Frances “Peggy” Harvey, circa 1933, in Wichitaw, Kansas, where she lived with her mother and sister. She was about to go to college at the University of Kansas, where she would study journalism and meet her future husband, a dashing journalism student named Wilbur Schutze.
1. A Goofy State of Mind.
Dear Peggy: The letter I am about to write you is a monstrous impertinence. This is fair warning; you should now tear it up. It is, I think, insolent enough to give an opinion when asked for it; it is the outside limit to render judgments when no one desired them, and as a result of reading a letter not addressed to you… So. You better tear it up.
If you are still with me, I wish to tell you that, from the absorbing letter you wrote Mother (and which she showed me because you mentioned my book: always encourage authors) I have decided you are in a goofy state of mind.
Sometime around the year 1949, the eminent war correspondent and novelist Martha Gellhorn wrote the above letter from her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico to an Episcopalian clergyman’s wife living in the small town of Alma, Michigan.
Both women were devoted writers of vivid missives. Gellhorn’s pen pals included Eleanor Roosevelt, the editor Maxwell Perkins, H.G. Wells, her husband (later, ex-) Ernest Hemingway, and other luminaries. The housewife whom she was addressing, Peggy Schutze, nee Harvey, a native Kansan of pioneer stock, wrote mostly to her mother and sister. They came to know one another because Peggy (a.k.a. Nani Peg, my maternal grandmother) was a member of the St Louis League of Women Voters, which was run by Martha’s mother Edna. Both Martha and Peggy were imaginatively terrible cooks and tore through stacks of paperback thrillers like addicts, but other than that they seemed to have little in common.
My Uncle Jim found the stack of Gellhorn letters – typewritten on paper translucent as skin shards – when my grandmother died ten years ago. I was interested in them then (like everyone, awfully: “Hemingway’s wife?!”), but I only became truly obsessed with them recently. My first novel had just come out to very little fanfare, I was pregnant with my first child, and part of me was worried I had seen the beginning and end of my writing life. I hoped that if I studied Martha, the writer who wanted to be a mother, and Peggy, the mother who wanted to be a writer, some golden mean would eventually present itself.
2. A Monstrous Impertinence.
This state of mind might be desirable if you were a novelist, dreaming up the characters and plot for a new novel. This novel would be written from the point of view of the woman: the woman would describe herself for the reader, declaring her character as subservient and uncertain, wedded to a man (seen through her eyes) who combined the outstanding features of Rudolph Valentino – irresistible to all women – with the personal complexes of Don Juan Tenorio – to whom all woman were irresistible – with the moral passions and mental fierceness of Martin Luther. Our heroine, a mouse in her own eyes, is married to this paragon, which is somewhat like being married to Vesuvius in eruption, and she is at once awed, adoring, and terrified. She is never certain for a moment of this amazing figure, her husband; by contamination, she attributes the most exotic talents and knowledges to her children, since they have inherited the father’s magic. And she counts herself for nothing…
Martha Gellhorn spent the early 1930s in Paris, cutting her teeth as a foreign correspondent, having a torrid affair with the married French journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel, and generally courting scandal and adventure. From there she’d gone on to cover the Spanish Civil War, marry Ernest Hemingway, live in Cuba, and become one of the few female journalists to report on WWII. (She covered D Day by sneaking on to a hospital ship and illicitly crossing over to France, losing her military credentials as a result.) Her journalism tended towards a particularly empathetic form of reportage; her pieces describe the lives of ordinary people affected by war, often ending on an editorial moment of strong anti-war sentiment. By the late forties she’d published six books and divorced Hemingway.
Following the publication of her well-received (and totally heartbreaking) war novel, The Wine of Astonishment (later republished as Point of No Return), and a brief, frustrating period of time spent in Washington DC during the height of McCarthyism, Gellhorn fled to Mexico. She described her home in the mountain resort of Cuernavaca as “a small white house in a small walled garden, set among high soft trees. Beyond the trees is a circle of blue mountains, the loveliest I know. This is a valley where nothing happens, where people simply live, where there is sun, and the slow peacefulness of day following day.” She often said that Cuernavaca was the place she spent the happiest four years of her life; she was in love with the landscape and the locals, she felt happy and strong living alone after her difficult marriage to Hemingway. She was supporting herself by selling what she termed “bilgers,” popular stories about titled English ladies and Italian gigolos, or naïve young American women visiting Europe, to Good Housekeeping and the Saturday Evening Post. In a letter to a friend, she wrote, “I’m all right again. I know who I am… Here, where I am really alone, I am not lonely. Whereas in the US, I feel the whole time that something is desperately the matter with me.”
