Michael Davidow's Blog: The Henry Bell Project

“About that money. We changed our vehicle the other day. And our new vehicle depends on you. How is that for starters?” / “Here I am.” He crossed his legs and arms. His head hurt, and so did his spine. The MCA man gave him a smile. He was of Bell’s same generation, but better-looking and better-appointed; he had pictures of his children and his wife on his desk, too. Studio-produced, with good lighting. / Bell’s future surely contained a root canal.

So Mad Men is coming to an end, and okay, I admit it– I'll miss it (wink). It doesn’t matter that Split Thirty came first in time (ask the agent who represented it for a minute); it doesn’t matter that The Henry Bell Project is more about politics and religion than it is about advertising; it doesn’t matter that Selma Kahn is sexier in text than half a dozen highly-posed mannequins could ever be, on television. Matthew Weiner deserves a hand. Every single day, it seems, another New York Times reporter is wiping away a tear.

Please tell me, New York Times, why do you care so much? And why are you now giving us “upshots” instead of news? And why is the new Sunday magazine so damned hard to read? And why did you ever allow Herbert Muschamp to write about architecture, or Seth Scheisel to write about video games?

Sorry, I digress.

Anyway, I have always suspected that the Times loves this show because it makes New York City feel good about itself (poor New York, with its raging inferiority complex), and my buddy Ginia Bellafante wrote the other day that I was right: that Matthew Weiner’s political arguments could be boiled down to a sense that city-people are smarter than non-city-people; that cities will save us, or nothing can; and that New York, in particular, is just plain better than the rest of this country. Hmm.

Well, if that’s what my brother Matt was saying, politically speaking, I have to admit I am unconvinced. I remember long ago reading an article by Joyce Carol Oates– holy hell, Joyce Carol Oates!– about how Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City because he grew up in some sad poor town in New York State without the benefit of city culture (city culture as defined by Joyce Carol Oates, I guess). As I myself grew up in a sad poor town here in New Hampshire, I remember being irked by that thesis. As if growing up in New York City protected one from feeling empty (wow, is it that simple?), or being an idiot, or crazy, or violent (Son of Sam, anyone?). Or maybe she meant a place like Cambridge… home to Harvard, thousands of budding artists, and the fine young Tsarnaev brothers…

I dunno. I was always careful in writing The Henry Bell Project to leave people alone; to not argue too much, with what made them happy. Henry is certainly fond of cities (as is the author, Oates Carol Joyce!). But Bertie — a true city boy– repairs to the country whenever he can. Paula is quite content in a suburb. Jack Mercer likes pineapple plantations; Pooch likes to be in motion; Selma is happy wherever she can get an egg cream (which you can’t get anywhere these days)… my point being that we all move around a lot these days, and that questing souls, thoughtful minds, and working hearts can be found all over the place. There are no short-cuts to spiritual integrity (ask Sal Paradise about that– no, not my character, but still). And well-trod roads can lead people to disaster. (Can you imagine, by the way, what today’s more sensitive three-year-olds will be saying about the horror of growing up in “Brooklyn,” come another fifteen years?)

It was the citified Democrats, after all, who first insisted on empowering minorities and giving voice to all dissenters, regardless of their smarts or common sense: demands that the outer fringes of the Republican Party soon came to embrace with glee, leading to the disaster that is Congress, today.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s Pogo, friends– and Pogo lived in a swamp.

Those clowns all think there are easy answers out there. Like truth is something there’s a recipe for, and they can’t understand why the rest of us get it wrong.

HENRY'S ITALIAN WEDDING COOKIES (from Gate City)

Preheat oven to 350. Stir well: 1/2 cup whipping cream; 3 tablespoons sugar. Stir in: 1/3 cup blanched, slivered almonds; 1/4 cup diced lemon peel; 1/4 cup all-purpose flour. Spread a cookie sheet with with unsalted shortening. Flour it lightly. Drop the batter on it from a teaspoon, well apart. Bake until golden brown, from 10-15 minutes.

