Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World by William Alexander

Source of book: Borrowed from the library. 

 

I have a somewhat long list of friends who are readers (birds of a flock, etc…) and when one of them recommends a book, I definitely at least take a look. If that book happens to be nerdy, well, that’s my vibe, so I usually end up reading it. This is a great way to discover interesting books. 

 

This one was recommended by my friend Sara, who has been the source of a number of books over the years. And really, does anyone seriously think I could resist a book about tomatoes?

 

(Also, read her post about the book - she highlights some great quotes I left out.) 

 

I have thought about which foods I could (if medically indicated) give up most easily. Sugar is actually not particularly high - I can live without sweet stuff. But a harder sell would be coffee. And the hardest might be tomatoes. I love tomatoes - even the bland supermarket ones. 

 

Alexander’s book tells the history of the tomato, focusing on ten specific varieties (and thus episodes.) So, we start with (in the preface) the original New World tomatoes, and then see how they (rather literally) took over the entire world. The Italian “Pomodoro,” which the Medici family made mainstream. The possibly fictional Robert Johnson who is credited with proving to Americans that tomatoes weren’t poisonous. The San Marzano - the first mainstream canned tomato. The Margarita pizza, another legend that is probably not true. Mr. Heinz and the development of modern ketchup - which involves some fun legal and regulatory shenanigans. That time Mussolini tried to ban pasta (and also the story of how tomatoes finally came to be put on top of pasta - that’s a relatively modern development.) The first hybrid tomato, Big Boy. The development of the tasteless supermarket tomato. The resurgence of heirloom varieties. And finally, the modern trend of greenhouse hydroponic tomatoes. 

 

It’s fun stuff. 

 

Alexander also has a breezy, humorous style of writing. This is less toward the science side of the PopSci spectrum, and more toward the popular side. Don’t expect extensive footnotes or scholarly sources. This is fun stuff, not something you would cite in your school essay. 

 

This is not a bad thing. It’s not like the author is just making stuff up. He does his research, and then interviews sources. But this book isn’t here to carefully lay out facts. Rather, it is to tell stories, and inform along the way. I found it quite fun. 

 

The preface is illustrative of the style. After a quick and dirty history of the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortes, he flips the script.

 

Within fourteen months, this once-thriving civilization would be in ruins, having fallen victim to Spanish aggression, germs, and their insatiable lust for silver and gold. But the true treasure of Mexico, one that in the end would have an impact comparable to that of all the precious metals in the New World, would soon find its way on a ship to Europe, to forever change the course of history. 

I’m speaking, of course, of the tomato. 

 

Early in the book, the author visits what is purported to be the scene of the unveiling of a basket of tomatoes at the Palazzo Vecchio. Which is now a government office. He is surprised to see such a historical building in use this way. But, as the secretary who guides him notes: “If we kept all the historic buildings as they were, we would have no place to live and work. This is Italy.” 

 

Speaking of history, the author notes that before the Spanish, Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) was arguably “the largest, cleanest, and most prosperous city in the world.” It is easy to forget that there was an incredible civilization in the Americas, before disease and violence nearly wiped it out. 

 

Also interesting history is the story of Bernardo de Sahagun, a monk who is considered one of the first anthropologists. Included in his periodic reports was clear evidence of the edibility (and deliciousness) of tomatoes. However, these were suppressed by the Catholic Church, presumably, as the author puts it, because Bernardinoo was “a tad too sympathetic toward the heathens whom Bernardino had been sent over to convert to Western religion and culture.” 

 

I found the chapter on pizza to be particularly fascinating. While pizza originated in Italy, the version that has taken over the world is a distinctly American creation - created by Italian immigrants who adapted the food to a new culture and place. 

 

A disconcerting fact in this chapter is that a 1989 study showed that pizza delivery drivers had a death rate on par with coal miners, and twice as high as roofers. Yikes. 

 

Those of us of a certain age likely remember Domino’s 30 minute promise, and also “the Noid.” Anyone remember this? 

