Back before literature hit that high-low fork in the road, leading on the one hand toward “Ulysses” and on the other toward “Gone with the Wind,” “David Copperfield” was probably the most revered and the best loved novel in the English language. Everyone knows (or used to know) that Dickens himself called it the “favourite child” among his fictional progeny; but late in life he also acknowledged that it was the “best” of his novels — a more purely literary judgment. Tolstoy, an impressionable 22 when “David Copperfield” was completed in 1850, considered it the greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelists.
So did just about every middle-class parent in the English-speaking world, who must have thought Dickens’s alchemical gift for euphemism transmuted into opacity such episodes as Steerforth’s seducing Emily, Jack Maldon’s putting the moves on the married Annie Strong and the prostitute Martha’s attempted suicide — not to mention the schoolmaster Creakle’s sadistic sexuality (“I am confident that he couldn’t resist a chubby boy, especially”) and the homoerotic bond between David and Steerforth (who calls him “Daisy” and wishes he had a “pretty, timid” sister). Whatever middle-class children made of the book, they grew up with its characters and language lodged deep in memory.
Samuel Beckett (born in 1906) appropriated a familiar line from Chapter III in his early story “A Wet Night,” simply changing “I” to “we” and adding a vulgarism: “This may be premature. We have set it down too soon, perhaps. But let it bloody well stand.” More ambitiously, P.G. Wodehouse (born in 1881) seems to have appropriated Steerforth’s bloodlessly efficient manservant and pander Littimer in creating Jeeves, Bertie Wooster’s comically omniscient “gentleman’s personal gentleman” — to whom he also gave something like Mr. Micawber’s allusive orotundity. George Orwell (born in 1903) recalled that when he first read “David Copperfield,” around the age of 9, he thought the account of David’s childhood had been written by a child. (Another remark everybody used to know.)
What amazed Orwell was Dickens’s empathy with children; what amazes me is that children could ever read “David Copperfield.” Education has slipped between then and now. But “David Copperfield” has slipped, too. Harold Bloom, in his 1994 survey “The Western Canon,” packs the current conventional wisdom into a single conjunction: “Dickens had enormous affection for ‘David Copperfield,’ but this was his ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’” But, not and. Got it. A warmup act for the masterworks.
These days even those of us who have enormous affection for Dickens tend to seek out less guilty pleasures among his books. The bursting-at-the-seams social novels — “Bleak House” (by consensus, his masterpiece, though I don’t consent), “Little Dorrit,” “Our Mutual Friend” — offer more in the way of high seriousness, if that’s our idea of a good time. And “Great Expectations,” Dickens’s other great bildungsroman, is a comparatively modernist novel: it’s tighter, less episodic, and its narrator-protagonist stews in guilt and anguish — which really is our idea of a good time. Dickens wrote “David Copperfield” smack dab in the middle of his career: before all these books, and after the rowdy, exuberant, shamelessly weird, wildly uneven early work — “The Pickwick Papers,” “Oliver Twist,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” “The Old Curiosity Shop,” “Martin Chuzzlewit” — in which we gladly put up with all sorts of nonsense for the privilege of watching him become Charles Dickens.
“David Copperfield” is the absolutely typical Dickens novel; maybe Dickens, the hammiest of all great writers, loved it best because it was just so him. But its very centrality makes it easy to overlook or take for granted. Compared to the early work, its miscalculations seem less understandable, its moralizing less tolerable; shouldn’t he have known better by this time? Compared to the late work, it seems too merrily “Dickensian.”
I don’t know, am I making heavy weather of this? Shouldn’t it be enough to remind folks that this novel, and no other, is the one with Uriah Heep and Mr. Micawber and Mr. and Miss Murdstone and Aunt Betsy and Peggotty and Steerforth and Mr. Dick and Rosa Dartle? And the too-seldom-praised Mrs. Micawber, as heroically deluded as her husband and longer-suffering, who deserves an incomplete sentence all to herself. No writer since Shakespeare could have put together such a cast of scene-stealers — as well as such supposedly minor characters as the respectable Littimer, the willin’ Barkis, the lone and lorn Mrs. Gummidge, the Punch-like Mr. Spenlow and the volatile Miss Mowcher.
Even the less-than-minor characters are indelible: the nameless creditor who stakes out Mr. Micawber’s lodgings (“Pay us, will you? Don’t hide, you know; that’s mean”), the monstrous and deranged shopkeeper who buys young David’s waistcoat (“Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!”) or the waiter who playfully, ruthlessly hijacks his dinner (“Come on, little ‘un, and let’s see who’ll get most”). In fact, the comestibles themselves tend to stand out in your memory: the “stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby, and with great flat raisins in it,” which David buys in the Strand, or the revolting sherry he’s served in an inn at Charing Cross, poured from “the stale leavings at the bottoms of several small decanters” and with “more English crumbs in it than were to be expected in a foreign wine.” Everywhere in this book, lifelike details leap at you, interrupting even the headlong melodrama of the shipwreck chapter: “A half-dressed boatman, standing next to me, pointed with his bare arm (a tattoo’d arrow on it, pointing in the same direction).” If ever a writer put words together to create in your mind something like virtual reality — a fictive world you could swear you’re inhabiting, teeming with people you could swear you know — Dickens does it in “David Copperfield.”
And he does more. The better to persuade you that this is all real, he contrives to let his narrator remain foggy about other details, which he could easily have invented and which a lesser writer would have. “I forget whether it was the Blue Bull, or the Blue Boar; but I know it was the Blue Something.” That this narrator is himself a novelist gives the narration a metafictional frisson — which Dickens absolutely intends, innocent though he is of our critical jargon.