Makes thirty cookies. Goes well with Chianti.

HELEN'S QUICHE LORRAINE (from Split Thirty)

Preheat oven to 375. Line a 9 inch pie plate with pastry. Bake for 30 minutes.

Cook 4 strips of bacon until crisp. Cook an onion, thinly sliced. Crumble the bacon, the onion, one cup of cubed Gruyere cheese, and 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese over the baked shell.

Combine 4 eggs, lightly beaten, 1 cup of milk, one cup of cream, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper; and pour it over the shell. Bake for 45 minutes and serve immediately.

Makes one quiche (I guess). Goes well with Scotch.

“Good morning, Chan. It’s Henry.” “Henry? Are you back from the coast?” “Here I am. Live, from Madison Avenue.”

Its charm continues to elude me. It’s a soap opera with elaborate sets. I think it has more to do with the self-regard of non-native New Yorkers than with any particular dramatic import. But hey— Matthew Weiner: where is the love?

Ten random Mad Men moments from the Henry Bell novels:

10. Pullman Porter eats a mango (Gate City);

9. Pooch sings the Ko-Ko-Bite jingle during lunch at the Four Seasons (Split Thirty);

8. Jack Mercer stares down a peacock (Gate City);

7. Liesl Engelbrecht and Paula Bell dance the twist (Gate City);

6. Pooch throws up in Times Square, while Henry talks about the Ted Bates agency (Split Thirty);

5. Henry insults the woman in mink (Split Thirty);

4. Tasha gets covered with magazine advertisements at Kahn’s studio in Hell’s Kitchen (Split Thirty);

3. Selma smuggles a strawberry milkshake into Chasen’s (Gate City);

2. Baby Robert falls into a swimming pool (Gate City); and

1. HENRY GETS DRUNK (the whole damn thing).

“Mr. Bell, can you believe this? They brought me out here all the way from Los Angeles, California. Because they didn’t want no girl from Chocolate City. I just graduated. The Nancy Taylor Secretarial School. Which is in Chicago, so don’t get confused. That’s where my dad lives. I bop around this country like a ping-pong ball. Imagine.” She crossed her legs, rested her elbows on her desk’s surface, rested her chin on her two hands, and blinked long sets of sympathetic eyelashes. “Ricochet Rabbit. C’est moi. And you should have seen their faces when I showed up.”

Claudia (that sexy receptionist) is one of the few characters in these stories who was named for an actual person: Claudia Lennear, the (sexy) back-up singer of the 60’s and 70’s. You can catch glimpses of her in Joe Cocker’s concert film, Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Joe Cocker died a little while ago. I was busy writing GATE CITY when that happened, so I failed to mark it properly here. But I sure owe him. His songs provide much of the soundtrack for SPLIT THIRTY, for that movie they will never make of it.

Per all the easy information you can find about him, anyway, he came out of Sheffield, England, a pipefitter by trade who sang in local clubs at night. He soon became a local sensation and then hit it big with his bluesy cover of A Little Help From My Friends — a rendition that the Beatles themselves (by all accounts) thought was terrific. He made a smash appearance at Woodstock and then toured America with that Mad Dogs business. He then had a spotty solo career with comebacks and fadeouts alternating regularly. And now he has died. He was always modest, always friendly, always a little surprised by being famous.

The Mad Dogs tour was orchestrated by the redoubtable Leon Russell, who backed up his brother Joe with a veritable army of sound. Two drummers, a horn section, saxophones (including Bobby Keys, who has also just died; RIP Bobby Keys, who deserves more mention than this), guitars, an angel choir, you name it. And song after song– Feelin’ Alright, Darling Be Home Soon, Bird on a Wire, The Letter, an incredible blues medley (Drown in My Own Tears, Something is Wrong with My Baby, and Loving You Too Long), and A Little Help From My Friends– they nailed it. It is a major work of rock and roll. Leon Russell makes more than walls of sound. He makes waves of sound– giant, disciplined, and mobile waves; against which Joe Cocker pits his singular raw voice. They engage in nothing less than sonic battle.

