How College Taught me to Adore all things Fin de Siècle
How College Taught me to Adore all things Fin de Siècle
By
David Gottfried
For reasons that need not concern us here, I did not go to a highly esteemed University. I hesitate to say this, but I must own up to the school’s weaknesses at the very outset because as the ensuing paragraphs will make clear, the school was no Harvard. Indeed, it was not even close; it was a collection of exceptionally ugly buildings, populated by exceptionally incurious minds, situated in the plains of Long Island. Long Island may be a New York City Subu0rb, but given the flatness of the terrain (A friend of mine who came from more hilly environs described the land mass as a flat-chested woman filled with flat-chested females.), the lack of intellectual effervescence in the student body, and the sorry collection of professors who taught us, we might as well have been in some State in the Western Plains that voted overwhelmingly Republican and received the oratory of Ronald Reagan with orgiastic glee.
The school was known as Hoffenbraus, and I have no idea what this word is derived from --- this of course must be ascribed to the school’s intellectual laxity which caused me to succumb to such pronounced mental lethargy that in the 40 plus years since my graduation, I have yet to figure-out where the name came from. But we certainly knew what the name “Hoffenbraus” felt like: It felt like a dreary, aging, blonde, German woman, with the multitude of heavy wrinkles that blondes succumb to with age, who wore ugly, black dresses and would be prone to comment, every so often, “He wasn’t all bad. He built the autoban.”
Actually, neither the demographics of the school not the history of its founding was Germanic. Rather its education was German. For example, I never once heard a professor speak of John Locke, except of course in very derisive terms which did little to explain the man’s philosophy. Describing a man’s philosophy can be a bit arduous, and mentally taxing, so we were taught philosophy by learning not what a philosophy stood for, but what it felt like, what its mood was. John Locke we were encouraged to associate with dull, dreary English cooking, heavy white wigs, and we were given to believe that our understanding of him would be complete if we simply recognized that 0he was the Eighteenth Century equivalent of President Gerald Ford.
Although English thought was nothing but a lot of oatmeal, Scotch Eggs, and warm beer, German philosophy was presented as spine-tingling expeditions on the Orient Express; haunted, Gothic castles where we might consort with Count Dracula and find fine vampire capes that would look so terribly elegant in an excursion to Greenwich Village; and a tale of mad, tortured, geniuses with mental insights that flashed and howled like thermo-nuclear explosions.
And so for four years I heard my professors scream and shout and intone with chilling reverence (or in the case of the more patently psychotic, the bellicosity of a Storm Trooper): FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, MARTIN HEIDIGGER; FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, MARTIN HEIDIGGER; FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, MARTIN HEIDIGGER.
I was more interested in learning about those guys than most of my fellow students, and I would bet I read more of these two malcontents than at least 95 percent of my fellow students, but my reading of these figures was, in a word, not terribly thorough. I never read more than a couple of sentences of Heidegger without falling asleep, and I only read about thirty to forty percent of Nietzsche’s corpus of belligerent prose. With regard to my limited reading of Heidigger, I should say, in my self-defense, that although one of my classes was for all intents and purposes a hagiographic, hysterical Ode to Heidegger, in which we were advised of his Supreme Genius with unremitting frequency, the professor who taught the class never assigned or even suggested that we read any Heidigger. It wasn’t until some years after my graduation that I learned that Hiedigger worked with the Nazis, had betrayed his Jewish mentor to the Third Reich, and that his philosophy is often thought of as a lot of verbose, gibberish.
To emphasize my disgust with Heidigger, and my heil Heidegger education, I have not bothered to check the spelling of his name, sometimes letting the I precede the E, and at other times letting the E get top billing. and in this cacophony of conflicting spellings I am presenting Germany as I came to see it: An eternally disputatious people, split between Catholics and Protestants, those under the yoke of Rome and those Germans North of Rome’s reign, a nation that only finds unity when it castigates the other, a nation that wasn’t united until it savored blood lust against France in 1870 and then reached its apotheosis of orgiastic aggression in the Second World War.