Both he and his narrator David know and love “Tom Jones,” in which Fielding teasingly calls attention to the novel’s fictiveness by such devices as telling us he hasn’t been able to find out what Tom had for dinner. But those gaps in David’s memory are even trickier than that. Like Fielding, Dickens plays with your disbelief in fictional artifice, while simultaneously making that disbelief easier to suspend — how improbable it would be, you realize, if David could remember every single thing — while simultaneously calling your attention to how skillful an artificer Dickens must be to disguise his artifice so well.
Yet no writer ever needed artifice less. In his preface to the first edition of “David Copperfield,” he claims that “no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.” The way the best scenes play in your head suggests that they were also squirmingly alive in Dickens’s head: this gift is unfakeable. And he gets carried away by his belief just as you do. Late in the novel, when the Micawbers decide to emigrate, David tells us: “I think, now, how odd it was, but how wonderfully like Mr. Micawber, that, when he went from London to Canterbury, he should have talked as if he were going to the farthest limits of the earth, and, when he went from England to Australia, as if he were going for a little trip across the Channel.” How wonderfully like Mr. Micawber: this isn’t Dickens sneakily complimenting himself on how wonderfully he’s managed to maintain a character’s consistency. It’s an uncalculated expression of admiration for a resilient eccentric whose reality, for the moment, Dickens doubts no more than David does.
And while we’re on the subject of Dickens and David, let’s talk about this portrait-of-the-artist business. I’m not sure I believe the critical commonplace that a sweet guy like David Copperfield could never have written “David Copperfield.” (These sweet guys’ll kill ya.) F.R. and Q.D. Leavis write that “David incarnates the kind of youth the age demanded — sensitive, modest, upright, affectionate, but also resourcefully industrious and successful in rising in the world. Now whatever Dickens was, he was not a Daisy, and his habit of referring to himself as the Inimitable does not sound like David either. While Dickens was a colourful personality David is colourless, and intentionally uninteresting in himself — only a type.”
But I think his colorlessness actually makes David a more convincing representation of a writer — certainly more so than writers might like to admit. He’s suitably self-obsessed — after his mother dies, he looks in a mirror “to see how red my eyes were, and how sorrowful my face” — yet he lacks a stable identity. He answers to any name he’s given: David, Davy, Mas’r Davy, Daisy, Doady, Copperfield, Master Copperfield, Mr. Copperfull, Trotwood, Trot.
It’s glaringly odd that David’s ostensible soulmate, Agnes, calls him Trotwood (the high-toned handle Aunt Betsy has bestowed) rather than his real name. And Dickens must have wanted that oddness: he knew that novelists live rich and strange secret lives behind their faces, and sometimes seem like pod-people to their nearest and dearest. The clueless Dora wistfully tells David he’s “full of silent fancies”; Mrs. Dickens must have known just what she meant.
David’s solitary childhood — we never hear of his having a friend or playmate until he’s sent away to Salem House — and his obsessive reading sound writerly enough. So does his “distrust of myself, which has often beset me on small occasions.” So does his tendency to retreat to an observer’s distance at important moments: as sailors fight for their lives, he notes that arrow-shaped tattoo; when Dora’s aunt consults the crucial letter he’s written, asking permission for his courtship, he notes that the paper looks both “familiar” and “odd” in her hands.
And most writerly of all is his passivity — about everything except his writing career. After he runs away to take shelter with his aunt, the big, splashy events happen to other people: for Emily, Steerforth, Mr. Peggotty and the Micawbers, he’s a likable minor character. David spends the last 600-odd pages of the book that bears his name watching more extreme, dangerous and involving lives than his own, acting as confidant and go-between and letting his “good and bad angels,” Agnes and Steerforth, duke it out for his soul. Toward the end of the book, David says he’s devoted himself to writing “with my strongest earnestness” — a word that keeps bobbing up like a Wagnerian leitmotif — yet surely as a novelist he’s better served in his silent fancies by something like Steerforth’s chameleon duplicity than by Agnes’s radiant integrity.
And that’s what bothers me most about “David Copperfield”: I suspect Dickens isn’t always leveling with us or himself. Sophisticated readers can correct for the merely antiquated: the notion, which no one in this novel questions, that it’s better to die than to have unrepentent sex, or the implication that Uriah Heep isn’t merely villainous but underbred. These are the ground rules; we can play or not. I can even sit still for the cranky, tacked-on chapter about a model prison, which slows up the ending so unconscionably. (Dickens objects to solitary confinement, then considered a promising and enlightened reform, as coddling a bunch of no-goods.)
And I do my best simply to forget Mr. Micawber’s wisecrack about bills of exchange as an invention of the Jews, “who appear to me to have had a devilish deal too much to do with them ever since.” My serious mistrust kicks in when I hit David’s lofty bloviations about the novel’s moral exemplars: Mr. Peggoty, the Christlike seafarer, and Agnes, the celestially backlit hall monitor. “There was something so religious in it,” David says of Mr. Peggotty’s certainty that he’ll find the fallen Emily, “so affectingly expressive of its anchor being in the purest depths of his fine nature, that the respect and honour in which I held him were exalted every day.” And he thinks of Agnes’s “sweet face and placid smile, as though they had shone on me from some removed being, like an Angel.”