She was also forty, single, and had decided she wanted a child. She wrote, “It’s what one needs: someone, or several, who can take all the love one is able to give, as a natural and untroublesome gift.” A few years earlier she had written an ex-lover, “I want a child. I will carry it on my back in a sealskin papoose and feed it chocolate milkshakes and tell it fine jokes and work for it and in the end give it a hunk of money, like a bouquet of autumn leaves, and set it free. I have to have something, being still (I presume) human…”
In February of 1949, she wrote to my grandmother. Martha mentions in one of the letters that she hasn’t been to Europe in two years, and that she is “completely hag ridden” preparing to leave her house in order to go “gallivanting around [Italy] in search of an idea or two, and the chance for making an honest dime.” What she doesn’t say is that the main purpose of her trip to Italy was to adopt a war orphan. As my grandmother squirmed under her mantle of domesticity, Martha was seeking a child of her own.
I don’t have any copies of my grandmother’s responses to Gellhorn or the “absorbing letter” that started it all, but my uncles and mother remember her letters as well-written fits of whimsy. My Uncle Bill emails me, “Her Christmas letters were in an ‘Erma Bombeck’ vein which I found highly inappropriate,” especially, he notes, when he was a teenager. As my mother puts it, “she used to take incidents from life and theorize about them and slightly fictionalize them to coax out entertaining tales.” Great for a novelist, but a liability in a letter-writer, particularly when the letter-writer is your mother, and the letter-subject, you.
My grandmother was, as Gellhorn immediately nosed out, a repressed writer. When my grandparents met in 1935 they were both journalism students at the University of Kansas. My grandmother seems to have had lots of dates, and no wonder. Peggy Harvey was charming, bright, and lovely (in a well-coiffed college-era photograph she recalls Judy Garland in Meet Me in St Louis), though in a letter to her mother and sister she attributes her success with the college boys entirely to a new girdle. She soon settled on the tall, good-looking, serious Bill Schutze, and in 1936 they eloped. When Peggy and Bill were first married, they lived in a New Deal housing project in St. Louis, spending heady nights drinking cheap wine with other idealistic young Democrats, including the drama critic and playwright William Inge. Peggy worked for a radio station, writing radio plays and fiction on the side. It might not have been Gellhorn’s glamorous Parisian romp, but it was its own kind of urban excitement.
By the time of the Gellhorn letters, Peggy was in her mid-thirties, with three small boys (my mother would come along later). Five or six years after they’d married, my grandfather had found religion and decided to become an Episcopalian minister, which is how they’d ended up in Alma. From my journalist Uncle Jim: “I have to imagine their sojourn in boondocks Michigan was a tough price for their religious convictions. I think it was an especially tough price for my mother to pay for my father’s convictions.”
Fast-forward to the late forties. More from Uncle Jim:
My father was in his mid-30s, a tall rail-thin cleric with a hawk’s beak and a smile never quite certain, rector of the only Episcopal church in Alma… My mother was sort of the local mad woman of Chaillot, locked away in a tower in the tottering castle next to the church banging away at an ancient portable typewriter and emitting blood-curdling whoops and hollers whenever she thought she had written something especially funny or blood-curdling. She was very bright, truly eccentric and certainly had never bargained for the life of a middle western small town preacher’s wife loaded up with brats, scoured by the shrewdly appraising eyes of parishioners whenever she left the house.
I’ve always loved my uncles’ descriptions of their childhood. They claim to have been deposited outside on the stoop every morning like “empty milk bottles” and allowed to roam free all day while my grandmother wrote. (Things were, I gather, a little less loosey-goosey by the time my mother came along.) Peggy worked on letters and journals and scraps of fiction; as a college student in Kansas she had written a breezy gossip column for the LaBette County newspaper under the name “Betty LaBette.” Jim reports that when he was young she presented book reviews to local clubs and wrote for an Episcopalian newspaper: “I only remember that when we were small, the penalty for interrupting her at her writing was often a wildly unsettling outburst, even if one were bleeding, especially if one were bleeding.”
Meanwhile, Martha Gellhorn was clattering away at her own portable typewriter in her paradise of Mexico, uninterrupted unless she wanted to be.
3. Pull Your Socks Up.
You and I, let us assume, are neither one of us complete dopes: we therefore know that even in a joke your husband [doesn’t] give a damn about pictures on dust jackets; that women do not crowd the “confessional” for love of the confessor; that, even as metaphor, “patting fannies” won’t do. But these themes recur, in the extremely witty and well-written letter of an extremely witty and intelligent woman. And they give me, an old hand at peering at people, pause… I like you. I think you have a great deal of stuff. I think you are being a fool, to the point of goofiness. I think you better pull up your socks and stop inventing things. Life is bad enough without invention of any sort. You’ve got a good young man who loves you, and three children. Leave those complications to novelists, who take their whole lives out in invention, because they haven’t much real life to handle… I can only plead affection for you, and a sort of anxiety. As if I saw someone trying to fly, without adequate training hours, on the grounds that it would be interesting to see what happened.