 

Well, it turns out that a paranoid schizophrenic named Kenneth Lamar Noid took this personally, and took a franchise hostage. Fortunately, after making the guy a pizza, the employees escaped while he ate it. A very strange episode. 

 

As a lawyer (and one interested in the history of government regulation - which has been an overwhelmingly positive force, by the way) I found the history of ketchup to be noteworthy. 

 

The United States has always had a weird anti-intellectual, anti-science bent, and this is how we ended up in the 1880s with literally zero regulation at the federal regulation over food safety. Even a half century later - before the New Deal - all kinds of shit could (and did) end up in food. Plaster. Formaldehyde. Arsenic. Lead. Cocaine and heroin. Sawdust. And a bunch of other bad stuff. 

 

It is easy to forget this, in our own day when food is generally regulated, inspected, and therefore unlikely to kill you. (At least in the short term.) The American Right, unfortunately, is hell-bent on eliminating these crucial regulations, thus enabling greater corporate profit at the expense of the lives of ordinary citizens. 

 

Also in this chapter: a trivia fact to annoy your friends and family with. Did you know that the reason ketchup is so hard to get out of the bottle is that it is a non-Newtonian fluid? Science!

 

And that brings us to Mussolini. 

 

Italians had tolerated Mussolini’s thuggish Blackshirts, the violent suppression of labor unions, and the murder of dissidents. But this time the fascists had gone too far. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a founding member of the Fascist Party who’d helped boost Mussolini into power eight years earlier, had published a manifesto in late 1930 that called for “the abolition of pasta, the absurd Italian gastronomic religion,” claiming it left Italians heavy, shapeless, and (lest anyone miss the point) unprepared for war.

 

At issue was a brew of factors that might sound familiar today. Pasta required wheat, and Italy imported most of its wheat from northern countries. What Italy grew a lot of was rice, and switching to rice would mean eating local. 

 

But there was more to it than that. 

 

Mussolini viewed food as a tool to control the immediate needs of the population and to promote a fascist agenda of self-dependency, austerity, and increased productivity and reproductivity (to replace all the Italians who’d emigrated in the previous decades). 

 

Not only did Italians (particularly those of the south) object to this forced change in diet, attempts to grow wheat in unsuitable places displaced cash crops like tomatoes and caused exports to fall. 

 

Oh, and they ended up with huge labor shortages both because of immigrant labor drying up, but also because of Mussolini’s policy of limiting women in the workplace. Hey, does that sound familiar these days? J.D. Vance, cough, cough…

 

The book also touches on SpagettiOs. I haven’t eaten those in many many years. (And the ravioli was better. Just saying.) My favorite line is this one, regarding the year-long study that was done that settled on the “O” as the shape of pasta “children could earth without making a mess.” Ha ha, that’s a good one! 

 

(They might’ve saved themselves a lot of time and money had they first sat down to a breakfast of Cheerios with their kids.) 

 

That’s the last of the lines I wrote down, but I should note that there are many other enlightening passages. I found the process of attempting to develop antibiotic-resistant tomato genes (it’s a long story, and less lurid than the press made it out to be) quite interesting, as well as the question of carbon dioxide costs of field tomatoes versus greenhouse tomatoes. (It’s….complicated.) 

 

This book was a great light (but not fluffy) read, both informative and humorous. I note that the author has written another book about tomatoes. Hmm. Maybe he has a thing for them too…

 

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Source of book: borrowed from the library

 

The last year or so, a couple of online friends and I have formed an informal book club, where we read agreed upon books as schedules permit. Say what you like about all the downsides of social media and the internet, but I have also found a number of friends that way - several of which I have now met in person. That applies to one of the members of this club. After a decade of online friendship, we were able to meet this last spring, and it was a real pleasure. 

 

I never saw the movie version of Fight Club. I’m not much of a movie watcher (although I do enjoy them when I do), and honestly, nothing about the movie appealed to me. 

 

Not only that, but a certain generation of young men - a certain type - fawned all over the movie. It reminded me a lot of how certain kinds of teen girls read Wuthering Heights and think it is a romantic love story. 