When Dickens gets into this mode — and it is Dickens, I’m afraid, not just David — I don’t really know what the hell he’s talking about anymore, except that he seems bent on repudiating the worldliness that nourishes his art. No matter what he thinks he believes, Dickens loves Uriah’s villainy better than Agnes’s virtue. Similarly, he relishes folly more than wisdom: compare his notoriously vague description of Dr. Strong’s school (“very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system”) with his richly contemptuous account of that “progressive” prison and its inmates’ bogus rehabilitation: “I found a great many foxes, disparaging whole vineyards of inaccessible grapes; but I found very few foxes whom I would have trusted within reach of a bunch.”
And, despite the late-inning reformations he engineers, Dickens prefers Mr. Wickfield as an alcoholic wreck, Mrs. Gummidge as a self-pitying hypochondriac and — best of all — Mr. Micawber as an epicure of debt, cheesy eloquence and bipolar self-excitation. Well, so does everybody. The Mr. Peggotty of the early chapters, who roars in barely comprehensible Yarmouthese, likens himself to a “sea porkypine” and drinks at The Willing Mind, is at least an energetic invention. (Although the Leavises understandably find his dialect — for which Dickens consulted a book called “Suffolk Words and Phrases” — “irritating in its patronizing exhibition of the quaintness of the humble.”) The later Mr. Peggotty, a fisher of women who talks about good deeds being “laid up wheer neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and wheer thieves do not break through nor steal,” is a pain in the butt. Dickens must have known it. And his refusal to know he knew it makes me want to shake him.
“David Copperfield” goes squishy and unctuous when Dickens stops following his storytelling instincts and starts listening to extraliterary imperatives: his dutiful religiosity, his class guilt (which he enterprisingly decided to confront in “Great Expectations”) and — in the case of the dwarf Miss Mowcher — a cease-and-desist letter from a solicitor for the real-life model, a chiropodist and manicurist named Mrs. Hill. She recognized herself in one of the novel’s monthly installments and objected to Dickens’s apparent intention to use Miss Mowcher as a bawd; this explains the headsnapping transformation of a worldly wit in Chapter 22 (“If either of you saw my ankles, say so, and I’ll go home and destroy myself”) into a preachy paragon in Chapter 32: “Try not to associate bodily defects with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason.”
In Dickens’s presentation of women, especially, he clearly felt constrained both as a Victorian Englishman in general and as Charles Dickens in particular. Nowadays you need either great sophistication or none at all to endure his heroines as they exhibit their virtue in unearthly patience and floribundant oration (Agnes, Annie Strong) or their sexuality in icky coquettishness (Dora, David’s mother). I’m willing to think they played better then than they do now, but if Shakespeare — and, earlier in Dickens’s own century, Jane Austen — could write women who were smart, good and sexy, what was up with the Inimitable?
He writes best about damaged, dark and dangerous women: in this book, the superbly brittle and edgy Rosa Dartle; elsewhere, the majestically embittered Edith Dombey, Estella, the conscience-stricken mantrap in “Great Expectations,” and Miss Wade, the paranoiac crypto-lesbian in “Little Dorrit.” I don’t imagine I want to know why. Nor does it help, really, to learn that while the empty-headed, increasingly burdensome Dora is obligingly, even gladly, dying so David can marry Agnes, his ideal helpmeet, Dickens was regretting his own early and ill-judged marriage — and naming his newborn daughter Dora, after the supposedly lovable character he was about to kill off. Okay, we always knew something was fishy. Now that we know more or less what, it’s still fishy.
I’ve dwelt on these problems — critics have pointed them out for years — just in case anybody still feels crazy for noticing them, and because I might as well clear the air before saying that “David Copperfield” is a staggering piece of work anyway: a novel any writer could still learn from, and should still be intimidated by. It would be scary enough if he’d put it through years of rewrites; in fact, he wrote it as he did all his novels, by the seat of his pants for serial publication. Unthinkable. Was he a Martian?
Dickens’s contemporaries, of course, recognized just as we do his visionary verisimilitude and his Olympian stock company of characters. Today it’s easier to see his psychological acuity: half a century before Freud — whose work would have scandalized him — he knew by observation and imagination that people’s irrational behavior made perfect sense. Of course David would marry a woman just like his mother, right down to the curly hair and the negligent housekeeping. Of course the fatherless Annie would love the geriatric Dr. Strong. Of course the stingy, taciturn Barkis would fixate on the explosively affectionate Peggotty. And of course sexuality can force its way to a hundred non-genital outlets: Uriah’s writhing and handwringing, Dora’s fingering the buttons of David’s coat, Miss Murdstone’s snapping shut her steel purse.
And Dickens’s mastery of the full range of the English language may now be … inimitable. He has what seems like a modernist taste for surreal comedy: “For anything that I can perceive to the contrary,” says Mr. Micawber, “it is still probable that my children may be reduced to seek a livelihood by personal contortion, while Mrs. Micawber abets their unnatural feats by playing the barrel-organ.” He has a postmodernist’s taste for the absolutely trite: “Everything is like life, in my opinion,” says the undertaker Mr. Omer, “if you look at it in that point of view.” But what modernist or postmodernist writer would also risk the sheer loveliness of Emily’s farewell letter to her never-to-be-husband Ham? “In another world, if I am forgiven, I may wake a child and come to you.” Hard as I find it to take seriously the notion that Emily’s transgression needs all this self-abasement, I can’t read that without a lump in the throat.
Finally, it’s the many-minded amplitude of “David Copperfield” that makes it both so formidable and so embraceable. Dickens thunders away by proxy about “earnestness,” yet he permits Mr. Micawber to fly under (or soar above) his ever-vigilant moral radar. His villains, paradoxically, also belong to the world of pure play. Miss Murdstone, the celibate Wicked Stepmother, and Uriah Heep, the charity-school Iago, never make moral choices either: they’re just bad, working their wills like two-year-olds while Dickens revels in their malice.