That tour nearly killed our man. Already troubled by alcohol and drugs, his addictions worsened over those months on the road. He was broken by the end of it all. And I think his exhaustion was at least partly caused by the music itself. He gave it all his heart. (In the film, someone asks Leon what the crowd likes best, and he says it is probably A Little Help From My Friends. To which the interviewer replies, “so that’s the easy one,” or some such nonsensical thing. Leon glares at him and snaps, “nothing is easy.”)

Finally, though, consider this, too: the Russell/Cocker dynamic actually illustrates what I am trying to do in my books (and does art all share the same DNA, or what?) Take GATE CITY, for instance: Henry trying to turn the tide at the convention in Chicago. We know beforehand he will lose; we know how Chicago turns out for Rockefeller. We know what happened, day by day. Waves of action and waves of results. But Henry provides the individual voice; he only goes down after a bloody fight; and in that fight is the poetry of his being.

Just like Joe Cocker singing the blues. So I am sorry that he has died. But what a gift he gave us while he was alive.

And away from the gallery, back in the lobby, against every wall and window; there were Kennedy girls in candy cane dresses, and Johnson girls opposing them, each type milling past Paula with avid looks on their shining white faces; here and there were the Symington girls, too, serious and sad for the fate of their man, not even having fun here at the big hotel; then came all those Stevenson girls, squares, folkies, and hipsters, each one a librarian at heart. Paula drank it in. No wonder her husband loved it so. It was the circus coming to town.

That circus metaphor comes courtesy of John Erlichman, who used it to describe the fun of posing as an advance man for Nelson Rockefeller while actually working for his old college classmate, Bob Haldeman. (“Say, you weren’t one of those bastards Bob Haldeman sent down here to spy on us, were you?” Bell asks Mercer at one point. “We caught a few of you guys last fall, over in Los Angeles. Driving our motor cars. Trying to screw our secretaries. Reporting back to Wilshire at the end of every day.”) Erlichman being one of Nixon’s key White House aides, and a man whose career was destroyed in the Watergate scandal of 1972.

But it’s a great saying, no doubt. Politics used to be nothing if not fun. There were parties, parades, rallies, all the time. There was drinking and eating and travelling around. There was exhaustion and exultation. There was the thrill of movement and meeting new people. (I wonder if Hillary Clinton feels any of that, wrapped in that miserable cocoon of hers.) Yet simultaneously politics was (and remains) serious stuff. Bell goes to Chicago with no lesser agenda than to alter world history. He puts down his shoulder and he works. And he is surrounded by others with the exact same agenda.

GATE CITY borrows many of its high notes from the Yom Kippur liturgy, though, and nicely enough this duality has its basis there, too. Because the rabbis used to teach that a direct connection existed between Yom Kippur– the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar– and Purim, the most joyful. They even believed that these two holidays were actually the same holiday, with the same meaning and the same importance. Yet on Yom Kippur, we fast and pray; while on Purim we put on masks and drink ourselves into oblivion.

What is shared in both sets of ritual is a recognition of our limits as human beings. That no matter how hard we try to change this fact, our lives remain subject to forces beyond our control. And sometimes we laugh at that; and sometimes we struggle with it; and sometimes we do both.

At least Henry Bell does, in Chicago, at the Republican Convention of 1960.

“Poison in the ground. Perchlorate variety. Though christ only knows what else. Gets in the air when the wind blows.” “Is it safe?” “Put it this way. I wouldn’t raise crops here.” Bell knew this area well from too many briefings on too many explosions. Rocketdyne used burn pits in its active zones. It destroyed contaminated items in the open air itself. “This whole hill is a chemistry laboratory. We use this place for testing fuel. Different mixes. Different strengths. Every ounce of that stuff is pure poison. And when you burn poison, you get more poison.”