 

I agreed to read the book because my friend had read it and recommended it as better than the movie (books usually are) and because it fit with an ongoing discussion we have been having about toxic masculinity. 

 

Having read it now, I think the Wuthering Heights comparison is even more apt. To admire and want to adopt the “fight club” ethos is to miss the point of the book, I think. 

 

Chuck Palahniuk has had a rather interesting life. Before his writing career took off, he had a blue collar upbringing and a blue collar job as a diesel mechanic. In fact, one might say that his first writing experience was with repair manuals he wrote for Freightliner. 

 

While working for Freightliner, he met his partner, who he has been with for over 30 years. Weirdly (although possibly understandably), Palahniuk hid that he was gay for years, referring to his partner as his “wife” in interviews. Subsequent inverviews show him pretty defensive about it; honestly his interviews reveal him to have a chip on his shoulder and a paranoia streak. 

 

In light of the book, that is kind of interesting. There is some degree of biographical writing perhaps. 

 

I am not sure how much of the plot to even include here. I knew some of it before I read the book, just from listening to other people and seeing the trailers in theaters and on TV. It probably can’t be spoiled at this point, except for the few people who studiously avoid popular culture. 

 

The idea of “fighting as a means of radical psychotherapy” is practically a meme in our culture now, as is the idea of “fighting one’s self” in a very literal sense. 

 

Palahniuk describes his style as “transgressive fiction” - and it definitely does run roughshod over taboo and social niceties. He isn’t the first, to say the least. One could consider “picaresques” of the 18th Century to be early examples. Such a genre is of course firmly rooted in the culture of its time - taboos change. 

 

I haven’t really decided how I feel about the book. It certainly taps into a certain kind of toxic masculinity, a sense of male frustration about living in a consumerist society. Which I totally get. I’m not a big fan either, although I prefer to take my frustrations out making music or walking up mountains. 

 

Another factor in why I didn’t find the book to resonate personally is that I was raised with a far healthier sense of masculinity than this book describes. The narrator first seeks emotional connection in attending deadly diseases support groups (perhaps inspired by the author’s volunteer work transporting members of these groups), and then in the fights at Fight Club. 

 

My own upbringing allowed for a good degree of emotions for men and boys. I am grateful to my parents for that part of my upbringing. They wanted me to be healthier emotionally than they were, and I believe they succeeded to a significant extent. 

 

(There were really only two issues I think that undermined this otherwise good approach my parents took. First, expressing negative emotions about them - and especially my sister - was off limits. So I ended up acting out rather than speaking out. Indeed, it took me into my 30s before I was able to actually express to them my negative feelings about their behavior - and they did not take it well. Second, after we got involved with Bill Gothard’s cult, expressing negative emotions was increasingly viewed as “rebellion.” You can guess all that flowed from that.)

 

Because of this upbringing, particularly before our cult days, I have been able to form emotionally close relationships with people - and not just my wife. I have friends, male and female, who I am able to be vulnerable, and I am glad of that. One could say that I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, at least once I get to know someone. 

 

Before American Evangelicalism became a Trump Cult, I felt that church was also a place where I could get that intimacy that all of us, male or female, need. I miss that, but have worked to expand my friendship circles and find my tribe in other ways. 

 

To me, the point of the book isn’t that having fight clubs is a good thing, or that manly men need to engage in ritual violence to find emotional connection, or any of that rot. Rather, it is that, without healthy ways of finding emotional outlet and intimacy, humans act out in violent and antisocial ways. And, as a corollary, consumerism is no substitute for connection, as the protagonist discovers. 

 

While I think the book has its flaws and its strengths, I can see how it would be popular with (and misunderstood by) a certain kind of surface reader. The style is deliberately simple, with short sentences and repeated mantras. I can all too easily be read as an uncritical paean to violent toxic masculinity - just like people read the Bible and adopt all of the worst of what it depicts. But to really understand Fight Club, you have to look at what is actually happening: the slow destruction of the narrator’s psyche as he self-medicates with violence against himself, others, and society - it is an analogue to heroin, with its highs, lows, withdrawal effects, and ultimate self-destruction. 

