McLemee on Scialabba
[George was on this list for a while. I’ve liked reading his stuff
since we appeared in the same issue of Grand Street many years ago.
So it’s good to read this. And George - why so modest? You should
have done a little self-promotion here!]
http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/09/mclemee
Divided Mind By Scott McLemee
George Scialabba is an essayist and critic working at Harvard
University who has just published a volume of selected pieces under
the title Divided Mind, issued by a small press in Boston called
Arrowsmith. The publisher does not have a Web site. You cannot, as
yet, get Divided Mind through Amazon, though it is said to be
available in a few Cambridge bookstores. This may be the future of
underground publishing: Small editions, zero publicity, and you have
to know the secret password to get a copy. (I’ll give contact
information for the press at the end of this column, for anyone
willing to put a check in the mail the old-fashioned way.)
In any case, it is about time someone brought out a collection of
Scialabba’s work. That it’s only happening now (15 years after the
National Book Critics Circle gave him its first award for excellence
in reviewing) is a sign that things are not quite right in the world
of belles lettres. He writes in what William Hazlitt — the patron
saint of generalist essayists — called the “the familiar style,” and
he is sometimes disarmingly explicit about the difficulties, even the
pain, he experiences in trying to resolve cultural contradictions.
That is no way to create the aura of mystery and mastery so crucial
for awesome intellectual authority.
Scialabba has his admirers, even so, and one of the pleasant
surprises of Divided Mind is the set of comments on the back. “I am
one of the many readers who stay on the lookout for George
Scialabba’s byline,” writes Richard Rorty. “He cuts to the core of
the ethical and political dilemmas he discusses.” The novelist Norman
Rush lauds Scialabba’s prose itself for “bring[ing] the review-essay
to a high state of development, incorporating elements of memoir and
skillfully deploying the wide range of literary and historical
references he commands.” And there is a blurb from Christopher
Hitchens praising his “eloquence and modesty” — though perhaps that
is just a gesture of relief that Scialabba has not reprinted his
candid reassessment of Hitch, post-9/11.
One passage early in the collection gives a roll call of exemplary
figures practicing a certain kind of writing. It includes Randolph
Bourne, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
among others. “Their primary training and frame of reference,”
Scialabba writes, “were the humanities, usually literature or
philosophy, and they habitually, even if only implicitly, employed
values and ideals derived from the humanities to criticize
contemporary politics…. Their ’specialty’ lay not in unearthing
generally unavailable facts, but in penetrating especially deeply
into the shared culture, in grasping and articulating its
contemporary moral/political relevance with special originality and
force.”
The interesting thing about this passage — aside from its apt self-
portrait of the author — is the uncertain meaning of that slashmark
in the phrase “contemporary moral/political relevance.” Does it serve
as the equivalent of an equals sign? I doubt that. But it suggests
that the relationship is both close and problematic.
We sometimes say that a dog “worries” a bone, meaning he chews it
with persistent attention; and in that sense, Divided Mind is a
worried book, gnawing with a passion on the “moral/political”
problems that go with holding an egalitarian outlook. Scialabba is a
man of the left. If you can imagine a blend of Richard Rorty’s
skeptical pragmatism and Noam Chomsky’s geopolitical worldview — and
it’s a bit of a stretch to reconcile them, though somehow he does
this — then you have a reasonable sense of Scialabba’s own politics.
In short, it is the belief that life would be better, both in the
United States and elsewhere, with more economic equality, a stronger
sense of the common good, and the end of that narcissistic
entitlement fostered by the American military-industrial complex.
A certain amount of gloominess goes with holding these principles
without believing that History is on the long march to their
fulfillment. But there is another complicating element in Divided
Mind. It is summed in a passage from the Spanish philosopher José
Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, from 1930 — though you
might find the same thought formulated by a dozen other conservative
thinkers.
“The most radical division it is possible to make of humanity,”
Ortega y Gasset declares, “is that which splits it into two classes
of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up
difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of
themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they
already are, without imposing on themselves any effort toward
perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.”
Something in Ortega y Gasset’s statement must have struck a chord
with Scialabba. He quotes it in two essays. “Is this a valid
distinction?” he asks. “Yes, I believe it is….” But the idea
bothers him; it stimulates none of the usual self-congratulatory
pleasures of snobbery. The division of humanity into two categories —
the noble and “the masses” — lends itself to anti-democratic
sentiments, if not the most violently reactionary sort of politics.
At the very least, it undermines the will to make egalitarian
changes. Yet it is also very hard to gainsay the truth of it. How,
then, to resolve the tension? Divided Mind is a series of efforts —
provisional, personal, and ultimately unfinished — to work out an
answer.
At this point it bears mentioning that Scialabba’s reflections do not
follow the protocols of any particular academic discipline. He took
his undergraduate degree at Harvard (Class of 1969) and has read his
way through a canon or two; but his thinking is not, as the saying
now goes, “professionalized.” He is a writer who works at Harvard —
but not in the way that statement would normally suggest.