In an undated excerpt of my grandmother’s writing, she is renumerating what she loved about “keen old” St. Louis when they lived there in the early days of their marriage, and describes a visit – perhaps their first meeting – with Martha. At this point they had only one child, my Uncle Bill (“Billy”), and my grandfather (“Bill”) had not yet gone to seminary.
My grandmother writes:
One of my favorite activities has been politics and League of Women Voter stuff, this past year, and Bill greatly disliked both… His particular gripe was against Mrs. George Gellhorn [Edna, Martha’s mother], a perfectly swell woman who was president of the League, and despite being the usual clubwomanly matron type, had a healthy and youthful interest in honest-to-goodness down-to-earth politics in our precinct and helped us beat the local gang boss. Mrs. G. gave rather sumptuous old fashioned dinners for greatly mixed up groups of people and sometimes included us. Bill said all the other others were out-of-the-world college professors and theorists, and felt a trifle overwhelmed by Mrs. G because she was such a dominatin’ woman. So the other day, when her daughter was coming to call, Bill made elaborate arrangements to duck out and go swimming at the Y. He planned to take Billy with him, taking for granted that no Schutze man would wish to spend Saturday afternoon with a member of that rampant feminist family… just as the two boys were ready to make their getaway, there was a knock at the door and Bill, being nearest, answered. He opened the door and discovered on the threshold, a very tall and good looking blonde, about our age, with flashing eyes and instant appreciation of meeting a man in St. Louis in these manless times. Miss G. was here to discover what people in neighborhoods like ours felt about international affairs, to include in an article her boss was making her write for Colliers on middlewestern viewpoint in general. Bill suddenly discovered that he had a great of knowledge about all our neighbors, about politics, international affairs, and just anything this gal wanted to know. He seated himself in the master-chair and did not stir therefrom all afternoon.
I’d assume Martha didn’t find her occasional visits to St Louis quite as enthralling as my grandmother did. Gellhorn biographer Caroline Moorehead describes one such visit thus: “Edna’s many friends and acquaintances dropped in, and Martha sat watching their ‘round shapeless pudgy non faces’ with disdain, observing that these ‘nice’ people were made of ‘Wilton carpeting, cold cream, ice cream, cotton wool, everything bland and soft.’” It’s not as if she came to Missouri to steal any ministers’ hearts.
And yet, as Martha points out, Peggy seemed to assign to her husband “the outstanding features of Rudolph Valentino” and “the personal complexes of Don Juan Tenorio.” It’s an attitude that baffled even Peggy’s own family. Uncle Jim recalls her saying that, “Of course, all clergymen were attractive to women in the church, and of course, all clergy wives have to take precautions for that reason. I was probably 10 or 11. I remember chalking that remark up to my mother being nuts. I always saw my father pretty much as a walking icicle. I didn’t want to hear about my parents’ sex lives. And you could never tell which part of what my mother said was some strange refraction of reality or simple delusion. But they were in their mid-30s in a place and climate where repression was almost a sport. Who the hell knows?”
Or it could be that Peggy was, as Martha assumed, “terrifyingly busy at invention.” Somehow she ended up as one of those people who never quite lived in her own proper context, among people who might have appreciated her zany wit, and instead found herself in a life were she was perpetually out-of-step with what was expected of her as a small-town clergy wife. Martha wrote that when living in the US she had the feeling that something was “desperately the matter” with her – so she took off and lived abroad. Peggy didn’t have this option. She had to make life interesting somehow.
Martha writes:
Personally, I get bored spitless as soon as folks cause me trouble (trouble being, in this instance, doubt.) I was made jealous once in my life and it was a jealousy to end all jealousies and the whole performance was done with drums and cymbals and enough to make the roof fall in. A really competent professional did the job, Miss Dietrich to wit, and I had cause as few women ever do. All that was lacking were neon lights to blazon the cause over the sky of Berlin. My immediate reaction, after the first shock of knowing I was jealous, was black rage. I got in a broken down airplane and left, like that, fast as winking. I also told the guy to pick up his chips and shove, as far as I was concerned: it didn’t make me feel more loving to have uncertainty introduced. It made me sore as hell, and secondly it made me think he wasn’t worth my time, and thirdly it bored me, oh but bored me in a very big way. Finally, no doubt as revenge, I took him back and treated him carefully to such a dose of indifference as would equal the score (in heaven) between my jealousy and his damaged vanity. But you see, I do not operate on a basis of doubt. I hate it… What interests me is how much one can give, how much one can get; but on the foundation of the idea that no one will ever tire of this pursuit and that one is utterly safe, in the heart.