 

There are a few lines I jotted down as being worth quoting. 

 

For example, this description of the support groups. 

 

Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of their throats. 

 

This is an obvious parallel to the final (and opening) scene in the book, with the narrator on top of a skyscraper with a gun in his mouth. 

 

Much later in the book, he expands on what he likes about the groups. 

 

This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention. 

If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.

You had their full attention.

People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. 

And when they spoke, they weren’t telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before. 

 

It is sad to require the perception of dying to get this kind of intimacy. This is what friendship - even more than marriage - is for. 

 

At the groups, he meets another “tourist” (one who is faking being sick) named Marla. Who is every bit as mentally unhealthy as he is. They recognize each other, but agree not to squeal - it is a mutually assured destruction situation. 

 

There is another scene early in the book, that makes no sense until far later. The narrator’s apartment blows up, and his weirdly dissociated description of it is haunting. 

 

Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the battery on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living-room set and personal effects blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo, only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the cliffside of the building. 

These things happen. 

 

While I disagree with the narrator’s solution to consumerism, I do find his diagnosis of the problem to be plausible. And this line, coming after a detailed, name-dropping description of his carefully curated crap is excellent. 

 

And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

 

And then there is more detailed description. 

 

Oh, not my refrigerator. I’d collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers. 

 

That’s only a slight exaggeration of my own pantry. Sigh. I feel seen. At least I know how to cook with them. 

 

After this destruction, he ends up crashing at the house of the anti-hero, Tyler Durden. (I won’t spoil the rest of the story about this.) Who lives in a decidedly different place. 

 

This is the perfect house for dealing drugs. There are no neighbors. There’s nothing else on Paper Street except for warehouses and the pulp mill. The fart smell of steam from the paper mill, and the hamster cage smell of wood chips in orange pyramids around the mill. This is the perfect house for dealing drugs because a bah-zillion trucks drive down Paper Street everyday, but at night, Tyler and I are alone for a half mile in every direction. 

 

The final line I want to feature is much more philosophical - perhaps even theological. It is part of a recurring conversation about transgression and meaning. This particular moment comes out of another recurring conversation, about how we tend to think that God is like our human father. 

 

(This is one important thing I understand about my mother, is that her desperate need to make God love her is 100 percent an extension of her failure to get her father to love her.) 

 

Tyler is perhaps the most nihilistic of the characters, but his perspective is certainly interesting. 

 

“What you have to consider,” he says, “is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.”

How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than his indifference. 

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

 

This may be the core of the book, and the best explanation for the actions of its characters. Everyone wants to matter. Everyone needs and craves connection. A negative connection is better than nothing at all. Being bloodied by another man is more satisfying than sleepwaking through life. Blowing shit up and earning the wrath of society is more satisfying than society not caring about you at all. Better to be evil than indifferent. 

 

It’s not my personal preference for philosophy, but then again, I believe I matter to at least a few other people, and that my life has meaning, even if I have to create it. 

 

Fight Club was definitely an interesting book. I’m not sure I am eager to read more by the author, but I am glad I read this one. 

 

***

 

Weird bonus fact: one of our otherbook club’s members works at a local library, and she says that Palahniuk’s books are the most stolen from the library. Tyler Durden would probably approve, I guess. But seriously? It’s not like they are that difficult to buy. 

 

The Problem of Louis Agassiz

Last weekend, a friend and I took a quick backpack trip up Bishop Creek to Bishop Pass and back. It was a first for me with this trail, although I have been up the canyon immediately to the south (well, east actually, but south down the range.) The Sierra Nevada are my happy place, and I was thrilled to do an east Sierra hike for the first time in years. 

 

 The view north from Bishop Pass. Saddlerock Lake is the big one in the rear. 

Mt. Goode is at far left.

Bishop pass is located in a relatively low spot in the Sierra crest - at 11,792 feet. (As I said, relatively low.) It is situated between two giant mountains. Mt. Goode (13,085) to the west, and Mt. Agassiz (13,893) to the east. And those are not as tall as the several 14,000+ foot mountains just southeast of Agassiz. 

