A portrait of the artist as a young satirist

The title of this post, first published here in April 2016, is I’m afraid somewhat misleading. As I look over all I’ve written in my life, I find that very little of it might be characterized as “satire,” however much I admire the form and find a perverse comfort in it. Maybe I missed my calling; maybe it’s a symptom of my failure of nerve. I can only say now that the below essay is something of a tribute to my satiric temperament, the perspective from which I view culture and human experience.

Satire is possibly a bastard form, comic though not quite comedy, smilingly tragic though not quite tragedy as it delineates the fatal flaws within us as a race. And it offers no solutions, except perhaps an implicit “Want to make the world a better place? Well, don’t do this.” But I can’t think of any literary form that effectively can offer solutions, however much writers try to do so. At least satire provides a way of maintaining perspective, a reminder of how we should assume a pose of humility as we recognize all of our failings. As Jonathan Swift said, “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.” The best satirists, though, are knowingly describing their own reflections, as well as the appearance of others. I know I resemble these remarks.

At the Strand Book Store the other day, I came across Walt Kelly’s Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, a book that I cherished as a child. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kelly’s comic strip was still running in the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, and it was among my favorites, along with Peanuts. After school, I used to lie on my belly on the blue-carpeted floor of the living room, the last orange rays of the afternoon sun dappling the carpet through the window, and open the Bulletin to its last pages, where I studied these, and others, and laughed myself silly (though I imagine most of the time, given the subtle comedy of these strips, I merely smiled in recognition). Other books (mostly pictures, but words too) that I cherished at the time were Gelett Burgess‘s The Purple Cow and Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, both of these published by Dover in fairly sturdy paperback editions. Paging through the Kelly book this weekend, I won’t say that my childhood came rushing back to me in some Proustian tsunami of memory, but quite a bit of it did.

For those who may not remember it, Pogo was an animal strip. Its lead character was Pogo Possum, and the stories meandered through Okeefanokee Swamp, populated by a frog named Churchy LaFemme, a porcupine named Porky, and an alligator named Albert, among the hundreds of characters major and minor who wandered in and out of the strip over its quarter-century lifetime. More to the point, Kelly often used the strip as political satire; in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the period covered by Ten Ever-Lovin’ Years, its most significant target was Joseph McCarthy, and in later decades Kelly would target the FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and a gentleman from Whittier, CA, named Richard Nixon. In this odd way, I was introduced as a child to recent American history and contemporary politics and racism. And that’s not all; Kelly was, above all, a liberal humanist, and the strip just as often provided a melancholy reflection on a lost, prelapsarian paradise. “Pogo combined both sophisticated wit and slapstick physical comedy in a heady mix of allegory, Irish poetry, literary whimsy, puns and wordplay, lushly detailed artwork and broad burlesque humor,” says an anonymous Wikipedia editor. “[His] characters are a sardonic reflection of human nature — venal, greedy, confrontational, selfish and stupid — but portrayed good-naturedly and rendered harmless by their own bumbling ineptitude and overall innocence.”

This book was soon joined on my shelf by issues of Mad magazine, then enjoying something of a hey-day with the satiric treasure-box of the early 1970s to work through and before it became a brand under the ownership of Warner Communications; it was inexpensive, advertising-free, and owned and published by the anarchic William M. Gaines; and shortly thereafter by the early issues of the National Lampoon, both of these, too, featuring sophisticated artwork and a profound skepticism, even cynicism, towards the American popular and personal experience of the 1970s.

I read these as a boy between the ages of 7 and 13 or so (though the nonsense rhymes of Burgess may have been introduced to me earlier). It was an odd time to be growing up, and I was in an odd situation. My younger brother and I were often plopped down in front of the TV for dinner time as my parents argued in the kitchen, and we ingested Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the Vietnam War as we ingested our chicken or hot dogs or what-have-you. A few years later, I learned about American history and the United States system of government in social studies class, but during summer break in 1973 I learned how this worked in practice during the Watergate hearings. On a more personal level, I watched The Brady Bunch and All in the Family as my own parents’ marriage deteriorated, eventually ending in separation in 1970 and final divorce about a decade later.

