Men

by Laura Kipnis

  As to who’s the better writer, Moody or Peck, or more of a man, on the all-important question of who can separate whom from his balls, all we can hope is that there are plenty of Band-Aids on hand should they try—really big ones. But I don’t want to limit this inquiry to Peck alone: his talent for re-creating abuse scenarios in his prose just makes the critical dynamic so wonderfully unsubtle. The real question is whether this is a generalizable condition, whether in Peck’s story we find the hidden template for the “hard-punching” critic generally. What’s most noteworthy in Peck’s confrontation with Moody isn’t the content of his rapier judgments, it’s the portrait of the critic that emerges, with literary criticism a stage on which to enact interior dramas. Punishing imagined inferiors, subjecting victims to the same capricious abuses you yourself have suffered—well, here’s a creative solution to a stored-up history of persecution, at least: counteracting its effects by deflecting them elsewhere.

  The point is that punch-outs preoccupied Peck a long time before Moody happened along; Moody was just collateral damage. Meting out blows while suppressing empathy for the victims at least offers the advantage of not having to experience your own history of vulnerability. Or that’s how it’s said to work with battered children who beat their own offspring. The knowledge that they themselves were once beaten is conscious—it’s the suffering it exacted that you hide from yourself. And from the ranks of the brutalized, writes psychologist Alice Miller, are recruited the most reliable executioners, prison guards, and torturers, who are compelled to repeat their own history because they’ve so totally identified with the aggressive side of their psyche.

  It’s something of a cliché these days that brutalized children risk growing up to brutalize their own children, but what’s less discussed are the countless ways there are—and venues in which—to administer brutality. What makes it tempting is the temporary distance it offers from your injuries and vulnerabilities; the comforting fantasy of imperviousness from pain.

  There’s always something perversely gripping about people acting out these kinds of psychodramas in public. If the residues of Peck’s family horror show seep into his brand of critical vehemence, it’s one of the things that makes his writing compelling, I suppose. It’s his habit of transforming these propensities into moral high-grounding that wears thin—for instance, his sanctimony about Philip Roth’s attitudes toward women in American Pastoral. (“It’s not really the misogyny in this passage that takes the breath away as much as it is the gynophobia.…”) Then you come across Peck interviewed at Gawker, referring to a previous interviewer as “Elizabeth Manus or man-slut or whatever her name was,” and to Jessa Crispin, who runs the amusing website Bookslut, as “ditch-dirty stupid,” and renaming her “Jessa Crisp-Tits.” Does writing critical takedowns exempt the critic from his own standards, or is Peck playing another game: doling out castigation and then soliciting it, re-creating the circle of abuse that gives What We Lost its narrative structure and makes reading Hatchet Jobs mostly feel like more of the same?

  Of course Peck is hardly the first writer to enlist culture as a means of repairing life’s injuries and redeeming its losses: transforming unlivable emotions into other idioms and forms is a large part of what gives culture its emotional resonance. (As Pico Iyer puts it about the writer’s task: “He has to plunge so deeply into his recesses that he touches off tremors that find an echo in a reader.”) If Peck captures the prosecutorial tone of the emotionally abusive parent, obviously this would resonate for far too many of us: the language of criticism is first learned in families, our earliest reviewers, after all. Who escapes unscathed from these lovely scenes? Brutality is forever tempting for just such reasons, offering the opportunity to disavow your own history of vulnerability and injury while reproducing it in others.

  Following Hatchet Jobs, Peck announced that he’d be giving up the pain game; he planned to stop writing criticism. Like his father, he intended to reform. But can his readers? If big-stick literary criticism fills a certain cultural niche, if there’s a certain nasty pleasure in watching other kids get beaten up in “hard-hitting” reviews, no doubt it’s because these proclivities aren’t Peck’s patrimony alone.