 Mt. Agassiz from Bishop Pass

Aperture Peak is behind and to the left.

 

This hike was in part inspired by me and my friend’s mutual love of Kim Stanley Robinson’s book, The High Sierra. In that delightful collection of random yet connected episodes and essays are a series of writings about the names in the Sierra. The good, the bad, and the ugly. 

 

The good ones really are great - one of the peaks this hike went past is called “Cloudripper” for example. The bad ones are mostly boring - how many “Gem Lakes” do you really need? 

 

But the ugly ones are named after people who are problematic in some way. 

 

Locally, the worst of these is Breckenridge Mountain (I have hiked on its slopes many times), which is named after Confederate traitor John Breckinridge (yes, the name is misspelled) and is listed as a remaining Confederate monument. I very much hope that this is renamed as part of California’s push to remove racial slurs and monuments to horrid people from its official records. I propose naming it after local writer, teacher, and conservationist Ardis Walker. 

 

Part of the problem with these names is that they are often people who never saw the Sierra, or never had any significant connection to it. They were just famous or rich fucks and thus get their names on things. Think about naming a mountain after the Elongated Muskmelon, for example. Just gross. 

 

Some of the names, though, are more complicated. 

 

Louis Agassiz is definitely one of these. 

 

***

 

Back when I was a kid, our family had a bunch of “christian” biographies for kids, the Sower series. While they were generally interesting to me, I later realized that they were definitely hagiographies, not accurate and nuanced biographies. The point was to highlight “heroes who were Christians!” for kids. 

 

What was missing fell into two categories. First, a lot of these Christians weren’t exactly the Evangelical sort that the biographies strongly implied. Sir Isaac Newton comes to mind as one with some rather unusual religious views. I kind of get this - kids probably don’t understand all the theological nuance, and since the point of the books was in part to insist that one could be both a Christian and believe in science, I can understand the decision. 

 

The other, though, is indefensible. 

 

Humans are complex and flawed. All of us. Leaving the flaws out of a biography is deeply problematic for various reasons. Making god-like heroes of the great people of the past tends to lead to disillusionment when the feet of clay are discovered. 

 

But more than that, the flaws are often the most important thing to know about a person, because those flaws often remain hugely influential long after the person passes. 

 

Louis Agassiz perhaps illustrates this more than any other person. 

 

***

 

First, the good. Agassiz was a hugely important scientist, and is responsible for a lot of what we now know about geological time. His first work alone, on fossil fishes, greatly expanded our knowledge of evolutionary history, and would have established his legacy.

 

It is his second project that made his fame, however. As a Swiss citizen, he grew up around glaciers and mountains. While he did not come up with the idea of an ice age - that was two Frenchmen of his era - he was the one who carefully examined and documented evidence of glaciation around the world, and put together the evidence of past ice ages. 

 

He spent his later life teaching, and the list of students is a “who’s who” of scientists and conservationists of the next generation. (And also William James.) 

 

So, that’s the good. If we just look at his accomplishments, then he is deserving of a peak in his honor, in California’s most glaciated region. 

 

Unfortunately, he also has a profoundly negative aspect of his legacy, one which is completely ignored in the Sower biography. 

 

Agassiz was a proponent of “scientific racism” - the belief that humans are essentially different species separated by skin color. This was very popular in the 19th Century, and remains unfortunately popular today in right wing circles. (I won’t link it, but you still see people citing the thoroughly discredited 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which literally argues that black people are genetically inferior and intelligent, and thus attempting to better their lives and eliminate systemic racism is futile.) 

 

Since Agassiz was a Christian, and believed that humans were specially created (unlike Darwin, who argued that we evolved, and that all humans were the same species regardless of pigment), he decided that the different races were actually created separately. God made black people, white people, “red” people (indigenous Americans), and “yellow” people (south and east Asians) as separate species. And no bonus points for guessing which ones he considered the most intelligent and advanced. 