Yet the same novel can also accommodate a character as subtly drawn as Steerforth: the narcissist who charms everyone but himself, the seducer who half-wishes somebody was smart enough to thwart him, the too-knowing sophisticate who’d like to be as morally uncomplicated as the sailors he hangs out with, and eventually drowns with — or as the fresh-faced schoolfellow who ends up writing about him. His creator surely put as much of himself into Steerforth as into David: Dickens gave David his own boyhood traumas (like his mortifying, terrifying stint at a shoe-blacking warehouse), and Steerforth his own adult suspicion of a spiritual void behind all that Inimitableness.
Every novel is probably a portrait of the artist, a cryptographic autobiography in which the trouble in its author’s head is projected as an imaginary world, people and all. People especially. Scholars tell us Mr. Micawber grew out of Dickens’s father, Dora out of his old sweetheart Maria Beadnell — and his wife — Tommy Traddles out of his friend Thomas Talfourd, and so on. Good to know. But “David Copperfield,” more nakedly than any of his other novels, is all Dickens, all the time: his earnestness and his anarchic humor, his fears and his fantasies, his joy in his own generative powers. His guilt about his joy. But his joy anyway. No wonder he loved this book the best. No wonder some of us still do, deep down. The masterworks can wait.
Copyright ) 2000 by David Gates. Excerpted from his introduction to “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens, recently published by the Modern Library. All rights reserved.
Lucie Blackman, 21, went out for the afternoon in 2000, phoning her roommate and best friend Louise to arrange a meeting later that night. Lucie never showed up, and within a few days she’d become one of those vanished blondes whose fates fuel headlines and hours of speculative media coverage. She was British, a former flight attendant, and she and Louise were living in Tokyo. They were also bar hostesses, a profession with a very specific meaning in Japan, difficult to explain to foreigners and not entirely clear to the Japanese themselves. Lucie both did and didn’t match the classic Missing Blonde profile, and for a while the mystery of what happened to her threatened to lapse into permanent obscurity.
One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.
Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.
Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.
Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.
The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.
But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”
Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.
Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.
As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.
The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”
Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.
Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.
“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary film on how government, Wall Street and academia colluded to deliver us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, made a powerful case that something was very very rotten at the heart of the American political/economic nexus. His follow-up book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America,” can be considered the legal brief that dots every “i” and crosses every “t” in his argument. A tightly argued, profusely footnoted and deeply enraged castigation of everyone involved, “Predator Nation” isn’t just a factually unchallengeable account of how Wall Street blew up the global economy. It’s a denunciation, a call for justice and a warning: After getting away with the crime of the century, Wall Street still isn’t satisfied.
“If you have already got 96 percent of what you want,” Ferguson told Salon, “why not take the remaining 4? That’s where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it’s really dangerous for the country.”
For at least 30 years the United States has been headed on the wrong track, handing over more power and wealth to a tiny percent of the American population at the expense of everyone else. But Ferguson’s story isn’t just focused on the greed and recklessness of the elite. It’s also about their criminality. The bankers who wrecked the financial system broke the law. And yet, amazingly, not only have the vast majority of responsible parties not been convicted of any crime — they haven’t even been charged. There have been a few settlements of fraud allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory bodies and a smattering of slap-on-the-wrist fines, but nothing that comes close to a proper reckoning for the massive hardship and economic destruction that they caused.
Ferguson’s glowering rage spares neither political party. Clinton gets the blame for completing the process of financial sector deregulation, and George W. Bush is lacerated for his general incompetence. But Barack Obama is showered with a particularly aggrieved contempt. Obama, writes Ferguson, came into office with more hope invested in him than in any recent leader, and then proceeded to “betray” and “screw” his supporters by declining to bring Wall Street to account for its misdeeds.
“Predator Nation” hits bookstores on Monday, just in time to cash in on the headlines generated by the latest banking atrocity — JPMorgan Chase’s massively failed derivatives bet.
“Predator Nation” is an angry book. Were you this angry before you started making the film “Inside Job”?
No, I absolutely was not. I remember the first time I got any kind of inkling of what was to come was in August or September 2007, when Charley Morris sent me a copy of a galley proof of his book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.” It was scary and powerful, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I remember calling Charley and saying, “You lay out a very convincing case but really, these people aren’t that crazy, they aren’t that stupid. They are regulated. Can it really be this bad?”
And he said: “You just wait.” And boy, he was right.
It’s not that I thought that investment bankers were like Mother Teresa. I knew that they weren’t. But the degree of nakedness and extremity of the dishonesty and its pervasiveness was a huge shock to me. It turned out that many banks, on a very large scale, and without any disclosure, had created and sold securities with the intent of betting on their failure. And this was done with the knowledge and approval of senior management of all these banks, including the oldest and most traditional.
How do you explain this behavior? How did we get to a point where it was routine for Wall Street bankers to behave in ways that most Americans would consider frankly immoral?
I think this has its roots all the way back in the 1970s and the beginning of the era of deregulation. But there was a kind of inflection point during the five-year period between 1997 and 2003 — the late Clinton and/or early Bush administration — when all the rules just went away. You went from a period, a regime, where people did have at least some concern about going to jail, to a point where everything is legal, and derivatives couldn’t be regulated at all and nobody went to jail for anything. And looking back I would say that this period definitely started under Clinton. You absolutely cannot blame this on George W. Bush.