The Santa Susana field laboratory remains a mess. Per the EPA, the “primary chemical contaminants include a variety of radionuclides, trichloroethylene (TCE), perchloroethylene (PCE), metals, and petroleum hydrocarbons.” The clean-up is ongoing. That poison we put into the ground to put our men on the moon was real. That's what it took to get so high. It was pretty rough stuff.

I look at what technology has offered in recent years: some good telephony (and we don’t destroy our own back yards anymore, either; we put our poisons in Africa and Asia) (well, fracking, but that’s another story). I don’t want to gainsay the rise of Facebook and Apple. The societal effects of these new communication abilities are still being tested in real time. We’ll see how they work out. It hasn’t done much more than make a handful of billionaires at this point, but perhaps it’s still too early to say.

And our lives weren’t changed by putting men into space, either. It can be argued that our having done so was a giant waste of money and time. We could have been better served by putting those resources towards a dozen other projects more intelligently calculated to alleviate human misery.

Yet one of the most interesting things about the 60’s was its combination of big industry and big consciousness. The line between convention and rebellion got blurred. The most powerful companies, the military men, the crew cuts and the squares, worked for ten years to put a man on the moon. And it can’t be denied. That was cool.

RIP to that ancient mix. And RIP to Leonard Nimoy, a landsman of mine, from Boston and points even further east. That silly old show of his was pretty terrific. Him and Shatner, actors playing actors, each trying to be what they wanted to be: in control, in their own personal ways, of their own personal rides on a very strange trip.

Plus his singing was underrated, and he was really a handsome guy. Who knew.

“He got business here. Or so he say. There ain’t no man a delegate to this convention who stays his own boss.” “That’s right,” Bell agreed. “That’s why I fly solo.” Pullman Porter was waved away by another marcher then, he nodded goodbye to Bell, and Bell double-checked the other notes he was keeping in his breast pocket, too, the ones from his morning telephone talks. Hawaii, correct. The Knickerbocker. That was north of this sidewalk, by two good miles; nearer to the Drake and the California delegation. If only Rocky could see him now. Gone ahead to scout the terrain, with feathers and hatchet in hand.

One of the pleasures of writing is reading; doing the research. And GATE CITY required more than just straightforward historical work (yes, Hawaii really was staying at the Knickerbocker in Chicago in 1960). It also involved learning anthropology. Because after all, Jack Mercer was his agency’s depth man; he himself was an amateur anthropologist.

But just as Thomas Kuhn’s work ran like water through SPLIT THIRTY, references to anthropological classics pop up everywhere in GATE CITY, and not just when dealing with Mercer himself. A non-exclusive list: Baby Robert is found hiding behind a cottonwood tree by his mother; just like Ishi, last of the Yahi, was found by sheriffs upon his entry to white society in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi In Two Worlds. Mercer prods Bell to accept the dictates of party hierarchy and feels like committing hari-kari when Bell turns him down; one of several sly references to Ruth Benedict’s work on Japan. Stanley Fishbein leavens his critique of capitalism with thoughts borrowed from Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (Goodman wrote that book on contract for Governor Rockefeller, no less; Rocky did not care for the results) (ha!). And upon landing in Chicago with work to do, for which he only has his own two hands, Bell feels “like a handyman, surrounded by engineers,” one of the central metaphors in Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.

If I had to pick out one book as the most important for an in-depth reading of GATE CITY, in fact, it would have to be that last one. One particular bit of Tristes Tropiques saddened me when I read it, though, and did not make the cut: his description of the coldness of his family’s synagogue, as remembered from his childhood. It seems to have been written without much sympathy. It seems to have been written by a young man.