 

After Agassiz, some of his students embraced evolution, and decided that the real difference between the races was the level of evolution. Black people were still closely related to apes, and white people were the most highly evolved. That’s the “scientific racism” argument in a nutshell. 

 

Both Agassiz’ original idea of separate species and the later evolutionary theory were used to justify all kinds of injustice, from slavery to Jim Crow. And now, as an argument why government should favor the white “haves” and let the black and brown “have nots” starve. 

 

The rebuttal to this disproven idea is beyond the scope of this post, but I encourage reading Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You by Agustin Fuentes for an excellent rebuttal. 

 

***

 

You can see the problem though. Agassiz was both a giant in the history of science AND responsible for an evil doctrine that has caused untold suffering not merely in the United States but around the world. 

 

That’s a problematic legacy, but also emblematic of the complexity of humanity. All of our heroes have flaws. 

 

Kim Stanley Robinson argues that Agassiz should be replaced, but that Muir (who has his own issues) should stay. I agree on the second - no one figure is more important to the Sierra Nevada and its preservation as wilderness as Muir - but have mixed feelings on the second. 

 

While I thoroughly loathe “scientific racism” as an idea and justification for injustice, I also feel that Agassiz is too important to be “canceled” in that way. Particularly given his importance in the field of glaciation and geological history. 

 

Breckinridge, on the other hand….dude probably never even visited California and is famous only because he turned traitor in the service of expanding enslavement around the world. Cancel and replace him already. 

 Our route from South Lake to the pass.

Drag and Gender as a Performance

I have been intending to write this post since seeing La Cage aux Folles at a local theater, which sparked a thought about how much of what we think of as “gender” is really just a performance. 

 

The central idea of that musical is a cabaret with drag performers. The owners are a gay couple, one of which is the queen of all the drag queens. (Performed with aplomb by local theater veteran and co-owner of Ovation Theatre, Jason McClain.) 

 

Drag itself is a performance, of course, and differs from reality. It isn’t really about cross dressing, for example, and certainly isn’t an expression of being transgender. As a cishet guy, I am probably ill qualified to parse the difference between drag as a queer art and as a mainstream art form - and I have been informed there is a difference. But I do think that it can shed some light on gender as a performance, which affects all of us as humans. 

 

The bottom line is this:

 

Gender is a performance, just like drag, and has virtually nothing to do with biology.

 

In other words, we as humans do a lot of social signaling with gender performances. The specifics of the signals vary greatly from culture to culture, change over time, and take on meanings that have zero connection to the inherent meaning of the signals. 

 

Just one example: pink used to be a “male” color as recently as 150 years ago, and blue was a “female” color. Clearly that has changed. And there is nothing inherently “masculine” about a particular wavelength of light and the color that our eyes perceive from that wavelength. 

 

Everything about this is just cultural signaling. 

 

What drag does is switch the signals, with men adopting an exaggerated set of “female” social signals, and women doing the opposite. 

 

As art, this makes sense: art both reflects and critiques reality, and always has. By switching the signals, drag creates frisson, discomfort, and asks us to question our assumptions about what male and female actually are. 

 

The thing is, male and female humans are far more alike than they are different, and, with very few exceptions, these “differences” are at the statistical level, rather than the individual one. For example, males are statistically taller than females, but a great many females are taller than a great many males. (Me included: I’m 5’7”, so about 15% of US women are taller than me. That’s about 19 million women in this country who are taller than me.) 

 

While height is fairly strongly associated statistically with sex, other traits have virtually zero correlation. For example, intelligence, leadership ability, emotionality. Despite this, our social beliefs assign traits along gendered lines, leading to a general cultural belief that men are better than women in roles that come with higher wages and social status. (Including the fact that we still haven’t had a female president.) 

 

Back to drag. 

 

First, I want to mention an observation by Carson McCullers, who probably would identify as non-binary now. Humans before puberty, and in old age, look pretty much the same, whether male, female, or intersex. 

 

If you were to give a boy and a girl the same haircut, and dress them in the same clothes, they would look alike. And, if you raised them the same, they would largely act the same. (As the father of female children who could mix it up and get dirty with the best of the boys, I know this to be true.) The “differences” we see are at most at the statistical level, and, more likely, entirely due to socialization, not inherent differences. 

