A visit to New Jersey elicits thoughts of old Vienna, somehow.
Editor’s Note: Every week, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes an “Off the Shelf” column sharing casual observations on the books he’s reading and the passing scene.
Can you be nostalgic for New Jersey? A number of things are conspiring to make me think about the town I spent my childhood in: Bloomfield, N.J. And I find myself, somehow, missing it.
First it was last week’s podcast conversation with Jonah Goldberg on The Remnant about growing up in neighborhoods that had a decaying ethnic character. On top of that, a section of my book that I worked on earlier this week brings me back to Halcyon Park, and Bloomfield Avenue. Then it was just noticing a certain YouTube personality and occasional correspondent, whose speech patterns, preoccupations (luxury watches, cheap wines), and family life screams at me: North Jersey suburbs.
I miss them. Passing through the Garden State last year, my family had to stop for lunch. Why not hit the old hometown? We went to the State Street diner. Which is just a few steps from the spot at Nardiello Hall where I spent so many hours of childhood waiting to be picked up after school, in my uniform of grey slacks, a white shirt, and a plaid maroon tie. The ethnic and racial mix of the diner clientele immediately made me homesick. I don’t recognize any single individual, but I recognized the composite whole.
Of course, as I age somehow, my memory downgrades the small horrors. When we left Bloomfield in the early 1990s, we felt like we were escaping ahead of a major crime wave.
In my childhood, neighborhoods in Bloomfield could be segregated, even between different white ethnics. Halcyon Park was then mostly Italian-American, with a substantial Irish minority and a very tiny smattering of Poles. The racial divisions were policed, often cruelly, I later discovered. But the commercial spaces, and — to a lesser extent — my parochial school, brought people together, perhaps against the wishes of some parents. In my early childhood my generalized idea of America, built from my impressions from the classroom, was that it was a country founded by an Italian — Christopher Columbus — and that Italians ran the important bits like New York and New Jersey, with strong supporting roles for African Americans and the Irish. Filipinos were emerging, however, destined to become one third of the country. This hierarchy roughly reflected my childhood measurement of America’s institutions. There was the Gambino crime family, then the mayoralty of New York City, then the police unions, and the local grocers. Italians and Irish didn’t run the American South, however, where all white Protestants lived in extreme heat. The heat was appropriate, I thought; they were preparing their souls and bodies for the torments of hell on account of their racism and lack of access to the sacraments.
Of course, as I age somehow, my memory downgrades the small horrors. When we left Bloomfield in the early 1990s, we felt like we were escaping ahead of a major crime wave. My mother’s car was stolen from in front of our house several times. There was a shooting incident around the corner, and another domestic incident that ended in gunfire up the street. I projected New Jersey’s density onto the rest of the world, believing most of the Earth’s space was being devoured by concrete, except for a few spots in Maine, where we vacationed.
This week I’ve finally finished Stefan Zweig’s meditation on life in Vienna before the war, The World of Yesterday, as part of my quest to read several melancholy accounts of a peaceful liberal world order just before or between the cataclysm of war. It is easy to see why people loved this book. And I’ll quote liberally from some early passages below.
Vienna was, we know, an epicurean city; but what is culture, if not to wheedle from the coarse material of life, by art and love, its finest, its most delicate, its most subtle qualities? Gourmets in culinary matters, much occupied with a good wine, a dry fresh beer, sumptuous pastries and cakes, in this city people were also demanding with regard to more subtle delights. Making music, dancing, the theater, conversation, proper and urbane deportment, these were cultivated here as particular arts. It was not the military, nor the political, nor the commercial, that was predominant in the life of the individual and of the masses. . . . This fanaticism for art, and for the art of the theater in particular, touched all classes in Vienna. Vienna, through its century-old tradition, was itself a clearly ordered, and — as I once wrote — a wonderfully orchestrated city.
I think many readers would marvel at his descriptions of the change of relations between the sexes and morals by the late 1930s and early 1940s. His admiration for the openness and honesty of the new morality makes you wonder temporarily if he is writing from the early 1970s. But you must give him his due, when he writes about the odd sexual mores of Vienna at the turn of the century, where prostitution flourished — partly regulated by the state — even as what we would now think of as normal relations with the opposite sex were socially forbidden.
Children and even young people are at first inclined to adapt themselves respectfully to the laws of their surroundings. But they submit to the conventions demanded of them only so long as they see that these are honestly observed by everyone else. A single untruthfulness on the part of teachers or parents inevitably leads a young person to regard his entire surroundings with a suspicious and therefore a sharper eye. It did not take us long to discover that all those authorities in whom we had previously confided — school, family, and public morals — manifested an astonishing insincerity in this matter of sex. But what is more, they also demanded secrecy and reserve from us in this connection.