The incident to which she refers happened in late 1945 or early 1946. She had just divorced Hemingway. (Tellingly, she wrote to my grandmother, “If marriage were usually as enthralling as you find it, more people would stick to it. My own experience with said state was comparable to living in Sing-Sing, which a touch of the Iron Maiden of Nurnberg thrown it.” Um, ouch.) Shaken from the marriage’s messy end and fresh from covering the disturbing Nuremberg trial, Gellhorn went to Berlin where her new lover, the handsome young Commander James Gavin, was stationed. According to biographer Caroline Moorehead, “Marlene Dietrich, who had apparently long had her eye on [Gavin], arrived in Berlin [as a USO performer] and was ‘sick with rage’ to find Martha installed as his mistress.” Martha spent her days palling around with other foreign correspondents, including CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood, and Dietrich told Gavin that Martha and Collingwood were in love. As revenge, Gavin told Martha he was going out for a walk and disappeared, spending the night with Dietrich. “Jealousy was not an emotion Martha had experienced before. But, recognizing the ‘disgusting, cheap, ugly’ sensation that now overcame her, she left Berlin for Paris, declaring that no relationship with a man was ever going to work for her and that henceforth she would stick to friendship.”
Martha described her reaction when she realized her lover had gone to bed with Dietrich: “I stayed in that room weeping as I really did not believe I ever could or would again… and every night since it has come back to me the same way, like a pain that hurts too much.” As she intimated in the letter to my grandmother, she took off for England. When Gavin followed her, she relented and took him briefly back, but their lives were headed in separate directions and they soon split for good.
In March of 1946, Martha was covering the Japanese surrender in Indonesia, but she was already writing to a friend that what she really wanted “was a little white house, with a picket fence around it and some toddlers.” While my grandmother was imagining inklings of drama, her accomplished epistler was weaving her own rosy-viewed, fiction-tinged story about what life as a mother would be like. They were both, I suspect, fairly busy at invention.
4. A Fine Cast of Characters.
See? If you want to write a book, you have started a fine cast of characters. But, presumably, you are not writing books, and are living. And on that basis, your cast of characters won’t stand; and to a novelist, you are (terrifyingly) busy at inventing complication…
Anyhow, you’re not average (since we take “average” to be an ugly word) and you’ve nothing to worry about (and certainly you know it) and if you like to keep life intense by believing it to be uncertain, go ahead. It all ends up the same. The point is to be alive, any way you know how. You are. You know.
And here it is, the assumption that we all secretly share (or maybe by “we” I mean only “me”) that there are two paths – writing books, or living; wife/mother, or novelist – and never the twain shall meet. I always feel like I’ve swallowed a dull coin of dread when I read those lines, but perhaps this is only how things were at that time, or maybe only how they seemed to Gellhorn.
When she was in her twenties, Martha wrote to her French lover Bertrand de Jouvenel: “I know there are two people in me. But the least strong, the least demanding, is the one that attaches itself to another human being. And the part of me which all my life I have shaped and sculpted and trained is the part that can bear no attachment, which has a ruling need of eloignement, which is, really, untamed, undomesticated, unhuman… Since I was a child people have wanted to possess me. No one has.” She was proud of the untamed part of her, but it also caused her pain. Never to sustain a relationship, her greatest successes came from that other life path – the daring war correspondent, the brazen world traveler, the independent-minded novelist.
Even when Gellhorn was married to Hemingway, writing and relationship didn’t quite mesh. Early in their courtship they supported each other while covering the Spanish Civil War and then at home in Cuba, where Hemingway encouraged her to be a more disciplined writer and they spent every morning working on their novels. But once they married her work became a point of contention with Hemingway, who resented her going away to cover World War II while he enjoyed the success of For Whom The Bell Tolls (and spent a lot of time drinking and fishing) back in Cuba. Martha wrote to her mother about the difficulty of being a journalist while still being “a good woman for a man;” meanwhile, Hemingway wrote to his son that Martha was “selfish and ambitious.” By the time he joined her in Europe to cover the war they had engaged in a kind of journalistic competition for the best reporting jobs, and unsurprisingly the much more well-known Hemingway won out. At this point, their marriage was all but over.
Which was essentially fine by her. She later wrote travel essays dismissively casting Hemingway as “the Unwilling Companion,” but for the most part refused to talk about her time with him. Maybe Martha foretold her own future when, 24 years-old and living in Paris, she wrote a letter to her mother saying that only in work “can one have a real sense of life, of the wonder and surprise and joy of being alive.” She was most happy when alone and traveling and writing. In the end, as she wrote, “I want life to be like the movies, brilliant and swift and successful.”