Selma actually pays a visit to two synagogues in GATE CITY; a big one on Wilshire and a small one in the valley. And though they differ from each other in many respects, neither qualifies as cold. These are also places she goes, however, to connect with the past. And perhaps only in Judaism does that connection so signify warmth and love. And perhaps only Judaism has that as its central problem in the modern age, too: that people no longer wish to connect with the past. I don’t know what to do about that as my wife and I raise our son, except to show him how such bonds have meaning and beauty to me.

One of the pleasures of writing is reading; doing the research. Consider that to be a holy task, and your story comes alive.

Responsible for a washing detergent that made clothes tingle; a brand of minty toothpaste that promised its users a glamorous grin; some shady business in London that may or may not have implicated the Rockefeller bank, depending on which rumors you believed; and the character of Kenny Kangaroo, escaped from a cartoon zoo to bounce through crowds of kids, stealing chocolate bars from their pockets and jamming them into his own.

There’s a dead giveaway that you are visiting the world of fiction when you hit that rundown of Henry Bell’s accomplishments; and it’s hiding like the purloined letter, right smack in the middle of things. It’s that toothpaste scam: the “glamorous grin.” Because every student of the 1950’s knows that no such toothpaste was ever sold. No such toothpaste was ever sold because the ad-man responsible for choosing that slogan decided against it. Decided against it because studies showed that the word “brilliant” made people think of things that were shiny and bright, like diamonds; whereas the word “glamorous” made them think of things that were rich and ostentatious, like fur coats. And “nobody want to have furry teeth,” reasoned that ad-man. Who also found the plodding obviousness of the work that went into that decision to be so off-putting that he quit the trade altogether. His name was Allen Ginsberg.

Now GATE CITY has no actual beatniks in it; no more than SPLIT THIRTY had any hippies. Which is because if you were to throw a rock at any crowd of random people in either 1972 or 1960 you would be far more likely to hit a score of regular-seeming souls trying to deal with the problems of their lives in ways that you and I can still easily sympathize with, than you would people who fully embody their generation’s cartoon archtype (the past is not another country; the past is more like two towns over, down the interstate highway). There’s the artist Tom Engelbrecht, of course (who goes so far as to quote Ginsberg’s A Supermarket in California when speaking to Bell in Santa Susana: “wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes…”) (to which Bell replies, unerringly, “what’s that?”) and there’s Tom’s assistant Elaine as well (who at least looks the part, wearing the same sweatshirt and dirty sneaks as Maynard G. Krebs himself); but neither are true beats. Meaning, per Kerouac at any rate, that neither is truly beaten. Both of them are still in there pitching; both of them are still willing to put in the time and the effort; put simply: both of them still have hope.

Which, come to think of it, was part and parcel of life in this country, ca. 1960. Ah so. And we know how that one ended.

No, there are no real beatniks in my new novel, except, perhaps, for the author himself. But even he probably flatters himself, to admit that he keeps writing even when he knows he can’t succeed at it. He keeps thinking that someday, people might read his goddamned novels. And really, man. What’s more square than that?

He estimated they had gone half a mile when she stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Here they are,” she told him in a hush. Then they were engaged by more teenaged girls with a campfire of their own sputtering behind them. The sky was darkening now. “What’s the story, morning glory?” “Who’s the old man?”

“Now now,” Mercer said. “No autographs, please.”

“Is he famous?” “Search me. I don’t know him.” “He looks like someone. He looks like Gregory Peck.”

Ah, Gregory Peck. The star of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a 1956 movie about the advertising industry. But perhaps more famous today as the star of To Kill a Mockingbird, which came out a few years later. As a practicing criminal defense attorney, I’ve never much liked that movie. It’s a bit mawkish for me. But I’ve nothing against Harper Lee, who wrote the novel upon which it was based, and who by all accounts was a very pleasant woman.

She’s been in the news lately because they’ve just published another book of hers; a prequel of sorts to Mockingbird, that she wrote in her youth but subsequently put aside. Her editors apparently thought it wasn’t up to snuff. They suggested she re-work some of its material, though, which she did: resulting in Mockingbird itself. And now there’s some concern that maybe this new book of hers isn’t all that great.