You say that everything is now legal, but in your book you dismiss Obama’s argument that he could not prosecute Wall Street bankers for criminal behavior because what they did was technically not illegal as “complete horseshit.”
I should be more precise. I should have said, “where everything was perceived as being legal.” There was no perception that, even when you were in fact violating the law, that there would be any legal jeopardy or legal consequence to what you were doing. And that was part of my surprise when I was making “Inside Job.” I really was surprised that people would so overtly and explicitly do things that 20 years previously probably would have gotten them landed in prison.
One can certainly argue that the penalties and prosecutions following the S&L [Savings and Loan] and insider scandals of the 1980s were vastly insufficient. No doubt about that. But there still were consequences. I don’t know whether [junk bond king] Michael Milken would have still done everything he did, if he knew that he was going to spend two years in prison and have about half of his wealth confiscated. Maybe he still would have made that bet, but still, clearly he had a few unpleasant days. And now, nothing, just nothing.
In your book, you have a laundry list of things you believe the bankers could be prosecuted for, everything from securities fraud to perjury to RICO Act violations. And then you point out, more than once, that during the Obama administration there have been no arrests or indictments of any firms or senior executives “related to causing the bubble or the crisis.” What’s your explanation for this? Is it as simple as the Obama administration being captured by the financial sector?
I’m not President Obama’s psychoanalyst, so I can’t speak to what goes on inside his head. But that is what I would say of the Obama administration generally. In the book I go through the list of his personnel appointments and it’s pretty clear.
But how do we square that with the negative Wall Street reaction to bank reform? You devote only one sentence in your entire book to Dodd-Frank, calling it “weak and ridiculously complicated.” But even so, House Republicans have introduced nine bills trying to repeal parts or all of it, Romney is campaigning on repealing the whole thing, and Wall Street hates it and has tried to kill every last part of it. There is clearly antipathy against Obama from the financial sector now, from Jamie Dimon on down, that wasn’t there when he got elected. If he was truly captured, why the antipathy?
Well, there is some antipathy. But he just held a very successful fundraiser at the home of the president of private equity group Blackstone. So the antipathy is not universal.
But you know, when I was in academia and also when I was running a software company I had a fair amount of contact with portions of the financial sector, investment banking industry, and the venture capital sector. And certainly they were already pretty rapacious and pretty politically conservative. But they would never then have said and done the things that they say and do now. I recently was at a dinner in New York City and one of the people there was a very, very successful man who is on the borderline between venture capital and private equity. And this guy went into an extended rant about how he was at a disadvantage because he had to pay 15 percent capital gains taxes. When I was first dealing with venture capitalists in a significant way, the capital gains tax rate was 28 percent, and nobody was complaining. Then they got them reduced to 20 under Clinton, and then later 15 under Bush. Plus, they got a rollover provision so if they took the proceeds of a venture capital investment and rolled it over into a new venture capital investment it was tax-free. At that point, we’ve reached nirvana, what more could there be?
But now we’re in this environment where this guy was loudly and aggressively complaining that he has to pay 15 percent to the government. And if that’s where you’re at, then of course you are going to complain about Dodd-Frank. You are going to complain about everything. If you have already got 96 percent of what you want, why not take the remaining 4? That’s where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it’s really dangerous for the country.
Do you find it alarming that even after this huge crisis and even with a lot of populist anger on both the right and the left focused on Wall Street, Mitt Romney is running for president while promising to further deregulate Wall Street and repeal Dodd-Frank, and the polls show him neck and neck with Obama?
That is true, but I don’t think that Romney is going to get votes primarily or even secondarily for that. Most of the votes he is going to get will be because he’s religious, he’s against gay marriage, et cetera, all of these allegedly “values” issues — things like that and wanting to reduce taxes. That’s why he is going to get a substantial fraction of the popular vote. The reason he says he wants to roll back Dodd-Frank is not to get votes, it is to get money.
Ninety-nine percent of your book tells a story of how we’ve gotten ourselves into a bigger and bigger mess, and then you’ve got about a page and a half discussing what could be done to fix it. But your solutions — a legitimate third-party alternative, controlling the influence of money in politics, real tax reform, fixing education — it’s just really hard to see how we get from our current problems to those bullet points.
Yes. And we’re not. Not right now. I think it’s going to take things getting worse, either slowly or fast. Either we continue to melt away for another 25 years and then finally people wake up, or there might be another crisis. And maybe that will be sufficient. We’ll see. I don’t know. I’d be interested in your own view of this. I’ve had debates with several of my friends on this question. If Obama had really had the balls to try to do the various kind of things that he’d promised to do, or kinda sorta almost promised to do during his campaign, if he really made an effort, how far do you think he could have gotten in 2009?
At this point, I’m in the camp that believes that American government is completely broken. And we didn’t really find out how broken it was until Obama came in. In your book, you talk about Obama coming in withoverwhelming majorities, but he really only had 60 votes in the Senate from July 2009, when Al Franken was finally sworn in, to January 2010, when Scott Brown took over Ted Kennedy’s seat. And even the things that Obama did get through had to pass muster with a handful of very conservative Democrats. Nebraska’s Ben Nelson had control over the entire government. It’s a completely dysfunctional system. I think Obama severely underestimated what he was facing when he came in, and picked the wrong strategy of trying to go bipartisan, but it’s not as if he had the freedom to do what he wanted that Roosevelt enjoyed when he became president in 1932.
But there are an awful lot of things that the president can do even without the Congress. He didn’t have to choose the people he chose. He didn’t have to choose the attorney general he chose or the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department that he chose. I think that if he had said, I’m going to allocate $500 million to a special prosecutor’s office, and we’re going to find out what the fuck happened here, he could have done that.