It’s remarkable that this eminent woman took such time and effort to reach out to my grandmother, this “mouse in her mind.” It’s maybe more remarkable that this relative stranger is able to see right to Peggy’s spine. In one of her letters she must have referred to her plan to start a career of her own once her children were in school, because Martha writes in response, “Okay. But I think you better write books instead of doing social service, when the time comes. You’d be wasted on social service.” That young idealist from the St. Louis projects hadn’t entirely disappeared, however, and social service it was. Once my mother was in kindergarten my grandmother went back to college and became a teacher, teaching English at a predominately black school in Pontiac, Michigan where she was the only white person in either the staff or student body – this was in the 1960s. I like this part of her biography. I like the blithe way she is said to have dealt with complicated race relations at a tempestuous time. But still I wonder where that urge to write books went. In Gellhorn’s novella “The Fall and Rise of Mrs. Hapgood” Mrs. Hapgood muses:
Did people ever give up what they really wanted? Those numberless women who had rejected careers as concert pianists in favor of wifehood and never forgot their sacrifice were more apt to be cowards than concert pianists. When you set out, alone, you were up against competition and doubt; you might turn out to be nobody, not a wife nor a concert pianist. You threw away security for hope; but those who were driven by hope did not stop to add and subtract; they could not help themselves; they did what they had to do, undaunted by final results.
You do what you have to do. Peggy always wrote, even when the work went unpublished, even when it would seem impossible that she would have any time for it. She wrote because she wanted to. Did it count as “giving it up” because the writing never led to commercial success or financial gain? Because she didn’t “throw away security for hope?” She might not have had a career as a writer, but she was always a writer.
An undated letter from my grandfather. This must have been in the mid-forties, when he had gone to seminary in Virginia and my grandmother and my Uncle Bill were living with her mother in Wichita. She was pregnant with my Uncle Jim at the time, and they were planning on moving to be with my grandfather soon — so it would have been after the visit from Martha in St Louis, but before the letters.
My grandfather writes, “I found myself telling somebody that [Gellhorn] isn’t the type of person you would think… When you get right down to the facts I don’t know of any reason for defending her gadding about, getting married, and unmarried. There is that which can’t be explained away. I’m not passing judgment but believe this might be explained by her lack of religion. It is true that such people scurry about seeking something but don’t know what it is so they try marriage, Europe, cars, etc.”
There is something telling about his pat explanation of this complicated woman. It’s all so simple in my grandfather’s estimation – Gellhorn’s unsettled life was result of lack of religion – a conclusion which would have probably made Martha laugh. And yet, she was seeking something, some nebulous thing that she herself might have been hard-pressed to define. She wrote in one of the letters to Peggy, after describing some upcoming travels, “This is a way of life too. But, honestly, I believe the sons and husbands are a better way of life.”
Who can say how much she meant this? And can’t there be a way of life that encompasses both?
Neither Martha nor my grandmother was ever able to reach a satisfying conclusion. Martha did adopt her Italian orphan, and wrote about the experience in a 1950 piece for the Saturday Evening Post that my grandmother clipped and kept among her letters. She writes, “the miracle had happened; I was struck by love as if by lightning.” The essay concludes on an uplifting, undeniably rosy note: “I found the little boy, all right, but in the end, the way I see it, he has adopted me.” In the end, however, she did not find that motherhood came naturally to her, and her relationship with her adopted son was always strained. He developed into a troubled adult, a drug addict who floated in and out of jail. From a particularly brutal letter she wrote him when he was a young man: “I have no respect for you, and at present little affection… And I’ve never been able to go on loving people I don’t respect… Honey, you are neither a job nor obligation: you’re a selfish, lazy, pointless young man.” Clearly motherhood was not the unconditional love affair Martha had been expecting.
Peggy Schutze was an adoring and adored wife, mother, and grandmother, and she enjoyed (despite her doubts) a long and happy marriage. When she had a stroke towards the end of her life, my grandfather’s fierce devotion to taking care of her impressed even the nursing home staff. A few months after she died, he followed. At his funeral, my Uncle Jim delivered a eulogy that was a tribute to their enduring love, faithfulness, and loyalty to one another.
As for her writing ambitions, despite the encouragement from Gellhorn, she never produced much more than Christmas letters and stories for us grandchildren. And yet, as Martha wrote, “It all ends up the same.” It is good advice for any writer, I think (or for that matter, any mother): The point is to be alive.
You are.
You know.
Protest is often the only way to get a company’s attention. And it can have results. But it’s not always the results that were intended, or wanted. For instance, after the outcry over the “sadistic contents” of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, three months before the book’s publication, it was dropped by the publishing house….Simon & Schuster. CEO Richard Snyder explained, “It was an error of judgment to put our name on a book of such questionable taste.”
The second thing to consider is unintended collateral damage. Many people objected to the content of Fifty Shades of Grey, but it not only helped keep Random House (now Penguin Random House) in the black, it brought in so much revenue that every employee, from “top editors to warehouse workers,” received a $5,000 bonus.
Professor Matthew Garcia, who wrote From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement and who has studied boycotts for years told me that “The boycott of S&S will be tricky. It requires a campaign and a set of goals. First, is there an organization willing to put the time in to organize and pursue the campaign the way the United Farm Workers did?”