When I first came upon satiric novels in my mid-teens, I must have recognized myself in some of their main characters. Both Gulliver and Huck Finn, the protagonists of the novels that bear their names, end up solitary, distinctly apart from the cultures that the novels satirized, Gulliver ensconced in a stable and Huck Finn ready to take to the river again. This voluntary alienation may be less a misanthropic nihilism than a strategic retreat. Although Gulliver doesn’t stand for Parliament or Huck Finn become an abolitionist, nonetheless they have been exposed to kindness and compassion as well as corruption. This retreat may, instead, be an acknowledgement that as individuals they are too easily corrupted by ideals (both real and false), practices, experience, and religious or social dogma that, upon a few moments of reflection, reveal themselves as catastrophically corrupt; Joseph Heller’s Something Happened reveals their ultimate psychic toll. As Pogo himself once famously said, We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Indeed. Since then I’ve become corrupt too, and unless you head for the stable or the river there’s really no way to avoid it.

I also remember that it wasn’t all satire. I enjoyed other kinds of humor and comedy, not least the gentler proddings of Robert Benchley, James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, and W.C. Fields (though all four had their darker moments as well), who are also finding their way back to my library after a long absence. All of this eventually led me to William Gaddis, Heller, Terry Southern, and the others. What I find curious is that I never tried to write satire in any focused way myself, given my pleasure and admiration for these writers and artists. Maybe I should have, but I imagine that what stopped me from doing so was the knowledge that Kelly, Twain, and Swift said it all far more effectively than I could. As Tom Lehrer once admonished, I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is shut up.

Ribbon cutting

Over the past few days I’ve been putting some finishing touches on a redesign of this web site, which debuted over twenty years ago as Superfluities. Since then it’s gone through a variety of iterations as my interests and indeed my life have evolved, and with the onset of my sixtieth birthday earlier this year I thought it was once again time to take stock of this writing, which has wavered between the sublime and the ridiculous, most of it leaning towards the latter. A self-consciously modest admission, perhaps, but nonetheless true.

When it began back in the 1990s, blogging itself was the killer app of its day, long before the launch of social media platforms like MySpace (2003) or Friendster (also 2003); Facebook was a mere glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. Now, two decades later, the internet is filthy with abandoned blogs, though many of them have since been deleted, their expressions lost to the ether. For me, blogging was a way to share my own writing with what I hoped would be a wider audience, and for a time it was. As Facebook and Twitter became more popular, however, blogs became less and less so, and in an odd way social networking and connection suffered too, at least when it came to the publication of lesser-known writers. Blogs, posted on the World Wide Web, were universally available to everyone, and many invited comments from its audience, no matter their origin; I myself landed a few paid writing gigs with the likes of the New York Times and the Guardian as a result of my blog posts. Sites like Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, are dependent on users forming groups of friends or followers, shutting out those who may not orbit in those circles, as wide as they might be; because you follow someone, they don’t necessarily follow you back. The circles are insular, and the feeds move too quickly to encourage anything but superficial engagement. Not to mention that, in the blogosphere, there was no character limit, nor was there much of an invitation to the short sharp shocks of a Facebook post. While blogs required a bit more technical know-how than a Facebook or a Twitter, the bar to entry was extraordinarily low if not non-existent, and what one learned on the technical side was, at least, transferable knowledge that could be leveraged in other pursuits.

I spent many years blogging about theater as both a critic and a playwright, and I had something of a reputation, but I don’t write about theater any more and have moved on to other pursuits. Nonetheless, in putting together this relaunch, I’ve noticed a few interests that have remained central over the years. In the past few days I’ve reread some earlier essays about Vienna, about T.S. Eliot, about my own background, and they more or less remain current concerns, even if since their original writing my views have evolved and my affinities broadened somewhat. I’m making a concerted effort to revive my interest in this writing itself, and hope that if you visit here you’ll find a more concentrated effort and more frequent posting than I’ve been able to exhibit over the past few years; over the next few weeks I’ll continue to repost a few essays that I’d like to preserve, but I’ll do my best to come up with new writing (now they call it “content”) too. At 60, I’m less argumentative and I hope more open-minded, and perhaps that’s because marriage and parenthood does that to you. There’s still plenty to write about, though, and I hope I still have a few things I hope to say that I hope are worthwhile to hear.