  * * *

  Even though I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly hard spanker, I suppose I sent a couple of kids home crying in my earlier reviewing days, and in my own book-writing career, I once got punched so brutally that it left me reeling and gasping for air. (Another version of pretending invulnerability is the proclivity for especially vicious reviews by younger women of other women writers.) In the real world, where a lot of critics also write books, one day you’re dishing it out and another moment you’re taking it. It can be just as psychically complex for any of us as for Peck: are you avenging your own book’s last bad review in the book review you’ve just been assigned to write? Cleansing yourself in the crystalline waters of your high-minded literary judgments, where nothing can really ever quite meet your standards? And there’s always rampant careerism to factor in.

  It sometimes happens that you encounter a victim of one of your critical spankings in social settings. It happened to Peck when he ran into the jazz critic and novelist Stanley Crouch, whose last book Peck had reviewed a bit unfavorably (“Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome is a terrible novel, badly conceived, badly executed, and put forward in bad faith; reviewing it is like shooting fish in a barrel”), at a restaurant in the Village. Crouch approached his table, asked, “Are you Dale Peck?,” introduced himself, shook Peck’s hand, and while still clasping it with one hand, slapped him twice in the face with his other one. (This was reported online by various sources, including Crouch’s lunch companion, the writer Z. Z. Packer.)

  You’d think that Peck would be getting used to this kind of thing, but maybe not. One night I was out to dinner with a friend at another restaurant in the Village where you’re apt to run into writers. Which is what happened: my friend recognized a friend of his as we were being shown to our table. We stopped, they hugged, the friend’s friend in turn introduced us to her dining companion, who stood up from the table. The dining companion was Dale Peck. My friend introduced me. I had, by that point, published an earlier version of the remarks above in Slate, and when I stuck out my hand automatically, Peck refused to shake it. I stood there for a moment, hand awkwardly outstretched, then lowered it, breaking into a slight sweat.

  I suppose I can understand him being unwilling to shake my hand, though having doled out far more than a lifetime’s share of critical abuse in his day, I did think he was being a bit thin-skinned.

  Men Who Hate Hillary

  Here’s what happened the last time Hillary Clinton ran for president: she drove men wild. Well, certain men. Especially certain men on the Right. You could recognize them by the flecks of foam in the corners of their mouths when the subject of her candidacy arose. And they’re already girding themselves for the next time around, because there’s something about Hillary that just gets them all worked up.1

  But what exactly? Despise her they do, yet they’re also strangely drawn to her, in some inexplicably intimate way. She occupies their attention. They spend a lot of time thinking about her—enumerating her character flaws, dissecting her motives, analyzing her physical shortcomings with a penetrating, clinical eye: those thick ankles and dumpy hips, the ever-changing hairdos. You’d think they were talking about their first wives. There’s the same over-invested quality, an edge of spite, some ancient wound not yet repaired. And how they love conjecturing upon her sexuality! Or lack of, heh heh. Is she frigid, is she gay? Heh heh. Yes, they have many theories about her, complete with detailed forensic analyses of her marriage, probably more detailed than their thoughts about their own.

  My point is that you can tell a lot about a man by what he thinks about Hillary, maybe even everything. She’s not just another presidential candidate, she’s a sophisticated diagnostic instrument for calibrating male anxiety, which is apparently running high these days. Un
derstandably, given that the whole male–female, who-runs-the-world question is pretty much up for grabs. Face it: the possibility of a woman in the White House creates a certain frisson; how could it not? The historic distribution of power between the sexes is being revamped, power is a subject that cuts deep, and the male psyche is feeling a little embattled. Change hurts; loss rankles. Thus defenses are mounted, which—as any human with the usual repertoire of human emotions probably knows—can take some pretty convoluted forms.

  Let me pause to confess that I haven’t been the world’s hugest Hillary fan myself—I’m not crazy about her politics, and her campaign stump speeches put me to sleep last time around, though she’s grown on me since her Secretary of State stint. (Her defense of international abortion rights is rousing.) The problem is that I don’t find her fascinating, which makes me even more fascinated by the passion of the guys who get so twisted up in knots about her. Of course, the Hillary haters assure us they don’t hate Hillary because she’s a powerful woman—they’re not Neanderthals!—they hate her because she’s Hillary. By attacking her they’re just refusing to kowtow to political correctness.