But if we’re going to try to get Simon & Schuster (and CBS, its parent company) to listen, what books should boycotters target to get to the United Farmworkers’ 10 percent threshold? Probably the big ones like…the Bruce Springsteen memoir. Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See. Maybe Shonda Rhimes’s bestselling memoir, Stephen King’s latest? How about Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything — cited as one of the “Seven Books You Need to Understand (and Fight) the Age of Trump“?
Should “not giving him a platform” extend to “not writing thinkpieces about his controversial, shitty memoir and a possible boycott?” I don’t ask this snarkily, I truly don’t know the answer here. But I guess I wonder how much better it would be if we simply gave these aspects of far right culture the equivalent of the silent treatment, or putting a tantrum-y toddler in the corner.
A large part of what helped get Donald Trump traction was his ability to exploit an endless cycle of outrage on social media, and left-leaning news coverage. As the woman says in this, the boycott will at the very least succeed in raising Yiannapolous’s profile (sorry, don’t see the point of not printing his name) among non-reading conservatives, who will then spite-order ten copies from Amazon, since the one reliable motivation among conservatives is pissing off liberals (again, witness our new president). What if we all expressed a collective yawn at this stuff? What if we acted like discussing it was beneath us, since it is. I feel like a Donald Trump in Edward R. Murrow’s day would have gotten a ten second clip, a disgusted shake of the head, and little else.
I truly do not know the answer here, but I do know we have more important things to focus on, and maybe a good reaction to The Twitter President would be to get off Twitter.
By the way, I should have said in that first comment, I thought this was a good piece.
Censorship never works. And hurting innocent bystanders is immoral. Today’s book deal for He Who Shall Not Be Named may lead to a future book deal for one of this site’s writers.. Quit whining and start winning. If you really want to make a difference, start organizing now and win the vote in 2018 and 2020.
Just to understand the level of censorship in our culture, the level of small-mindedness, and the totalitarian impulses that govern the minnow-sized overton window of the contemporary left and publishing:
The Millions won’t EVEN post comments with Milo’s full name. Just had two taken down or not posted.
@gargoyle
His name is in mine above. Maybe it was the content of what you posted?
No comments have been deleted from this post; perhaps this is a case of user error. You are very free to say Milo Yiannopoulos if you like.
“a memoir by “that person” (whom I’m declining to name, or even describe, because why give him more free publicity?),”
“That person”? This is getting extremely silly. First, “the n-word”… now “He who shall remain nameless” (as applied to various boogeymen).
But when is summer camp over…?
Milo Yiannopoulos
It’s funny, in the 70s liberals would have marched in the street over free speech, right to protest/assemble, etc for groups like neo-nazis, KKK, etc. Now, in the age of President I Can’t Even, it’s come full circle to boycotts and censorship. What a world.
To be clear, the author is opposed to a boycott. And I don’t see anyone practicing censorship here. I think most progressives still strenuously advocate on behalf of free speech (of which, btw, boycotts are a form), though of course it’s a bit easier when neonazis are a fringe group rather than the president’s advisers and propaganda wing.
A question: why does The Millions, a site focusing on intelligent takes on mainstream literature, seem to attract such a hostile, aggrieved, PC Police Police commentariat? Seems weird. Or is that just the internet these days?
“So what, then, is the endgame?”
Are we talking about Milo Yiannopoulos or Darth Vader? Why not sic one of the highly-lauded “geniuses” of 2016 on him? Yiannopoulos has an IQ of 105 (and three of those IQ points are contributed by his British accent)… simply hire Paul “The New Swift” Beatty to write a series of devastatingly witty, evisceratingly-precise satires. Or arrange a public debate between Yiannopoulos and Roxane “I Dare You To Critique Me” Gay… it’ll be better than Vidal vs Buckley (or Lefty Hitchens vs Righty Hitchens) ! Imagine the rhetorical firepower unleashed! The Wildean barbs! The Nabokovian slights!
Ha! Just kidding.
The real joke being that Yiannopoulos isn’t even a genuine creature of the Right… he’s no more ideologically committed to the Right Wing than any of the vast majority of (successful) American politicians are ideologically committed to Israel… they just do what they “gotta” do. That is to say, Yiannopoulos is a run of the mill, power-hungry, self-interested airhead-Capitalist at heart and if this were twenty years ago, he’d be Ariana Huffington (née Arianna Stassinopoulus), realizing that there was more influence/money to be had in wrapping a conservative core with a smiley facade and fleecing softer soccer mom sheep (aka The Clinton Maneuver).
All these years later, though, the “Liberals” are no longer sexy (have you seen what’s happening to the Clinton Foundation? Yipes!)… so Yiannopoulos is milking the “Alt Right” for what it’s worth. But what is he milking? (npi)
He makes comments and speeches we disagree with…. and? What kind of shelf-life do you think a Gay British Pretty Boy Nazi-Lite Shock-Jock Nitwit will actually have as a meme in America? Simply printing his name won’t give him any extra “power”, but treating him like 10x the threat he actually is is precisely what grants him visibility.