225 minutes

Title page of Bach’s autograph score of St. Matthew’s Passion.

Originally published here on June 23, 2016.

The wife is away and the kids went to bed at about 9:00, so I spent some part of this evening listening to Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, in the 1962 recording conducted by Otto Klemperer. Not all of it, I’m afraid; only the first 75 minutes or so. The entire recording lasts for nearly four hours, and I doubt that I or anybody else for that matter has the time to listen to it in its entirety in one sitting, with the exception of those who deliberately carve out an evening to hear it live. Still, even its first third was powerful enough. Listening to it without distraction, even in your own home, leads you into a deep enough contemplation and meditation that is far too rare in my own experience. And I choose my words carefully here — “far too rare” is, in reality, only once every few years. The fragmentation of contemporary musical experience, apart from the sublimity of Bach’s Passions, means that our music comes to us in three- or four-minute slices, far from the 225 minutes of a Bach Passion. What’s more, the Passions don’t even have the narrative drive of an opera. We know how they end, let alone how they begin. Wagner’s Ring has the conflict and characters of the Nibelungenlied, a grand tale of passion stretching over many, many years, and Wagner does with the myth what he will. Bach was rather more constrained with the gospels.

For some reason, this brought to my mind my father, who for the last twenty years of his life lived more or less by himself. His companion, and it was an important one, was the classical music station in Philadelphia WFLN. (Don’t go looking for it; it ceased operations in 1985.) In the 1970s and 1980s, he would sit by himself, quietly smoking and drinking in his sitting room, listening to the chamber music, symphonies, operas, and most likely the Bach Passions every evening for several hours. He listened to them not on a computer or a DVD player, but a radio (I tried myself to find some classical music on the radio tonight, only to find that WQXR has gone all web). He may also have read a book or magazine, and in the spring and summer watched a baseball game or two on television, but even after the games were over, far into the night, he listened to WFLN and thought — about what I can’t say. Maybe philosophy; maybe about his own life; maybe about other things. But listening to the St. Matthew’s Passion tonight myself, alone in my living room, my daughters asleep nearby, drinking a few glasses of Grüner Veltliner, I possibly experienced the same thing, and about what I thought I would find it hard to say. Even “thought” is the wrong word. Perhaps, and only perhaps, it was a few hours in which the music brought me closer to my Self, whatever that is, however that may be defined.

Solitude, quiet, and time unbroken by interruption, whether it’s by glancing nervously every few minutes at an iPhone or by something else: these are the dearest and rarest things, not least because so poorly valued. (And ironically they’re the costliest: Find a quiet bar where you can while away a few hours with a few quiet drinks by yourself, or even a place where you can sit quietly without disturbance in New York. You’ll pay for it.) These are the things that the spirit requires. But of what value is the spirit today? One of the ways in which art teaches us the value of the sublime is through mere duration — not noise or variety necessarily, but through listening or seeing quietly over a long period of time. It carves out a large piece of our lives. I know of few King Lears that last less than three hours, and I’ve already mentioned the Passions of Bach. Contemporary equivalents might include the music of Morton Feldman. They don’t benefit from smartphones buzzing with calls or incoming emails that must be dealt with instantly, or constant looks at one’s watch. Quite the opposite. If you listen to the St. Matthew’s Passion on your computer, you’ll find yourself clicking away to Outlook or another email program, or Facebook, or Twitter, I guarantee it. The music suffers. The spirit has its demands on our attention, and as our attention is distended across distractions, it suffers too.

I mentioned solitude briefly above, but I must contradict myself here, for a live performance of St. Matthew’s Passion is (most likely; I’ve never experienced it myself) an example of individual contemplation within the intentional community of those who choose to attend the performance. In that sense, it is like church. I’ve also been attending services at Grace Church over the past six months or so, and perhaps its greatest message to me has been the necessity of pursuing spiritual life through community. There is a moment during the service in which those in the congregation turn to each other, friends or strangers, to shake hands, to acknowledge fellow churchgoers. It draws the individual from himself to the truth that there are others around him, and that there’s no separation from them; and especially at Grace Church, I’ve found, those others are of far different backgrounds than oneself. For the ceremony, however, we are united, one in spirit, whether white or of color, gay or straight, rich or poor, and however our opinions may differ. (Even atheists may be welcome. As the Yes, Prime Minister series once waggishly put it, they’re called “Modernists” in the contemporary Anglican Communion.)