There’s some talk now that JPMorgan’s disastrous bet on credit default swaps might lead to tighter regulation. I have to say, it was bizarre to be speed-reading your book while the Morgan news was causing post-traumatic stress flashbacks to the worst days of the financial crisis. Does what happened there fit into the narrative of “Predator Nation”?
I rather think so, yes. Mr. Dimon has long been largely correctly regarded as the best, most judicious, most careful steward of a major global bank. That he and his bank could make a mistake like this does not bode well. One thing that has actually not been widely discussed, somewhat to my surprise, in the commentary about all of this, is that this mistake — which it appears will cost them between $2 billion and $5 billion — this occurred in a very forgiving economic environment. If they made a mistake like this in September 2008, then things could look really quite different.
Does it qualify as criminal behavior?
There is some suggestion of criminality in the lack of honesty on disclosure of the positions and their potential implications. I can’t say; we don’t know enough yet. It certainly is the case that JPMorgan, although more prudent than many other banks over the last decade, has frequently been just as dishonest. It has done a number of extremely unethical things, some of which I mention in the book. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if they had not been forthcoming about this.
Do you think it will make any difference in how banks are regulated?
I fear not. Honestly. I’m sure that Mr. Dimon is momentarily chastised, and that JPMorgan will not be making any similar bets in the next couple of years. But is it going to change the overall posture of bankers and banking and is it going to change the regulatory environment in any significant way? I tend to doubt that. Unfortunately.
So where does this leave us? Your book is filled with a strong sense of personal outrage. How do you personally feel about the prospect that the only thing that could get us out of the mess we’re in is yet another crisis, perhaps even worse than the one we just lived through?
Personally, I am very fortunate. I have a very blessed life. I made some money earlier, I’m basically pretty financially secure. I can’t have private jets and private islands but I don’t have to worry about having a roof over my head or being able to eat well, unlike many people in this country going forward. And I do work that I love. I love making movies, I love writing books. Personally I’m fine.
But the country is not. But this happens to countries. This is not the first country it’s happened to. It’s not even the first time it happened to the United States. We’ll see whether we come out of it. Last time it happened we came out of it, eventually. It took a long time and it was very painful but eventually we came out of it. Will that happen again or not, I don’t know, I honestly don’t.
The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later.
The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.
A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured.
The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.
What can we do with this information? If we subscribe to the idea that literature ought to improve people’s characters — and that’s the sentiment that seems to be lurking behind the study itself — then perhaps authors and publishers should be encouraged to conceal a main character’s race or sexual orientation from readers until they become invested in him or her. Who knows how much J.K. Rowling’s revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay, announced after the publication of the final Harry Potter book, has helped to combat homophobia? (Although I confess that I find it hard to believe there were that many homophobic Potter fans in the first place.)
Absurd as this tactic may sound, many publishers are already kind of doing it — and catching hell. Although the term “whitewashing” is most often used to describe film and TV adaptations in which white actors are cast as characters who were people of color in the original book, something similar also happens with book graphics. Novels about black or Asian characters have been given cover art that features white people.
Controversies over cover-art whitewashing, and other attempts by agents, editors and publishers to downplay or even eliminate minority characters, have roiled the world of young adult literature in recent years. The author Justine Larbalestier (who is white) wrote a YA novel, “Liar,” with a black heroine in 2009, but her publisher insisted on using a photograph of a white teenager for the cover. Larbalestier took their disagreement public and the ensuing scandal persuaded the publisher to back down. Ursula K. Le Guin, a revered science-fiction and fantasy author who has often chosen dark-skinned people as her protagonists, has had to put up with seeing them depicted as white in cover art and film adaptations for decades.
Publishers argue that they’re only trying to make sure their authors’ books find the widest possible audience. What they mean is that a certain percentage of white (or straight) readers will summarily conclude a book isn’t for them if the face on the cover fails to resemble their own. Sad to say, the publishers are probably right about that. While the readers in the Ohio State study didn’t get to choose the stories they read, many of them were deciding how much to invest in the protagonist and his experiences — how much to identify — on the basis of his sexual orientation or race.
Authors, fans and observers are rightly disgusted by the practice of cover-art whitewashing. It shouldn’t have to be that way. But some commentators on the controversy seem to think that if publishers act as if race or gender or sexual orientation isn’t a factor in what many people decide to read, somehow it will simply stop being a factor. This seems unlikely. If it were so easy to rid people of their prejudices, the world would already be a much pleasanter place. It takes regular exposure to different types of people in the course of everyday life — at school and in the military, the workplace and the neighborhood — plus a whole lot of time and peer pressure to wear bias down.
Well, it takes that — and maybe the magic of storytelling? The readers in the Ohio State study did become more understanding of gay and black people after they were (let’s not put too fine a point on it) tricked into identifying with them. This type of sleight-of-hand is something only a non-visual medium like prose fiction can pull off. It can firmly lodge readers inside an imaginary person’s head without ever showing them his or her face. In Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys,” for example, the narrator never explains that all the principle characters are black, and each reader will come to that realization at a different stage in the narrative. It’s Gaiman’s way of tweaking the very common readerly assumption that defaults all major characters to white unless their race is otherwise specified. (And sometimes not even then, as quite a few young fans of “The Hunger Games” demonstrated by being astonished when a supporting character, clearly described as black in the novel, was played by a black actress in the film.)