And I particularly like his description of the stultifying and somewhat rushed education he and other members of his class received, in five languages and in culture.
The world about and above us, which directed all its thoughts only to the fetish of security, did not like youth; or rather it constantly mistrusted it. Proud of its systematic “progress” and of its order, bourgeois society proclaimed moderation and leisure in all forms of life as the only effective virtues of man; all hasty efforts to advance ourselves were to be avoided. Austria was an old State, dominated by an aged Emperor, ruled by old Ministers, a State without ambition, which hoped to preserve itself unharmed in the European domain solely by opposing all radical changes.
After much admiring of the newer world that young people were bringing into being, he does put forward this disquieting passage.
True, we had more freedom in the political sense than the present generation, which is compelled to submit to military service, compulsory labor, and in many countries to mass ideologies, and in almost all countries is helplessly delivered up to the arbitrary power of world politics. We were able to devote ourselves to our art and to our intellectual inclinations, and we were able to mold our private existence with more individual personality. We could live a more cosmopolitan life and the whole world stood open to us. We could travel without a passport and without a permit wherever we pleased. No one questioned us as to our beliefs, as to our origin, race, or religion. I do not deny that we had immeasurably more individual freedom and we not only cherished it but made use of it as well. But as Friedrich Hebbel once so aptly said: “Now we lack the wine, now we lack the cup.” One and the same generation is rarely granted both. If morality gives man freedom, then the State confines him. If the State permits him freedom, then morality attempts to enslave him.
Zweig’s heart is internationalist, and the fracture of Europe’s wars was a terrible burden on him, he writes. “The more truly European someone’s way of life was in Europe, the harder he was hit by the fist shattering the continent.” I think my sort too quickly spits on the cosmopolitan life, which has real charms and even virtues. And Zweig’s own reflections do tend to quiet the zeal I feel welling up in me occasionally, as the European Union and other liberal-internationalist institutions run into trouble, even trouble I believe they have richly merited.
He was moved by the Zionism of his friend Theodore Herzl, but ultimately he detested it.
At first Herzl could rightly feel himself misunderstood — Vienna, where he thought himself most secure because he had been beloved there for so many years, not only deserted him but even laughed at him. But then the answer roared suddenly back with such force and such ecstasy that he was almost frightened to see how mighty a movement, already growing beyond his control, he had brought into being with his few dozen pages. True, it did not come from the well-situated, comfortable bourgeois Jews of the West but from the gigantic masses of the East, from the Galician, the Polish, the Russian proletariat of the ghetto. Without realizing it, Herzl with his pamphlet had brought to flame the glowing coal of Judaism, long smoldering in the ashes, the thousand-year-old messianic dream, confirmed in the Holy Books, of the return to the Promised Land.
One recent critic called this book “an unusually eloquent and moving suicide note, albeit one more than 450 pages long.” Zweig left the European continent, despairing at the approach of World War II. Before it ended, he and his wife deliberately overdosed on drugs in Petrópolis, Brazil, after years of moving farther and farther away from the enormities of Europe. “I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth,” Zweig wrote at the end.
Zweig is a man who acutely observes his social scene, but I’m not sure what at bottom he really believes in, other than cultivating in himself an urbane Europeanism and then admiring the result.
If this book is a suicide note, I must endure the guilt of speaking ill of it and the author. But I often felt reading it that the Vienna he describes so beautifully could never have been much more than a mirage. Really, how can a city devote itself to epicureanism and expect itself to remain free for very long? Almost all sensitive souls, in their hearts, believe this is the ideal world, a world of nearly pure leisure and exploration. But a world like this is sustained by labor, and even struggle, the venturing of risk. The frightful conservatism of his education seems to reflect a culture that had lost its sense of purpose. So enthralled with itself, it produced curators rather than art.
Zweig is a man who acutely observes his social scene, but I’m not sure what at bottom he really believes in, other than cultivating in himself an urbane Europeanism and then admiring the result. And there is a part of me that sees this as his intellectual, and ultimately spiritual, weakness. I think it partly explains the vituperative assessment of Michael Hoffman, who spat on Zweig’s “machined” prose, saying that even reading Zweig’s actual suicide note “one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn’t mean it, his heart isn’t in it (not even in his suicide).” I go far enough down this road, but not all the way. There seems to be no cause for which Zweig would truly fight or risk his life. And so once his world ran out of the enjoyment by which he defined his life, he found no reason to continue living it.
What else this week? I turned in a chapter for my book, ahead of schedule. Spring arrived for a day, only to give us summer. But for now I’m back to my own misleading nostalgia. I miss the dense neighborhoods. I miss Calabrese Pizza. I miss the empty parking lots around abandoned machine shops where I could jump my Huffy. I wish my own children could have a childhood of trading baseball cards and collecting a few quarters to pick up a Bahama Mama Slush Puppy at the corner store.