“After spells as a substitute teacher and Welfare Department social
worker,” he told me recently in an e-mail exchange, “I was, for 25
years, the manager or superintendent of a mid-sized academic office
building, which housed Harvard’s Center for International Affairs and
several regional (East Asian, Russian, Latin American, Middle
Eastern, etc) research centers. I gave directions to visitors,
scheduled the seminar rooms, got offices painted, carpets installed,
shelves built, windows washed, keys made, bills paid. I flirted with
graduate students and staff assistants, schmoozed with junior
faculty, and saw, heard, overheard, and occasionally got to know a
lot of famous and near-famous academics.”
As day jobs go, it was conducive to writing. “I had a typewriter and
a copy machine,” he says, “a good library nearby, and didn’t come
home every night tired or fretting about office politics.” When the
“homely mid-sized edifice” was replaced with “a vast, two-building
complex housing the political science and history departments as
well,” the daily grind changed as well: “I’m now part of a large
staff, and most of my days are spent staring at a flickering screen.”
More pertinent to understanding what drives him as a writer, I think,
are certain facts about his background that the reader glimpses in
various brief references throughout his essays. The son of working-
class Italian-American parents, he was once a member of the ascetic
and conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei. In adolescence, he
thought he might have a religious vocation. The critical intelligence
of his critical writings is now unmistakably secular and modernist.
He shows no sign of nostalgia for the faith now lost to him. But the
extreme dislocation implied in leaving one life for another gives an
additional resonance to the title of his collection of essays.
“For several hundred years,” he told me, “a small minority of Italian/
French/Spanish adolescent peasant or working-class boys — usually the
sternly repressed or (like me) libido-deficient ones — have been
devout, well-behaved, studious. Depending on their abilities and on
what sort of priest they’re most in contact with, they join a diocese
or a religious order. Among the latter, the bright ones become
Jesuits; the more modestly gifted or mystically inclined become
Franciscans. I grew up among Franciscans and at first planned to
become one, but I just couldn’t resist going to college —
intellectual concupiscence, I guess.”
Instead, he was drawn into Opus Dei — a group trying, as he puts it,
“to make a new kind of religious vocation possible, combining the
traditional virtues and spiritual exercises with a professional or
business career.”
He recalls being “tremendously enthusiastic for the first couple of
years, trying very hard, though fruitlessly, to recruit my fellow
Catholic undergraduates at Harvard in the late 1960s. It was a
strain, being a divine secret agent and trying at the same time to
survive academically before the blessed advent of grade inflation.
But the reward — an eternity of happiness in heaven!”
The group permitted him to read secular authors, the better to
understand and condemn their heresies.
“Then,” he says, “Satan went to work on me. As I studied European
history and thought, my conviction gradually grew that the Church
had, for the most part, been on the wrong side. Catholic philosophy
was wrong; Catholic politics were authoritarian….On one occasion,
just after I had read Dostoevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, I
was rebuked for my intellectual waywardness by a priestly superior
with, I fancied, a striking physical resemblance to the terrifying
prelate in Ivan’s fable. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.”
The departure was painful. The new world he discovered on the other
side of his crossing “wasn’t in the slightest degree an original
discovery,” he says. “I simply bought the now-traditional narrative
of modernity, hook, line and sinker. I still do, pretty much.” But he
was not quite ready to plunge without reserve into the counterculture
of the time — sex, drugs, rock and roll.
“I was, to an unusual degree, living in my head rather than my body,”
he says about the 1970s. “I had emerged from Opus Dei with virtually
no friends, a conscious tendency to identify my life course with the
trajectory of modernity, and an unconscious need to be a saint,
apostle, missionary. And I had inherited from my working-class
Italian family no middle-class expectations, ambitions, social
skills, ego structures.”
Instead, he says, “I read a lot and seethed with indignation at all
forms of irrational authority or even conventional respectability. So
I didn’t take any constructive steps, like becoming a revolutionary
or a radical academic…. In those days, it wasn’t quite so weird not
to be ascending some career ladder.”
So he settled into a job that left him with time to think and write.
And to deal with the possibility of eternal damnation — something
that can occasionally bedevil one part of the mind, even while the
secular and modernist half retains its disbelief.
Somewhere in my study is a hefty folder containing, if not George
Scialabba’s complete oeuvre, then at least the bulk of it. After
several years of reading and admiring his essays, I can testify that
Divided Mind is a well-edited selection covering many of his abiding
concerns. It ought to be interest to anyone interested in the “fourth
genre,” as the essay is sometimes called. (The other three — poetry,
drama, and fiction — get all the glory.)
As noted, the publisher seems to be avoiding crass commercialism (not
to mention convenience to the reader) by keeping Divided Mind out of
the usual online bookselling venues. You can order it from the
address below for $13, however. That price includes shipping and
handling.
Arrowsmith 11 Chestnut Street Medford, MA 02155