This Heil-Heidigger class, incidentally, was supposed to teach its students what existentialism meant. I don’t think I will be disparaging the students too much when I say that I strongly doubt that on the day the course came to its merciful close not one of the students, myself excepted, were capable of providing a meaningful, coherent, definition of existentialism.
But we weren’t really taught ideas, let alone expected to be able to analyze ideas. Rather, we were encouraged to make associations: To know that existentialism was very Left Bank, very espresso, very left wing, often homosexual, outstandingly irreverent, famously chic and movingly artistic. Our associative education, which never told us what things were but only told us what they were like, reached the zenith of inanity with one student who said that all things French were “sort of homosexual.” He said this not in disparagement, not in awe, and not in celebration; it was for him a statement of fact and an association he learned to make with the French, what with their svelte cigarettes, slippery syllables, flamboyance in Fashion and fickleness in foreign policy.
Although the philosophical nub was Germanic, the artistic nub was Western Europe about one hundred and twenty years ago. In terms of literature, culture and the arts, everything good came out of the age when Europe was obliviously on its way to self-demolition in World War One. The pacifism induced by Vietnam seemed to create in some of the more fervently anti-American and emphatically stupid types a kind of masochistic envy of what was inaccurately perceived as British and French timidity in World War One but correctly adjudged as British and French cowardice in the years leading up to World War Two. And so these ignorant students wistfully looked back on a world which did not know that its era of salons and celebrations was coming to an end and was about to be submerged in four years of trench warfare and then, recovering from trench warfare, maintained its perverseness and made sure that no obstacles were placed on the coming Holocaust. Accordingly, they adored, absolutely adored, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Toulouse Lautrec and every gay-appearing Frenchmen who, in their view, made his nation a wet anus greased-up for invasion by the Kaiser’s armies. (They were completely ignorant of the intense heroism of the French in World War One, of their losses at Verdun, of the taxi cabs marshaled to prevent the invasion of Paris.) These students were given to believe that there was something so elegant, so irresistibly elegant, about decadent Englishmen – they weren’t sure who they were, but they saw them all the time on dramas on Public Television and other pseudo-intellectual institutions – who drank tea, did queer things like go to flower shows, constructed a civilization of superfluous ceremonies, and went to France to lamely fall before the German ranks. (Personages and places such as Winston Churchill, “Chinese Gordon” and the 19th century fight for Khartoum were assiduously deleted from the curriculum.)
And of course, when we came to the inter-war years, the gospel according to Hoffenbraus University made it clear that Virginia Woolf was to art and thought what Jesus and Mary were to Christianity. I mean that place could not get enough Viriginia Woolf.
She was perfect for the seventies. She was perceived as a feminist. She was a lesbian. She was a snide, sarcastic bitch who castrated men for a living. What she wrote, or what she may have written, did not always seem to matter that much, and most of us never really read her. But boy did we hear about her. Somehow the whole of English Literature was thrust aside, every tome by Milton and Shakespeare summarily thrown into the trash can to make way for the finest, grandest, grand dame and all-around disagreeable Harridan in the English Language.
(Actually, years later I read Virginia Woolf, and her husband Leanard, and they were not at all what my professors and fellow students had imagined. But then again popular culture, and those debased parts of academia which resemble popular culture, projects its own imagination onto history and forgets the truth when it isn’t in sync with popular prejudices. For example, in a recent movie about Margaret Thatcher which starred Meryle Streep – I think it was entitled “The Iron Lady” -- Thatcher was portrayed as being a feminist. However, she was adamantly opposed to feminism, something she despised as much as the brawny, muscular coal miners whom she put out of work.)
In the course of genuflecting before Virginia Woolf, the Virgin Queen of English Letters, our professors made homage before Bloomsbury, that famous group of early Twentieth Century English writers and artists and over-fed fornicators who led such a celebrated role in lacerating the legacy of the English lion. And, in the course of our Professor’s lectures, or should I say meandering, non-sequential monologues, about Bloomsbury, some of us began to imagine that we too could, with the right pose, and the extra measure of arrogant elan, morph into rich, privileged irresponsible artists who defamed society, were applauded by throngs of adoring people in lecture and assembly halls, and took tea with the queen.
