In her review of Eve Pell's memoir, We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante, Megan Hustad describes how Pell, descendant of a rich and privileged family, traveled west and embraced radicalism in the 70s, hoping to escape the aristocratic failings of her flawed family back East. However, in her memoir, Pell comes to see that her turn to radicalism wasn't really a shift in perspective. Here's how Hustad describes Pell's reflection on her life:
The last part of the book offers a glancing overview of Pell’s immersion in early ’70s radical chic. She starts working with assorted anti-capitalists, joins the Prison Law Project and shares a brief kiss with Black Panther Field Marshal George Jackson in the visiting room at San Quentin. This account of Pell’s radicalism is made more compelling in that it didn’t require a fundamental shift of perspective—her world was not reimagined so much as flipped around. Pell at the revolution retained the strident elitism she was born to, only now black, brown and other oppressed peoples occupied the moral superior slots.
Pell eventually realizes that she’s in over her head when a brick thrown through her window lands on her son’s bed. Satisfaction would have to be found elsewhere, and likely after dispensing with self-righteousness and resentment. To her lasting credit, “We Used to Own the Bronx” is a graceful object lesson in how perspective is gained not all at once but by accretion, the reward of years of methodical observation.(from "Megan Hustad on Class in America," posted on Truthdig, Arts and Culture section, June 12, 2009--my emphasis)
I've underlined the phrases that jumped out at me when I read this review because they reflect some recent ponderings of my own. I have observed over the years the various ways that people--including me--attempt to transcend their past by seeking redemption in work or a new religion or travel or education or by getting the hell as far away from family as one can. Unfortunately, the attitudes that we've inherited or nourished go with us. Those attitudes just get placed on the new life we've adopted. In her case, Eve Pell transferred her family's sense of moral superiority to the new "family" she adopted: radicals of the 70s. These were the new "superior" groups to her.
I didn't grow up in a rich, privileged family--far from it--but I grew up in a very religious family and one with a fierce pride in family history. We were members of a country Southern Baptist church that my father and his mother helped found. The pastors of this church were often the yelling, hell-fire-and-damnation pastors one encounters in film and literature. Sin stuck like flypaper and contaminated everything we touched. In addition, I lived in a culture that practiced corporal punishment. Whippings with leather belts or even leather-braided bull whips accompanied the shame of our short-comings. A less sensitive child would have listened to those sermons, accepted her punishments, and would have been perhaps only superficially affected. I was too sensitive and took everything to heart. Self-righteousness and self-doubt doubled up in the seat of my saddle. Over the years, of course, my religious views changed. Eventually (over a long period of time), I abandoned most of them except the ethical ideals, espoused by many religions, which seem very true to me. I consider myself to be an agnostic Christian, if such a philosophical combination can actually make sense. But I don't think I quite abandoned the self-righteousness; that attitude was just transferred to other things: my political views, my views of personal responsibility, my views of parenting.
In the last few years, however, I've been working on un-saddling that sense of self-righteousness. It's hard--but a work in progress. And feeling resentment about the past just clouds the present. I can relate to Pell's conclusions about her own life:
In a wistful prologue, Pell admits to lingering mixed feelings about her background. “My relatives include bigots, humanitarians, eccentrics, athletes, and ordinary people, most of them infused with a strong sense that they are aristocrats. Like them, I love it that our family used to own a manor in colonial America.” But “while the family forms a sort of bulwark against time, a base of permanence in a world of flux, it exacts a terrible price.” (from "Megan Hustad on Class in America," Truthdig, June 12, 2009)
3 comments:
I understand what you're writing about----how it's possible that we can contain such contradictions within us (and be temporarily deluded by them)----and the term I've appropriated for this feeling in my own mind is "cognitive dissonance." Learning to push through this dissonance and find some thread of clarity is sometimes so difficult that it stops some who prefer to remain in their more comfortable not-knowing, but I think that our continuing to question (our motivations, our past actions, our present stances) is essential to breaking free of old shells we've formed over our sensitivities (that "accretion" you refer to----I wrote a poem using that term once; wonder where it is?), no matter our age.
Chris
But Hustad uses the word "accretion" not to reference the "shells" we build around our sensitive selves but to the self-knowledge that we gain over the years: that is, perspective is gained over time, through the accretion of observations.
And the other important point I wanted to make is that too often we think that we've given up the "old, bad" ways of doing things or viewing life when what we've done is just transfer our feelings of superiority and condescension to our new ways of thinking. So Eve Pell was describing in her memoir (according to her reviewer) that when once she felt superior because she was descended from a privileged family, she then felt superior because she thought she had abandoned that privileged life for a life of radicalism. The point is to question that feeling of condescension and superiority--it always puts us in an "us and them" position: "We" are better than "they," no matter who "they" are. And it prevents us from accepting or understanding our common humanity.
I understand exactly (though I didn't communicate well): these "understandings" become like shells, harder to crack, because we come to believe them "true" even though they are merely another layer added to our once-held "truths."
(By the way, I can't get to my gmail account----some error----and thus can't easily get to my blog. I hate computers sometimes.)
Post a Comment