  Despite the reassurances, you suspect there’s more to it than that. Hillary’s ascendancy—to the Democratic ticket or ultimately the presidency—will be proportional to how much she vexes men. Despite all the platitudes about gender progress and “how far women have come,” a certain obdurate level of anxiety persists between the sexes. The problem is that it’s less permissible to discuss such anxieties, precisely because of all the progress. We’re far too enlightened to be debating whether a woman should be president—that would be antiquated and discriminatory. So the qualms must find more creative routes of expression.

  As our tour guides into these subterranean psychical thickets, I’ve enlisted a selection of Hillary’s right-wing biographers to lead the way, or more specifically, a selection of authors obsessed enough to write entire books about a woman they detest, while still being lucid enough to find a commercial publisher. Unfortunately this excluded self-published works like Hillary Clinton Nude: Naked Ambition, Hillary Clinton and America’s Demise by Sheldon Filger, but even the painfully repetitious title screamed for the interventions of a professional editor, and life is short. I also declined to read any books that came with voodoo dolls; sadly this ruled out The Hillary Clinton Voodoo Kit: Stick It to Her, Before She Sticks It to You! by Turk Regan, but as fuming tirades were in no short supply, I felt that I could afford to be choosy.

  Biographies, even bad ones, are the record of a relationship, and sometimes that relationship just goes sour. A few self-reflective biographers have admitted as much: Thoreau’s biographer Richard Lebeaux has commented that writing the book was like a marriage, and not always the smoothest of marriages, “not without some stormy arguments, separations, and passionate reconciliations.” For whatever reasons, Hillary’s biographers are especially prone to the marital mode. She seems to attract a certain type: guys with a lot of psychological baggage, emotional intensity, and messy inner lives. As we’ll see, there are a lot of stormy arguments in these pages too, though fewer passionate reconciliations. Mostly it’s a litany of injury and accusation, the sort of thing you tend to hear in couples with unhealthy levels of attachment.

  What I’m saying is that reading these Hillary bios, you feel you’re learning as much about the authors as you do about her, possibly more. So let’s turn that spotlight around, shall we? After all, what’s sauce for the goose.…

  The obvious place to begin is with R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., author of Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House, since if Hillary’s biographer-foes sound like embittered ex-husbands, in Tyrrell, founder and editor-in-chief of the far-right American Spectator, we’re fortunate to have a biographer who’s occasionally mused in print about his actual ex-wife. So who gets it worse—Hillary or the ex? Actually it’s a toss-up. Indeed, Madame Tyrrell and Madame Hillary share an uncanny number of similar traits. Hillary’s a self-righteous, self-regarding narcissist, “a case study in what psychiatrists call ‘the controlling personality,’” and assumes the world will share her conviction that she’s always blameless. Compare with Tyrrell on the soon-to-be ex, from his political memoir The Conservative Crack-Up: “She resorted to tennis, then religion, and then psychotherapy. Finally she tried divorce—all common American coping mechanisms for navigating middle age.” When Tyrrell worries that suburban women will secretly identify with Hillary’s independence and break from their husbands’ politics in the privacy of the voting booth, clearly suburban women’s late-breaking independence is territory he has cause to know and fear.2

  Hillary’s disposition is dark, sour, and conspiratorial; she has a paranoid mind, a combative style, is thin-skinned, and “prone to angry outbursts.” Whereas the ex–Mrs. T., we learn, was afflicted with “random wrath”; and as divorce negotiations were in their final stages, threatened to make the proceedings as public and lurid as possible. Hillary has “a prehensile nature,” which makes it sound like she hangs from branches by her feet. (Tyrrell has always fancied himself a latter-day Mencken, flashing his big vocabulary around like a thick roll of banknotes.) And while he nowhere actually says that his ex-wife hung from branches by her feet, the reference to protracted divorce negotiations probably indicates that “grasping”—the definition of prehensile (I had to look it up)—is a characterization he wouldn’t argue with. When Tyrrell writes of Bill and Hillary that there was an emotional side to the arrangement, with each fulfilling the other’s idiosyncratic needs, as we see, he’s been there himself.