We were told we could become famous artists with a pose and a gesture. For example, I had a psychology professor who persistently “taught” about Creativity, speculated as to what made Creativity possible, and seemed to be, in her own life, nothing but a succession of dramatic poses. On many occasions, toward the end of a class, she would roll her eyes and, with great dramatic flourish, utter the following: “When the dinner party gets dull, and the guests are sated and stupid, haughtily raise your wine glass and inquire ‘Does the neurotic create in spite of his neurosis – and then her voice spiked in volume – or because of his neurosis.’” The preceding words are in quotes because this is pretty much exactly what she said --- and I heard her say this on at least 5 occasions.
And so we endeavored to become crazy and artistic.
Some of us wrote poetry in an effort to catapult ourselves into a latter day Bloomsbury of our imagination. I suppose we opted for poetry because poetry was the sort of thing that could be a one-page, or simply half a page, effort. Poems were short, they did not necessarily require sustained focus, organization or concentration, and given the prevailing preferences in poetry – no rhyming, no meter, no alliteration – we knew that poems were a quick ticket to stardom ala Alan Ginsburg.
So the girls wrote poems about hating men, and the guys wrote poems about hating the world, and the composition of our one-page manuscripts left plenty of time for doing acid, smoking reefer, popping pills and leading dissolute sex lives. After all, the creation of the proper artistic environment was essential to the creative process, and with that tenet serving as our point of reference, we did everything to excess, believing that each episode of drug-induced delirium, each hysterical tantrum in a shopping mall in which we would berate the common clerks for their vulgarity and bourgeois sensibility for not giving us a better price on a pair of very tight jeans, and each and every episode of gonococcal urethritis, vaginitis, and proctitis would further enhance and develop our artistic refinement.
We further believed that the muse could best be summoned if we strived for a diva effect, and so we routinely whipped ourselves into frenzies and fights and at times fisticuffs over all sorts of slights, sincerely believing that we were entitled to a special status of exaltation as true and tortured artists. The student who most excelled at majestic, mad explosions of rage was one Glenda Newbenstein. When she wasn’t percolating with waterfalls of wrath, she would announce that she was on the verge of anorexia nervosa, a malady which was a gallant testament to heightened sensitivities. She knew her sensitivity made her write the finest poetry, and when she failed to win the School’s Walkenstein award for creative writing, a much clamored about prize that the arty children salivated for, she came very close to murdering Professor Diana Schwartz, who served on the judging panel, by running her over with her sporty car. The matter was further complicated because her boyfriend, Steven Manicotti, had won the award, and so Glenda was convinced that her boyfriend had copulated with Professor Diana. Oh the intrigue. Oh the scandal. In this claustrophobic world of grandiose imaginations, it was a literary scandal and a sexual scandal that we were mighty proud of.
Of course, we did not all have money like Glenda. Although she spoke of art incessantly, and disparaged anything coarse and mercantile, she was made and empowered by everything coarse and mercantile. In other words, she was made by her Father, who could not give a damn for art and beauty and robbed people blind in the plumbing business.
But some of us did not come from homes of affluence, and we were getting ready for a fall. As we passed on from college, and as Carter was shoved aside by Ronald Reagan, economic imperatives were making themselves more insistently felt. The things that passed for status in the Seventies no longer did the trick, and the things that had once passed for status were not even in our reach, and we were profoundly incompetent to confront the working world.
We had spent four years imagining that we were beautifully tailored people in a Merchant Ivory film, believing that the only thing to study was art and philosophy and that the only art and philosophy to study came from a very thin sliver of human history. More importantly, Science and Technology, which had been despised as handmaidens of Capitalism and accomplices of the Vietnam War, had been completely ignored in our studies. And, unbeknownst to us, science and technology, all through the seventies, had been percolating with developments that would soon ignite the communications revolution, and other revolutions soon to come.