There’s also some concern that maybe she’s being taken advantage of by some money-hungry types eager to cash in on her before it’s too late. I have no opinion on that (other than to hope it isn’t so). But this other business is funny to me.

Now the wonderful fact of the matter is that a lot of great books had no editors at all. Or if they did, these guys were ineffectual. James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance. Edited? Poorly, I guess. Or Moby Dick: a glorious mess. Or, um, Shakespeare. Not so much edited as chopped up by the players themselves. Nor is every editor out there the equivalent of Maxwell Perkins. Though you wouldn’t know it, to hear about poor Nell Harper and how lousy she wrote without first being told what to do by some guy in New York City…

It’s something, in other words, to assume that because a book lacked an editor, it can’t be any good. That theory has more to do with the modern commodification of fiction than with any truth about art. Maybe this new (old) book will be weirder and wilder than Mockingbird. Maybe it will be tamer and duller. Maybe it will be shaggy, maybe it will be strange. I don’t know. I don’t even care. But maybe people will still simply enjoy sitting down with Harper Lee and seeing what was on her mind fifty or seventy-five years ago. Maybe not everybody; maybe just a few people. And maybe that’s enough.

Because let’s remember this, too: it wasn’t Bach that led to Mozart; it was Handel. It wasn’t Mozart that led to Beethoven; it was Haydn. It wasn’t Beethoven that led to Wagner; it was Meyerbeer. It wasn’t Wagner that led to Mahler; it was Bruckner. And so on, and so on, and so on. There is a great role played by art that itself may not be great. It is enough to inspire; it is enough to challenge; it is enough to be loved.

At least I’d like to think so. But what do I know. I don’t have an editor.

Bell walked from his cluttered desk to blow off steam after an hour of effort. He stuck out his tongue at Baby Robert, who was standing in the hallway in short blue cotton pajama pants, and Baby Robert reciprocated in kind, laughing his raucous laugh. “Say,” Bell told his youngest boy. “I bet you didn’t know this.” “Bubble.” “Ted Williams just hit his five hundredth home run.” Baby Robert mulled that over but not for very long, before he decided on more laughter as the most appropriate response. “Mind over matter,” Bell stated. “He wills himself to get those hits. Did you watch your howdy-doody today?” His youngest child toddled away in search of his mother and better conversation.

(An open letter to S.V., Holly, Michigan.)

My wife forgives me many things. Our lawn is not as nice as our neighbor’s. I have the bad habit of resorting to scissors when our toddler son needs a pair of short pants, and all I can find are long pants. And I can’t stand watching baseball games with her.

The last game we watched together was the Red Sox beating the Cards in the World Series last year. At the end, while Boston’s players were still celebrating on the field, she commented on how the Cardinals in the dugout were ruining everything by sticking around. The cameras kept showing them looking sad. And I sputtered out how wrong she was: how the Cards had every right to be there; how they did not want to leave the field yet; how they did not want their summer to be over yet; and most importantly of all, how losing was part of baseball, for the love of jesus christ.

As it is with writing. And politics. And life. Needless to say, she thought I was nuts.

Since then, anyway, the Sox have lost a slew of games, traded away their best pitcher, and permanently rented the cellar of the A.L. East. And I myself have hardly been able to watch a single game this year. Not because I am a fair weather fan (I was born in Boston, so sue me). But rather because I have been too busy with work, with that toddler child of ours, and with stealing as many hours as possible for writing the prequel to Split Thirty. So busy that I have not been able to keep up this blog for all this time, or my book’s facebook page; so busy that I have not been marketing Split Thirty at all; even so busy that I neglected to note the fortieth anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation this past weekend, in any witty or subtle fashion whatsoever.