Will we even be talking about Milo Yiannopoulos in 2018…? If he’s smart, he’ll switch polarities in time to cash in on the inevitable backlash of 2024. Yes, that’s right, kids: the pendulum will keep swinging. And just like the proverbial broken clocks you’ll all get to…. and so on.
” why does The Millions, a site focusing on intelligent takes on mainstream literature, seem to attract such a hostile, aggrieved, PC Police Police commentariat?”
Probably owing to all the political editorials being sneaked in with the Lit Chat, I’d wager.
erratum:
“But what is he milking?” was meant to be “But how is he milking it?”
Another day in the comments section of a Millions article. Nice to see the usual fodder I guess.
Ed, of course the author is against a boycott – a viewpoint she finds unique enough to devote an entire essay to. And as far as censorship the author refuses to print the name of the subject of her piece, which is of course a political statement in and of itself. Why you are baffled that political statements about political figures elicits politically-tinged comments is, er, baffling. Unless you just don’t like hearing views you don’t agree with, which is a pretty accurate description of the Internet these days.
Toad,
First, electing not to print someone’s name, while possibly silly, is not censorship, though leave it to the geniuses here to immediately assume they’re not allowed to print Milo Yiannapolous’s name just because their stubby little fingers stabbed submit wrong twice.
And baffled is a funny word, and dismissive, but yeah okay, color me baffled by the reflexive hostility and defensiveness in the comment section of this website. And it isn’t just in the political tinged columns–it is in reviews, thinkpieces, you name it. Anywhere that people can detect anything to be offended by, most often by perceived over-PCness. Which is odd, considering 1) The Millions isn’t an especially leftist site, unless you have been living in a cave and find ideas like white privilege new and shocking, and 2) that said, it is clear that there’s a progressive bent to the editorial direction here, so why people don’t find another place to go is beyond me, though people enjoy being offended, so I guess I’m not baffled after all.
Ed – “censorship” is probably a bit strong, I agree. I think the “hostility” you are picking up on is a reflection of our society as a whole right now – people are mad/proud/scared etc. But if you don’t think the Millions – or American literary culture as a whole – is leftist, man, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not saying that as a condemnation, necessarily, and I’m a proud lefty myself, but it’s interesting, for how vocal the lit community is about diversity in terms of race, gender, sexual identification, etc, there is zero clamor for diversity of opinion (political or otherwise). The way to counter voices like this Yannanopolis clown is to ignore them. The reason your race-baiting hate-spewing uncle doesn’t have a $250k book deal is that no one takes him seriously, no one writes think pieces about him or boycotts his employer. Yanni is a fictional character, like Bill O’Reilly or pre-CBS Colbert. He’s a wrestling heel. He subsists on boos; without them he dies. So just quit booing. Go write a book instead.
Illuminating article. Thanks for this essay. Much to think about. Don’t buy the book, and say no to censorship seems obvious. The idea of boycotting S&S was/is a knee jerk reaction. It becomes tricky, however, when a nonfiction book crosses the border of free speech to hate speech. Quite troubling.
“while the lit community is about diversity in terms of race, gender, sexual identification, etc, there is zero clamor for diversity of opinion (political or otherwise)”
There’s also extremely little diversity of people in terms of socioeconomic class. MFAs that you (read: parents) have to drop 150K for are the norm.
“But if you don’t think the Millions – or American literary culture as a whole – is leftist, man, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Leftist? Not even remotely. Liberal and/or “Liberal”, sure.
My MFA cost me nothing and gave me time to finish two books. My agent is shopping them around at the moment. We wouldn’t turn down a deal with S&S.
Toad,
I know the publishing/lit world, including this website, are liberal. I’m saying I don’t think The Millions is an especially liberal operation, and yet it seems to consistently attract a certain brand of vitriolic comment in response to what, to my mind, are pretty standard PCisms. But again, maybe this is just the internet in 2017. On the rest, we totally agree. Feel like social media has a lot to answer for, in terms of creating the kind of constant outrage that elevates clowns like Yiannapolous. Gamergate wouldn’t even have been a thing as a recently as ten years ago.
Gargoyle,
MFAs–the top 50 or so anyway–mostly don’t cost anything, and usually provide a stipend. The trust fund MFA baby is a total canard. It’s kind of impressive how authoritatively wrong you are in this thread.
” saying I don’t think The Millions is an especially liberal operation”
lol
“I wonder how much better it would be if we simply gave these aspects of far right culture the equivalent of the silent treatment, or putting a tantrum-y toddler in the corner.”
I understand the impulse, but the sad truth is that this just doesn’t work. In fact, this is exactly what they want, because it allows them to grow their odious little networks without anyone paying them any mind, and then when they finally force us to pay attention to them, it’s too late.