  Threatening ex-wives, property settlements, bad breath—not exactly lighthearted stuff. Tyrrell at least tries to be amusing about it, in the sense that love transformed into hatred can be amusing, in a bilious, horribly painful sort of way. Not so with Edward Klein, author of the bestselling The Truth About Hillary, and a tragically humorless type. When Klein rants, “As always with Hillary, it was all about her,” note the rancid flavor of marital over-familiarity—he’s really just had it with her. He’s practically venomous. Though he’s also so suspicious of her sexual proclivities that unintentional humor abounds: he’s like an angry Inspector Clouseau with gaydar. The inconvenient fact that there’s no particular evidence Hillary bends that way dissuades him not. Thus we learn that Hillary went to a college with a long tradition of lesbianism (Wellesley), where she read a lot of lesbian literature, and two of her college friends would later become out-of-the-closet lesbians, and later, some of her Wellesley classmates were invited for “sleepovers” to the White House. (Get it? Sleepovers.) In 1972, a Methodist church magazine she subscribed to published a special issue on radical lesbian and feminist themes edited by two—you guessed it—lesbians. In college, her role models were feminists who refused to wear pretty clothes, and sometimes appeared mannish; her White House chief of staff was also mannish-looking. Though according to Klein, Hillary never much liked sex to begin with. Sounding like a Monty Python rendition of a Freudian analyst, Klein speculates about a fight Hillary once had with a college boyfriend about not wanting to go skiing; skiing, says Klein, “might have been a substitute for an honest discussion about her sexual frigidity.” The episode ended with Hillary retreating into “icy silence.” Get it? Icy. (He also quotes Richard Nixon, of all people, who said that Hillary is “ice cold.”) Yet Klein reports that Hillary had a torrid affair with Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel (and her former law partner) who later committed suicide. This would make her a frigid closeted bisexual adulteress, for anyone keeping track.

  In his preface to the paperback edition of The Truth About Hillary, Klein does attempt to weasel out of some of his more incendiary allegations, claiming mysteriously that the “exaggerated rumors” about the hardcover edition—that it claimed Hillary’s a lesbian and Bill raped his wife—“were blatantly untrue.” Huh? Because this is indeed the book that has Bill Clinton, on a Bermuda vacation in 1979, telling some guys in the hotel bar that he was going
back to his room to “rape my wife,” and this was how daughter Chelsea was conceived. Perhaps Klein means that he just quoted a lot of imaginary gossip rather than asserting such allegations himself. True, it’s his rhetorical strategy throughout the book to employ others as mouthpieces for his sleazier innuendos, as when he imagines the West Wing staff gathered around the water cooler asking one another:

  Was it true they slept in separate beds?

  Were there any telltale signs on the presidential sheets that they ever had sex with each other?

  For that matter, did the Big Girl have any interest in sex with a man?

  Or, as was widely rumored, was she a lesbian?

  The italics are Klein’s. If it’s a handy truism that constant sexual innuendos mask a discomfort with sex, then Klein is one uptight dude.

  But there’s just so much sexual baggage among these guys generally, not to mention rather mixed feelings about the female body itself. When Klein writes of Hillary’s lower regions that though she’s “a small-boned woman from the waist up, she was squat and lumpy from the waist down, with wide hips, calves, and ankles,” the blatant bodily aversion in the phrase “squat and lumpy” isn’t just a disagreement with her health care plan. Klein’s concentration on Clinton’s physical appearance is so microscopic that you fully expect to turn the page and find an index of her moles, accompanied by a close reading of what they indicate about her moral insufficiencies.