Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

on in a broader sense? The question transcends this particular dispute, in that it implicates underlying forces more general in effect.

As a college student in the sixties, well before what is inaccurately called the “gender” integration of dorms made the traditional difficulties college students have always had in showing up on time a matter of sex, race, and class, I was a student of the late William Alfred, professor of English at Harvard and author of the successful play, Hogan’s Goat, in which the female lead was played by the young Faye Dunaway. At that time, Harvard had a number of professors whose fame in the real world was greater than that of Professor Alfred, but his extraordinary abilities as a raconteur—and the fact that Faye Dunaway often stayed at his house—gave him status equal or superior to that of Henry Kissinger, Pat Moynihan, Timothy Leary, Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Lowell, and others. To enter his tutorial, one on one, was a prize for which an unreasonable number of students competed, many of them simply dunces who wanted to meet Faye Dunaway. Somehow, I was chosen, to the professor’s eventual regret, as I was simply a Faye Dunaway–seeking dunce who had talked my way in on a mixture of bravado, unjustified self-confidence, and pure passion.

I believe he quickly came to the conclusion that this was so, and yet he kept me on, not out of pity or inertia as one might expect, but because one day, upon seeing his glazed expression as I committed literary criticism, I stopped in midsentence and said, more or less, “Look, I don’t claim to be intelligent; it’s not my strength.”

Given that I was a Harvard student whom he was tutoring for an honor’s degree, he was quite taken with this confession (other than Richard Bissell, I may be the only person ever associated with Harvard to have made such an appraisal of himself, although there are many who could). Now completely awake, he asked, “What is your strength?”

“I’m loyal to what I love, at any cost,” I said. “And sometimes I can put together a decent sentence.”

Subsequently, there was less analysis of literary texts and more general discussion. I never encountered Faye Dunaway, and although I remember nothing from his lecture courses whatsoever, I remember our conversations, and two things above all. The first was that during the war the army sent him to the Rockies to learn Bulgarian, and that, desperately lonely and forlorn there, he made friends with a pig, with whom, perhaps echoing the circumstances in which he related this to me, he had long conversations. “Pigs,” he said, “are very intelligent,” and then he turned scarlet.

The second point was something deceptively simple. He told me that, in this time of great political upheaval, he was depressed and despondent. This was no surprise. Weren’t all intellectuals? No, he said. Politics can go one way or another and one is seldom satisfied even by one’s own party. He was saddened because of a fundamental change he had observed in recent years among his students. Unlike those who had passed through in previous decades, these were different, tragically and alarmingly so. What he went on to say was unquantifiable, or at least unquantified. It was probably unverifiable as well, and yet it was wise and true, and he said it in only five words, but with import that not even Laurence Olivier could have matched. “Now,” he said, “they run in packs.” He was a playwright, and he could speak in such a way that even something pedestrian and austere was rendered beautifully.

I agreed. It was clear. But, being young, I was not as disturbed as he, though over the intervening forty years I’ve seen his meaning fleshed out relentlessly, and now share his view, including all that was unspoken—even if I cannot replicate the depth of his understanding. “Now they run in packs.” Now indeed they do, and they are either oblivious of the fact (along with much else) or, if not, proud of it in the manner of the possessed, like the invalid who professes love for the illness about to carry him off, or the alcoholic who praises the magnificence of drink.

Only an angel could write even a semi-memoir without imparting to it at least a whiff of confession. I don’t like the confessional form, which so often is only prurience masquerading as sincerity, but still I must admit that twenty-five or thirty years ago I was to some extent like the people I have been criticizing, in that I was borne along on an ineluctable current and enjoyed being the advocate of an irresistible change that I saw wreaking havoc among good people who were in the process of being put out to pasture, or, perhaps better, who were like old Eskimos set out on the ice. These good people of whom I speak would have a high position that they had held since F. Scott Fitzgerald was healthy, and then suddenly they would disappear, not because they would die but because of the changes coarsing [sic] through the publishing industry. People would lament their passing and the passing of what they believed, but I would justify and praise the powers that had cut them down.

In the seventies particularly, publishing was rationalized, consolidated, and transformed. Although I was hardly the cause of this and could not have stopped it, I was conspicuous in acceptance of it and have regretted it ever since. Much like my opponents today, I was on the side of the newly dominant power and insufficiently critical of it. What I did was comparable—if not in enormity and scale—to the French collaborating with the Germans after the fall of France. So many French intellectuals, their histories now scrubbed, obfuscated, and faked, made excuses for their conquerors, of which the worst was that because there was no stopping them (which, in fact, there was), one had to find a way to accommodate. Which is what I did with