self-Esteem Resources Centers, or Self-Esteem Crisis Hot Lines. Like all of life, self-esteem begins with one tiny seed.

  If that slatternly woman who was hired to clean the building had done a spit-and-polish perfect job of it, she would have felt a little better about herself. Not much, maybe, but a little. That’s how it starts. If the copyeditor had done such a good job on the book that I had written her a thank-you note, as I always do when I’m pleased, she would have felt good about herself.

  When I finished scrubbing that hallway and stood there inhaling the clean smell and looking at the sun dance over the gleaming tiles, I felt great about myself—in the midst of a potentially disastrous publishing crisis that could have damaged my reputation as a writer, I was proud of being such a good janitress.

  The “secret” of self-esteem is no secret at all. It is contained in Robert E. Lee’s farewell to his troops after the surrender at Appomattox: “You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from a knowledge of duty faithfully performed.”

  10

  DÉJÀ VIEWS

  Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories—a tremulous attraction here, a perfect Christmas there, the smell of October in some forgotten year—but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu.

  What other people could take the very symbol of eternity—reincarnation—and turn it into the latest thing? During that particular fad we gorged ourselves on The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, Carrie, The Other, and any number of Damon-the-Demon, Owen-the-Omen spin-offs. A kid, plus reincarnation: the perfect American combo celebrating endless youth and life without death.