Actually, I knew a student, John Linguini, who was, supposedly, a major in the natural sciences at our school. In his senior year, he took a course entitled “Great Science Museums.” This required that he write three short essays, each about five pages, in which he explained how delighted he was by the three museums that he was taken to in the Great Big Yellow School Bus compliments of Hoffenbraus University.
John is a bright guy, but although he majored in the natural sciences, I knew more about biology and chemistry when I graduated from Junior High than he did after four years of majoring in the natural sciences. He does not know the nucleotide bases of DNA. He does not know what a ribosome is. He cannot explain the difference between ionic and covalent bonding. He thinks “absolute zero” is a synonym for flunking out. But he can describe the delightful items on the menus in America’s greatest science museums.
In addition to our ignorance in math and science, we were afflicted with an ignorance that less educated people rarely suffer from: We were oblivious to the fundamental dynamics of societal relationships, the tendency of that great horde of people who never suffered from an artistic education – landlords, automobile sellers, automobile repairmen, lawyers, plumbers, garment manufacturers, etc. – to try to rip you off every chance they get while your head is buried up your wonderfully artistic ass.
Really, we did not know how to do anything. In addition to lacking professional skills, we lacked basic, essential manual tasks that every person needs to know. We thought we were too good, too intelligent, and too refined to know how to fix our cars, prepare meals, grout a bathroom, roast a chicken, or become acquainted with some of the most basic financial functions (Some students could not grasp the meaning of, let alone accomplish, the simple task of balancing a checkbook.)
Although my professors savored being effete intellectuals, some of the philosophers they introduced me to were quite brilliant and highly anti intellectual. (Intelligent and intellectual mean very different things) Nourished by these philosophers, I changed the starter on my car and felt like such a cool dude and total he- man. That feeling of Grease monkey independence was to Virginia Woolf and her “moving, suicidal” depression what Chivas Regal is to cooking wine.
The other day I was reading about National Youth Administration camps for impoverished young people in the Depression, which took kids from farms where cotton sold at 9 cents a pound and worldly knowledge was scant, and taught them how to build cars, build houses and sew pillowcases. I wanted to go back in time and be 18 in 1936 and be rescued by the NYA – which of course educated thousands a whole lot less expensively than Hoffenbraus.
Quite frankly since Hoffenbraus rarely taught math and science, and only rarely and sporadically taught foreign languages, and taught philosophy and art in the aforementioned limited and prejudicial manner, why shouldn’t the school just declare the whole damn thing a failure and start all over and start doing something useful by becoming a vocational high school for high school graduates.
But in all fairness to Hoffenbraus, lots of colleges seem to be breeding grounds of ignorance and incompetence. Lots of college-educated people are utterly inept at corporeal things. When President Truman was advised that fifty top political prognosticators claimed that Dewey would beat him in the 1948 election, Truman gruffly said, “Not one of them has sense to plug up a rat hole.” (Incidentally, it really does help to know how to take care of rats, which I had in some of my sorrier tenements, and I was taught how to plug up a rat hole by a kind, elderly black lady. The trick is this: You must use more than plaster to seal the hole because rodents will gnaw through the plaster. You must insert ground glass or steel wool behind the plaster.)
The rich among us, such as Glenda Newbenstein, were protected by family money and as they progressed through their twenties they became more like their mercantile parents and learned the value of hoarding a dollar and lying about the merits of a product they wished to sell. John Stabatino, who majored in the natural sciences but had no more than a recreational-television-viewing understanding of science, was insulated from the Hoffenbraus effect by his macho, thoroughly uneducated Father who understood E.M. Forester when one of his characters said, “Art is for rich people, after dinner” and always instilled in John the absolute necessity of making as many bucks as possible.
I cannot speak for many of the other students as I have not heard from them in decades. However, I can say that I was poor, that I had no macho, uneducated Father with a common sense understanding of the world (Indeed I had no father. Only a mother, a brilliant, confused Mother, hopelessly enchanted by art), and, after graduation, I was, unfortunately, easy prey for the monied thieves I met when I went to gloriously and unabashedly artistic and animalistic New York.