Of course, not all readers are white or straight, and the ones who aren’t deeply appreciate novels that advertise the diversity of their characters. It’s about time they got heroes and heroines who looked like them, and novels that speak to their distinctive experiences. They have been identifying with characters across the boundaries of race, gender and sexual orientation from time immemorial, and are masters of the art, but understandably they’d like to give their ninja skills a rest. Furthermore, there are also white readers who prefer variety in their fiction or are deliberately trying to correct the imbalances of the past.
Nevertheless, if you believe, as many Americans have since the days of the Puritans, that books ought to morally improve their readers, then maybe there’s a place for a little judicious whitewashing in the writing and publication of fiction. It has literally been demonstrated to change hearts and minds, at least for a while. That’s more than many consciousness-raising efforts — including righteous lectures delivered by the enlightened — can say.
Further reading
Ohio State University’s research blog on the study of the experience-taking while reading stories
The Booksmugglers blog on notable recent instances of book-cover whitewashing in YA.
Ursula K. Le Guin writes for Slate about the changes made to the race of major characters in the TV adaptation of her “Earthsea Trilogy.”
Hunger Games Tweets, a Tumblr compiling and discussing the response of some fans to the casting of a black actress as a supporting character in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ novel.
An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.
The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”
The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.
All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.
It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.
The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”
While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.
This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?
The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.
If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.
This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.
Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”
Excerpted from
"This Is How" by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.
Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.
Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.
For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.
Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.
The therapeutic process takes time, commitment, and funding. Then, insight leads to understanding, which leads to choice. At last, they are free to move on.
It’s such a clean, well-defined structure for the process of healing. Almost like a paint-by-numbers portrait where all those black outlines are confusing at first, but in time, as you apply the correct colors in the right areas, the tangle of lines resolves into a perfectly clear image.
Unfortunately, our brains tend to color outside the line. First, there is the matter of understanding our past and the events that transpired.
Understanding what happened in the past is rarely truly possible. Because true understanding must incorporate context. Not merely what we experienced, but why. And the why requires knowing the motivations of the other people involved. Without the perspective of this context, our understanding will always be biased; it will be from a single perspective: Ours. And therefore, not necessarily accurate or true.
If you are on a highway and you drive past a car accident so severe that the hood of the car has been crushed up against the windshield, you may very well assume the occupants are dead. And perhaps this will haunt you because as you passed by the car, you glimpsed a little girl’s doll on the shelf behind the backseat. One look at that accident was all anybody would need to know what “unsurvivable” looked like. And you have never been able to forget that doll or the little girl who must have loved it and who died in such a terrible crumple of steel and glass. Let’s imagine that you are haunted by dreams where you come upon the accident and you see the doll and you do nothing.
Let’s say that what was unknown to you was that the car was a high-end Mercedes that featured crumple zones designed to absorb the impact of a crash while protecting the occupants within a safety cage. And let’s say that the two occupants inside the car were sitting there as you drove by and the man in the driver’s seat was on his cell phone.
“No, I mean totally like, trashed, totaled. We’re waiting; they’re supposed to send a tow truck. She’s good except she has to pee so she’s—”
“Oh my God, did you just tell Jason that I have to pee? Now he’s going to imagine me peeing. Don’t forget to tell him we found the doll at a tag sale but we need to buy wrapping paper. At least we think it’s the doll.”
“You hear that? Yeah, don’t think about her peeing. And we’re pretty sure it’s the right doll; we had to spend like three hours on Craigslist to find one.”
Imagine that after the tow truck arrives and our couple has been safely installed into a rental vehicle, they don’t really ever think about that crash again except both are pleased with the new car’s color. Neither liked the wrecked Mercedes’ particular shade of red.
In this example, you can see how your entire perception of what happened — and you were a witness — is completely distorted by your point of view.
So, if you were to enter therapy over being disturbed by this wreck, you could spend years discussing why the sight of the doll was so upsetting, and how impotent you felt being unable to stop and help but even if you could stop, what could you have done?
Possibly, the therapist would have you write letters to the dead little girl.
What this really accomplishes is the creation of a sort of personal myth. A series of well-remembered events with finely honed details. As accurate as they may be, they are accurate from only one perspective.
For many years, I believed that one’s past had to be fully understood in order to move through and beyond it. I see now that I was wrong about this. I know now that scrutinizing one’s past and trying to gain understanding and “make peace” with it is a kind of addiction that keeps one focused on the past and not on the present.
As with any addiction, the first step to overcoming it is to see it.
And once you see it, you have to stop it.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Once the current moment moves into the past, it is entirely gone. It ceases to exist except in documents, photographs, and an impression left in a sofa cushion. The past — and all the moments it contained — are no longer sharing this world with us.
They are no more real than Cinderella.
To spend time — year after year — in therapy or on your own thinking about your past and forming conclusions and stitching the elements into a narrative that you can name, “the truth,” in order to be “free” of it, is not how you become free from your past.
The past does not need to be reconsidered in the present and given a structure. The events of the past cannot be understood when you are the only element of the past actively engaged in reliving it.
When somebody says, “Therapy has been really helpful to me in terms of resolving some of my issues from the past,” what does this actually, in practical terms, mean?
Or somebody is “haunted” or controlled by their past. How is this possible?
When I first moved to New York, I became friends with a guy who seemed to be exactly the guy I wanted to be. He was very outgoing and had lots of friends and they probably all felt as I did: Like his best and closest friend.
After we’d been friends for almost a year, one night we were out drinking and he told me he had a confession to make, something he wanted me to know about himself.
I nodded and tried to look very sincere and open, while inside my mind it was the Kentucky Derby, with most of the money being placed on female-to-male transsexual. That wasn’t it.