“It’s funny, in the 70s liberals would have marched in the street over free speech”
“Free speech” does not include the right to get a quarter-million dollar advance from a Big Five publisher. Milo is free to write and publish whatever he wants. Liberals are free to let his enablers know that his views are not okay, and that we object to funding any infrastructure that supports the dissemination of those ideas.
Nobody is stopping him or S&S from doing it without us, so I don’t know what your “free speech / censorship” beef is. Perhaps you should think a bit harder about what those things actually are.
“MFAs–the top 50 or so anyway–mostly don’t cost anything, and usually provide a stipend. The trust fund MFA baby is a total canard.”
I missed Ed’s fumbling point. As you say, there are only around 50 MFAs that fully pay for tuition and provide (some sort) of stipend. The vast majority don’t do either (there are over 300 residency MFA programs). So just already, looks like MFAs are for people who can take out a lot of debt, unless you get into one of the 50.
Now, let’s look at those stipends. All of them are below poverty level. Some incredibly slim number are at poverty level. Now, I know that, Ed, as someone with a mommy and daddy who pays for their car, rent, and cellphone bill, it may be confusing to realize that most people can’t live at poverty level. Let alone supporting a family!!!! I’ve never met an MFA student who didn’t a) have an ton of debt or b) rich parents, and I’ve met plenty of MFA students. It’s a rich kids game.
Ed, you also need to look up on wikipedia something called opportunity cost. They don’t teach about it in an MFA, but it is covered in books which can be read, if you do that sort of thing.
Gargoyle,
You obviously thought MFAs cost 150k and were wrong about that. I’ve seen this bit of misinformation before time and agin, from people who have a personal stake for whatever reason in hating MFAs, and I think it’s because Columbia costs that much. The rest of the good ones, i.e. the ones worth going to, as we’ve established, are tuition-waived and usually provide stipends.
Lol at “you’ve never met an MFA student who didn’t have a ton of debt or rich parents.” First, from your complete lack of knowledge or authority on the subject, my suspicion is you haven’t met an MFA student, and they exist in your mind as a anger-inducing strawman. As someone who has actually met MFA students, lots of them, I can say they run the gamut in terms of socioeconomic class, age, circumstance, etc. Also, signally, in your zealous taxonomy of Made Up Privileged People, you left out c), which is having a job.
@Ed
Wow. I mean I know critical thinking is at an all time low… but you didn’t address my points at all! I’ll help you again: 1.) poverty-wage living and 2.) the significant majority of programs don’t pay for tuition and 3.) opportunity-cost.
The only thing your response said was to make up that I believe all MFAs cost 150K… which I never said. Please post comments that actually respond to things, not rants that make you feel good, cause it’s just a waste of time.
Garg,
I did adress it. Literally all the programs worth going to besides Columbia are tuition free. I’m sure there are ones that charge an arm and a leg, but I don’t know about them. And most MFA students have jobs. is that clear enough?
Idk what you mean by opportunity cost. Yeah, people have to give stuff up to do MFAs, have to quit jobs and move, as is the case with most ventures. Why this particular one has a hair so far up your ass, I’m not sure. But feel free to continue imagining the average MFAer to be a certain kind of person if it makes you feel good, I really don’t care.
@Ed
Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to scramble through life, lacking so in logic.
“Literally all the programs worth going to besides Columbia are tuition free.”
You can’t redefine all MFA goers as just the people who go to the (minority of) free ones. You. Dumbass. That’s called the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. I’d suggest you look it up on wikipedia, but since you already failed to do that for opportunity cost, I’m not holding my breath.
Gargoyle,
You seem angry. Is it because of the vicious censorship you endured upthread, or the fact that you thought the average MFA cost 150k? Lol. Again, 1) Any of the ones worth discussing or attending cost nothing, and 2) In either case (tuition remitted or not) most people either work or take loans out. It is not, as you say, a rich kid’s game. Rich kids have better things to do than attend MFA programs and work at coffeeshops for three years. Like moving to Manhattan and interning at a publisher.
As a follow up, and to be clearer (since you seem like the worst kind of dense person, i.e. a dense person who thinks they’re smart), I was confining my response to what most people who know anything about it consider to be real MFA programs worth attending, which are definitionally the programs with tuition remitted. Expanding the conversation to every shitty program in the country though, it still seems the average tuition may be 30k, which is far far less than the 150k you believed people to be dropping as a norm, a number I assume you picked to support your fanciful notion of MFAs a country club for rich white layabouts.
@Ed
I never said the tuition was 150K. I understand why that was confusing though, you aren’t exactly detail focused. As usual, your responses don’t address any of my 3 points tho… quit rambling!
Gargoyle,
Enough. Calling people stupid on the internet is the height of stupidity. I apologize to you, and to anyone with the misfortune to have read this comments tangent.
@Ed – Wa alaikum assalam