The sacrament of the Holy Eucharist takes only about an hour — about a quarter of time a performance of St. Matthew’s Passion. Even so, it’s an hour that one must make plans for, for the solitude and quiet the sacrament demands. It is nearly 1:00 in the morning now, but I may just spend another hour or so with the next CD of the Passion. One must make the time, wherever one finds it.

My people

The city of Ternopil, Ukraine. Source: https://ternopilcity.gov.ua/en/about/istoriya-mista/

As I repost some of my past essays, I offer the below, originally published here in 2019, before the current anguish. I should note that additional research points to the very real possibility that small municipalities like Urman were incorporated into the Ternopil administrative region some time ago — rendering genealogical research even more difficult from this distance than it already was.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a few direct-mail scam artists showed up offering to research and produce your family’s very own heraldry for a nominal fee. “Did you know that the [Insert Family Name Here] has its own coat of arms? Think of it — an courageous eagle against a field of blue, a sword-carrying warrior against a field of red,” went some of the bulk-mail letters that accompanied these scams. “Suitable for framing, your coat of arms reflects your family’s proud history in empires around the world.” These occasionally showed up in my father’s mail, too. He’d read these letters and laugh. “You know what’s on the Hunka family coat of arms, George?” he’d say to me, tossing the mail into the trash. “A peasant hut against a field of poverty.”

He was probably not far off. My ancestors on both my mother’s and father’s side were uneducated peasants in Eastern and Central Europe back in 1900 — Ukraine, Slovakia, and Lithuania. Though family tradition had it that my paternal great-grandfather held some kind of position in a local Orthodox church in Ukraine, there is no real evidence to prove it (in any event, my paternal grandfather was a staunch atheist). And when they came to the United States in those unsettled years before the First World War, they found jobs suited to their family backgrounds. My paternal grandmother held a position as a charwoman in a local elementary school in Philadelphia; my paternal grandfather became a freelance electrician after being trained at the Valhalla Dam in New York; my maternal grandparents were coalminers, textile workers, and subsistence farmers in northeast Pennsylvania. While their children went on to earn college and university degrees in the 1950s and beyond, they themselves were the unskilled product of an agrarian land, and none of them was particularly cheerful — not surprising, coming from a region that was damp, cold, and gray every year from October through May. (I’m sure you can partially attribute the generally dour nature of Russian and Eastern European literature, even its humor, to the climate.)

Coat of arms or no, the casual amateur geneology research I’ve done over the past twenty years or so has turned up little in the way of my family’s history before 1900, indicative, perhaps, of their low status on the socioeconomic totem pole. The best I’ve been able to do is trace my grandfather back to the region from which he emigrated — Ternopil, about 125 km southeast of Lviv, which is listed as his original home on the register of the ship that brought him to Ellis Island in 1914. A little research, mainly through Roman Zakharii’s useful web site, revealed a tranche of Hunkas (or Gunkas) in a small town called Urman. He left behind a sister and brother when he embarked for the shores of New York.

Urman is “a village of 622 people in Berezhany Raion (county) of Ternopil Oblast (province) of western Ukraine. It lies in the historic region of Halychyna (Eastern Galicia) and during 1772-1918 was part of Austrian empire, consequently of Poland in 1920-1939 and of Soviet Union in 1939-1991,” says Wikipedia. This being the internet era (and I having a little time on my hands), I did a quick Facebook search and turned up an English-speaking Hunka who still lived in Urman; we engaged in a brief correspondence that, alas, did not reveal anything except that if there were Hunkas or Gunkas in Urman at the turn of the century, there were still a few left. It may be likely that we share some blood, those Urman Hunkas and those on New York’s Lower East Side; it’s not a common name in either of those places. But farther than that I cannot go with any certainty.