He proceeded to tell me in great detail about the utterly atrocious physical abuse he’d experienced at the hands of his father and mother during his childhood. It was well beyond anything I myself had ever come close to experiencing.
After this evening, my friend spoke of his past abuse frequently. And I realized that all the time we’d been friends, all those moments prior to his revelation had probably been, in his mind, moments leading up to The Telling.
Only after The Telling could he be fully himself with me. His story of his past abuse was a large part of his identity. It was a protected secret that was kept out of view for acquaintances and coworkers. Only after a measure of trust and intimacy had been formed would there be almost a ceremony in which he detailed his abuse. Rather like unwrapping, slowly, an extravagant gift one knows is going to blow the mind of the recipient.
When we first became friends it had amazed me that he was single. I now understood that he was single because of
how guys reacted when my friend finally revealed his history. It was like encountering a new person. And my friend’s abuse was now like a third person with us wherever we went.
Who could blame him? It was a wonder he was still alive.
Today, I see it differently.
My friend is a dramatic example of somebody who is haunted by their past. But because the past is gone, how does it haunt? Of course, it does not. The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We re-experience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.
We enter therapy and discuss our past. We formulate opinions about what happened. We create a rich, detailed world. In therapy or on our own, we focus our attention on something that no longer exists in order to understand or have perspective or acknowledge or own what has happened. And only after we decide this understanding or recognition has taken place do we stop worrying that particular tooth with our tongue.
For years, I believed this was how to live.
I was wrong. It’s how to stagnate.
I know now how to get over the past. It has worked for me in a deeper, more enduring way than any therapy I have ever had.
Writing six autobiographical books is what freed me from my past.
If the books had been cookbooks I expect I would feel just exactly as free. That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains.
Perhaps the process of writing — being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter — has soothed me because it’s kept me busy. When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.
For the same reason, being out of a job and just hanging around is depressing in a thousand different ways. All you have is time. Sooner or later, you end up wandering around bad neighborhoods inside your head. Neighborhoods like, “They never should have fired me, those assholes.” Which may be true or it may be untrue but it’s irrelevant to everything. It is through work that challenged me and required continuous freshness that I began to occupy not the past but this, right now. My advertising career had not been challenging. Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.
And this, here, this line, that comma.
That’s what freed me from the past. The present kidnapped me. I climbed into its car when it held up its hand and showed me the candy. I hopped right in.
When something from my past upsets me here in my present, it’s because I let my mind think back to the past and grab hold of something.
This is how the past haunts us. We think about it.
Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to “getting over” one’s past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess.
Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling. Sometimes, a particular trauma may be the largest thing we have ever experienced. So we kind of move into it, make it our home. Because there’s nothing in our lives on the scale of that loss or that trauma.
So, you need a larger life. Something that can successfully compete with your past.
To live with your mind in the past — in the name of healing or understanding or overcoming — is to live in a fantasy world where nothing new or original is created. To “understand” one’s past is to handle clay that no longer exists and shape it into a bowl nobody can ever see or touch.
Denial of the painful events in one’s past is the same as obsessing over one’s past. To actively refuse to discuss or think about, if need be, what happened is to imbue it with power. Recycling the past into a new business, a not-for-profit to help others, a workshop, a painting, a book, a song — these are ways to explore the past in the context of the present. These are things people who are actively alive do.
You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry around, show people occasionally, put back in its black velvet pouch, and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.
Then, when asked to join the pole vaulting club, pull the coach aside and whisper, “I can’t. See” — and remove your gem from your pocket — “this is my terrible thing and as I expected, showing it to you has taken your breath away and made you sympathetic. So I will be excused, I assume?”
Other people will allow you — they will never blame you or challenge you — to use your past as an excuse to not face the normal fears everybody has when facing their future. Even if you were brutally physically assaulted, you must not withdraw because you are afraid it will happen again. This is not a valid exit.
Your fears that it might happen again are perfectly reasonable and justified: It might happen again.
Many people believe that if something really bad happens to them, they have paid their dues and nothing else really bad can happen again. But on the day you attend your mother’s funeral or declare personal bankruptcy, there is no law in the universe that prevents you from also getting a speeding ticket and your first grey hair.
When multiple bad things happen, it can feel like “life is out to get you.” It’s not. And it’s not a sign, either. What you do is, you keep going. You stop waiting for fairness.
- – - – - – - – - – - – -
You do not need to work through your past so you can heal. You need to move forward and then you’re as healed as you’re likely to be.
Unless.
Unless you experienced something so unspeakably terrible, something so out of scale in magnitude that it simply doesn’t fit into the past. It is too large to be contained by time or space. And if this is you, the thing you can do for the duration of your existence is to tell your story over and over. So that other people can hear you tell it and they can be moved, changed by it. This can help others.
Which is the single comfort for people who will always remain locked in their history, inside something that is really a different species of awful.
I met somebody whose grandfather had survived the death camps in Germany.
He told me that his grandfather was a very quiet, broken man. He rarely spoke and when he did, he told the same stories about how he survived.
I told him, “Do you listen, every time he tells you?”
He said, “No, I just kind of let him talk and do my thing; I’ve heard it all a thousand times.”
I wondered if he had ever truly heard it once. I suggested he listen, hang on every word and try to see visuals in his mind of the story his grandfather was telling him.
Some stories must be carved into the present and the future by telling and telling again and then again until the story is part of us.
From “This Is How” by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.
Joji Obara and Lucie Blackman (Credit: Estate of Lucie Jane Blackman) 
A detail from the cover of "Predator Nation" 
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon) 
Matti Friedman 
Augusten Burroughs 