Other writers are a hell of a lot more astute than that. Rick Perlstein, for instance, managed to get his latest book on Nixon published just in time to reap all that free publicity— and I wish I had one speck of his ink.

Thankfully, though, S.V. of Holly, Michigan, who somehow stumbled across Split Thirty all on her own, and who is kind enough to say she liked it, picked up the slack and posted a link on Henry Bell’s facebook page to a fine account of Nixon’s last days. And she added a thought: that she has been wondering lately what Bell himself would have made of that whole situation.

Now we last left Henry in the spring of ’73, testifying to Congress and otherwise keeping mum. As I mention above, the book I’m writing now is a prequel, taking him back to the Kennedy era. And if I had to guess, I would say it will be another three years or so before Henry will be answering S.V. more directly. But here are some belated thoughts on that subject, in the meantime: because who is Perlstein, that he should get this field to himself?

And no, for the record, I have not read Perlstein (just as I have never looked at Mad Men on tee vee). I bet that he and I have sources in common, though (just like me and my imaginary buddy, Matthew Weiner): those still-unequaled histories written by Teddy White; the unfairly forgotten masterpieces of his fellow journalist, John Gunther; the wise and caring works of sociology that came out of the 50’s, too, by men like Riesman and Whyte. And what I have to say is this: that Watergate was an aberration; that its ugliness was personal, rather than institutional; that it caused a temporary fluctuation in the great and wide field of American politics, as had the Great Depression before it in a much more salient and significant way; and that forty years has sufficed to wash away nearly all of its effects.

Now Teddy White was excoriated in his day for having missed the big story of ’72; for having treated the Watergate scandal so cavalierly in his last Making of the President book. The New York critics really thought he had lost his touch. But I am still arguing the opposite. That he saw the ’72 election for what it was, instead: the latest jog to the right of the American body politic. Which every election since has only solidified.

In fact, if White had a flaw, it was that he started nearly all of his analysis with Roosevelt and the ‘30’s. So he saw his day’s rightward march as a new and true post-war event. I believe that had he gone back further, he would have seen something even more startling. He would have seen how truly conservative-- even reactionary-- this country has always been. And I believe he would have despaired. Because the fundamental go-it-aloneness of the American population, sustained over countless waves of immigration from nearly every other country in the world, says something difficult about humanity itself.

When you write from New York City, it must be hard to view the rest of the country as anything more than a curiosity. That damned New Yorker cartoon has more than a grain of truth to it. And it must be hard from the skyscraper canyons of Fifth Avenue—and even moreso from those new, weird, self-involved brownstone canyons of Brooklyn-- to realize how others actually live, and how those lives translate to their politics: the loneliness of all those highway drives; the shallowness of all those shopping plaza parking lots; the death of initiative that lies behind every new convenience. And all of that, applied to the reality of life: to falling in love, to suffering loss; to caring, and struggling, and dying. The bravery in that fight, and the pride involved.

But that loneliness, most of all. What we hate to admit, ever.

New Yorkers make loneliness into a sort of poetry. They are lonely in crowds. They are lonely and they treasure it, or they are lonely and they curse it. But they are never actually alone. They are part of the city, and they know it.

New Hampshire, where I am writing from, has belonged to this country from the beginning. When it was time to ratify its constitution in the 1780’s, they held a vote. Not enough people voted. So the legislature made a new rule: if not enough people voted, then approval would be assumed. And not enough people voted, again. New Hampshirites couldn’t be bothered. Two centuries before Ronald Reagan, they wanted to be left alone.

And I fear that our country’s modern political culture may well have more in common with New Hampshire in the 1780’s than with New York City, ever. I say that without pride; in fact, I say it with sadness. And most of all, I say that this presents a challenge: because the fight to find meaning in this life remains an individual one, a matter between each citizen and his or her conscience; a fight that only the strong can win, and many choose to ignore.

So what would Henry say today? He would say thank you, S.V., for prompting this note.