All this, anyway, is mere genealogical bookkeeping. Apart from genetics, though, what interests me is what all this means for one’s temperament — personality traits and philosophical perspectives that we imbibe from our parents with our mother’s milk. We are imitative creatures, and we’re never more imitative than when we’re young; we observe our parents’ ways of speaking, their attitudes towards the world and each other, their moods and their likes and dislikes, and we incorporate them into ourselves unconsciously. Of course, we change — as we get older, we accept or reject the traits that we inherit as we see fit. It’s both a conscious and an unconscious project, and it affects us for both good and ill. And because our parents were imitative creatures too, they receive their temperaments from their parents, and back and back into the distant past.

Nor do these temperaments appear from nowhere. They’re formed by our (and their) reactions not only to family dynamics but also to history. Our attitudes towards money, violence, humility or pride, politics, power, culture, art — we absorb our parents’ responses to these too, perhaps not as intensely as we do those things closer and more intimate to us, but we absorb (and later in life accept or reject) them as well. It is, in a way, a generational butterfly effect; we unconsciously repeat or exhibit a trait that may have originated several generations ago, passed on to us through our grandparents and our parents in some small, protean way. But that trait is still there, whether we recognize it as an internalized characteristic or not.

Alas, short of asking Facebook strangers whether or not they share a penchant for alcohol, cynicism, or an appreciation of bad folk music, there’s only so much we can learn about how the geography and history of our ancestors has affected ourselves. Fortunately, though, there’s one other avenue open to our investigation, and that’s culture. A few days ago I wrote about my enthusiasm for Central and Eastern European culture, literature, and philosophy. These writers and philosophers were affected by the same cultural, political, and historical milieux that affected my potato-digging ancestors — on a grander intellectual and artistic scale, perhaps, but affected nonetheless. I share some of my temperament with those of these writers and philosophers, who sprang from the same soil as old Maxsym Hunka back there in Ternopil, who may have received (or lacked) the same early education, were rendered dour by those gray winter skies, or experienced the regional and political disasters as Max and his neighbors. And as far as those left behind — well, there’s the Holodomor for Ukraine, as there were other catastrophes in Central and Eastern Europe in the last century.

Is like necessarily drawn to like? I can’t say. But it is intriguing that, quite without knowing it, I married a woman whose ancestors came from the same region; my two best friends these days also have their family roots in western Ukraine and Lithuania. These days I’m brushing up on my Ukrainian history and my Gogol, both of which appeal to my temperament. And I’m sure that a part of my hostility towards the current President is tied to the despicable way he’s been treating the country I consider my homeland (not to mention the country in which I live now).

I don’t know if I’ll ever have the chance to knock on a few houses in Urman to see if there’s any physical resemblance between me and their occupants. But perhaps there are a few, in more ways than one — even if we don’t, in the end, share any blood.

Saturday serenade: From chaos to order and back again

Wilhelm Gauseː Court Ball in Vienna (1900).

In his study of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske turned not to Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern to introduce his themes, but to Maurice Ravel’s 1920 La valse. “I feel this work a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny,” Ravel said, and Schorske wrote:

Ravel’s musical parable of a modern cultural crisis, whether or not he knew it, posed the problem in much the same way as it was felt and seen by the Austrian intelligensia of the fin-de-siècle. How had their world fallen into chaos? Was it because the individuals (in Ravel, the musical themes) contained in their own psyches some characteristics fundamentally incompatible with the social whole? Or was it the whole as such that distorted, paralyzed, and destroyed the individuals who composed it? … These questions are not new to humankind, but to Vienna’s fin-de-siècle intelligentsia they became central. Not only Vienna’s finest writers, but its painters and psychologists, even its art historians, were preoccupied with the nature of the individual in a disintegrating society.

As, I would add, am I. It is small comfort to realize that we’ve been here before, but we must take our comforts as they come.

To while away a few minutes today, you may wish to hear La valse itself. I’m quite fond of eccentrics; they are the spice of society, so long as they don’t shade into sociopaths, which they too often do. Below you’ll find Glenn Gould’s re-arrangement of Ravel’s solo piano arrangement of La valse in his 1974 series for the CBC, Music in Our Time. His introductory remarks are of interest as well.