All the Sad Old Literary Men

I recently finished a book called All the Sad Young Literary Men, written by Keith Gessen, who is the editor of the literary magazine n+1. This is not so much a novel as a series of short stories. They all center on overeducated east coast quarterlifers coping with unsatisfying relationships and hindered artistic ambitions. They are literary and they are sad and they are men, but are they young? On this, Gessen is conclusive: they are not. Not anymore. Not after they’ve graduated from their Ivy League universities and attended grad schools and ensconced themselves in overpriced Brooklyn apartments. Gessen’s message here seems to be: by the time you’ve written your thesis and defended it – by the time you’re out of school, in other words - you are officially old, or you will be very, very soon.

The trouble is, most of the guys in Gessen’s novel (they’re all a bit interchangeable) are around my age, or perhaps a little bit older. This made the experience of reading the book rather disturbing, at times. Was I, I wondered, as old as Gessen’s protagonists? By the numbers, it seemed so, but I felt downright sprightly next to most of these bitter veterans. Take the following descriptions as evidence:

In reference to a young writer, contemplating a novel he’s beginning:
“He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write.”

Referring to a history graduate student at Syracuse University, after being discovered by his students literally passed out at the gym (2 passages):
“No one wanted to see a man this sweaty, and this old, leaving stains all over the equipment.”

“Mark for his part sat up slowly, and then made his old-man’s dignified way to the dressing room.”

More poignantly, referring to the same history student, now finished with school and living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend:
“They both fell asleep then, in the Brooklyn night, two people no longer very young, no longer very happy, though still unsettled, still a mess.”

And, finally, in the book’s epilogue, the narrator contemplating his girlfriend’s pregnancy:
“She was too young to be having babies, and I, I was too old.”

Get the picture? I’m twenty-seven and Keith Gessen is about five years older than me so maybe he has some insight into the process of urban, intellectual aging that I haven’t yet acquired. However, it’s alarming to find that the thread linking these collected stories of intellectual, literary youth in the Thousands is not the dread of living in an age of terrorism and governmental hypocrisy, but rather the burden of mortality! And these are folks in their late twenties! “There were so many things I’d once wanted to do!” declaims one character late in the book. Well, me too, but at least I’m not trudging through life already teathered to my own tombstone. At twenty-seven, I’d like to think I’m just getting started on many things. Besides, I really only feel old when I go out to Columbia bars. Or, of course, when I read books by Keith Gessen.

Of Human Bondage

Last night I finished Somerset Maugham’s opus Of Human Bondage which, at 600+ pages, is lengthy even by the generous standards of the bildungsroman. The middle part of the book is occupied with what is arguably the novel’s best-remembered episode: young Philip’s miserable love affair with the horrid Mildred. In the introduction to the Penguin edition, University of Saskatchewan professor Robert Calder describes her as having “few redeeming qualities,” but I would go further and venture she has none whatsoever. Philip’s love for her is by turns baffling, enraging, and fascinating. Calder posits that Philip is enslaved by the need to redress her initial spurning of him. In this, he is abetted by the insecurity of his deformity (a club-foot) and an undeveloped sexuality.

Harrowing as it is, the portions of the novel which spoke directly to me--especially at this point in my life (especially, in fact, this week in my life)--were not so much those which pertained to Mildred, but rather Philip’s casting-about for meaning and direction in life. Raised by his uncle, an unaffectionate and miserly country curate, Philip, in the first of many characteristic acts of rejection, declines a scholarship to Oxford and elects to study German in Heidelberg. From there, his wanderings take him eventually to Paris, where, upon the suicide of a fellow art student, he becomes disillusioned with the bohemian life. Next, the protagonist returns to England and London where he becomes apprentice to a chartered accountant, a position he botches totally and is forced to leave. Finally, he settles on medicine, his father’s profession, and he sets off again to London to attend school.

Throughout it all, the meager inheritance left to him by his parents depletes, and in the novel’s final quarter Philip is made destitute by both a loss on the stock market and an astonishing act of cruelty on the part of Mildred. He is forced to leave medical school and live on the street. It is here that, as I was reading in Sabor y Cultura on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, I felt that Philip’s plight touched a nerve with me particularly. A few choice passages which set my heart racing with uncomfortable recognition are here reprinted:

“It was because he could not believe in the reality of his experience that he did not give way to utter despair.”

“His uncle and the solicitor would of course do something for him, but he dreaded their reproaches [at his profligacy]. He did not want anyone to reproach him: he clenched his teeth and repeated that what had happened was inevitable just because it had happened.”

“He tried with all his might not to think of the life he was leading.”

“Philip thought of those early days in Heidelberg when Hayward, capable of great things, had been full of enthusiasm for the future and how, little by little, achieving nothing, he had resigned himself to failure. Now he was dead. His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything. It was the same now as if he had never lived.”

Philip eventually rights himself, but it does not come without a cost. The dreams which had given his youth such a fire are virtually extinguished by the novel’s troublingly upbeat ending, and Philip’s attempt to convince us (and himself) that he is satisfied with the dull bourgeois safety which awaits him in a passionless, anodyne marriage is not entirely convincing. That being said, the misery of poverty, which Maugham depicts with vivid immediacy, convinces thoroughly--and the novel is uniquely frank in its treatment of fiscal affairs and their importance to the life of the soul. Two years after leaving medical school and being reduced virtually to a pauper’s life, Philip at last receives a modest inheritance from his uncle who dies after long illness. Having finally become solvent, Philip remarks upon the folly of romanticized poverty:

“He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it. He knew that the lack made a man petty, mean, grasping; it distorted his character and caused him to view the world from a vulgar angle; when you had to consider every penny, money became of grotesque importance.”

This assessment squares with my own limited experience and the notion that although money itself may not make one happy, its lack will almost certainly bring unhappiness, if not, as in Philip’s case, outright despair. As the bitter and aged art instructor Foinet remarks to Philip in Paris, “money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make complete use of the other five.” “There is nothing,” he continues, “so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.”

These days, my own anxiety encompasses both income and the search for a meaningful life. Philip is thirty when Of Human Bondage ends and he finds himself married and settled into a steady profession. My nearness in age to Maugham’s surrogate/protagonist notwithstanding, I would like to think my story diverges completely from Philip’s in that I have always been certain of my desire to act. Where Philip’s journey was marked by its continually changing aim, my own life has consisted of constant recalibration of means to the same, consistent end. It is only very recently that I have allowed myself to consider abandoning that very end which had once, almost exclusively, defined me, but to which I have lately felt a slave.

No one, of course, should be made to feel a slave to anything, and I am perhaps exaggerating the pull of acting’s promise. In Philip’s case, it is a revelation late in the novel of life’s meaninglessness, which ironically sets him free: “If life was meaningless,” he notes, “the world was robbed of its cruelty.” True enough, I say. The question is not whether there’s a point to life, but whether one can find one’s happiness in the rubble. That remains to be seen.