 

Likewise, shave beard and hair off an old woman and an old man and dress them in baggy clothes, and it would be harder than you think to tell them apart. 

 

What we are left with is a handful of secondary sex characteristics. Some of those are also merely statistical. Even as a teen, I had more hips than some girls. Some women have flatter chests than some men. (Breast reduction surgery is performed most on cisgender males, by the way.) Some men struggle to grow facial hair, while some women grow it. My wife’s voice is essentially in the same range as mine. The list goes on. 

 

Thus, it is actually fairly easy to swap the signals. Makeup is mostly associated with femininity in our culture, so put some on. Get a wig. Wear a dress. And, more than anything, adopt the mannerisms that are coded as “female” in our culture. Exaggerate them, and you have a drag queen. That’s really all there is to it. 

Shawn Rader as Georges Seurat in

Sundays in the Park With George

 

Shawn Rader (center top) - 

what a difference a little makeup makes

Because we humans are masters of picking up tiny differences, some people are better able to “pass” when performing. A tall man looks less like a woman to us, for example. (Something that causes problems for cisgender women who tend to be tall. Hate and bigotry toward transgender women often spills over into hostility toward any woman who doesn’t look “feminine” enough.) So the degree of “passing” will vary. 

 

Drag is about exaggeration, over-signalling, not passing, although some performers definitely are incredible at the illusion. And it is the illusion that is the source of discomfort for certain people. 

 

Because drag reveals that most of what we culturally experience as gender is mere artifice, mere signaling, it also invites us to consider what else in our culture is mere artifice, mere signaling. Or perhaps mere prejudice and a desire to keep people “in their lane.”

 

If femininity is a performance, then perhaps not all women prefer to be mothers, or love cooking and cleaning, or are okay with lower salaries. If masculinity is a performance, then perhaps men are not “naturally” unavailable emotionally, or naturally violent. 

 

I have been thinking about why it is that right wingers are currently losing their ever-loving shit over drag queens. 

 

Surely it isn’t an objection to acting performances generally. I mean, Jim Caviezel is not literally Jesus Christ, and people still went and saw that movie. And since right wingers at least claim to like Shakespeare, one has to assume that they are okay with all of his gender bending (to say nothing of the fact that males played all the female roles in Shakespeare’s day.) 

 

Although I am sure it is a reaction to the LGBTQ rights movement, and drag queens are seen as an easy target, I’m not even sure it is entirely that. Not all drag performers are gay, after all. (Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy were and are heterosexual, as far as I can tell, and their drag performances on the big screen are well known.) 

 

I think, rather, that it is because drag queens blur the distinction between genders, and invite that questioning of cultural gender roles and gender essentialism that is the issue. Right now, we are in an age of reactionism. The right wing wishes to undo the social progress of the past 100 years, and put women and minorities firmly back in their place, and LGBTQ people firmly back in the closet. 

 

Drag queens, by revealing that gender is a performance, open the possibility that “traditional” (aka Victorian middle class white) gender roles are not the only way to “be a man” or “be a woman.” They suggest that there are many ways to live our lives. 

 

And that is scaring the ever-loving shit out of right wingers. 

 

The story of my own family is illustrative of this. 

 

My wife is, by any reasonable definition, a cisgender woman. She has literally given birth to five children. She dresses in a way that our culture codes as feminine. She has longer hair than mine. She wears makeup most of the time. Within the framework of our mainstream culture here in 21st Century America, she socially signals her femininity just fine as far as appearances go. 

 

However, she doesn’t fit with the behavioral stereotypes of our culture. When we were preparing for marriage, we got some premarital counseling with an MFT, who gave us a series of personality tests. This was quite fun to do together, honestly, and also gave us important insights into each other that have been highly beneficial in our marriage. (I highly recommend getting secular premarital counseling before marriage or even cohabiting. It really does help with relationship skills.) 

 

One of those tests involved personality traits that code as masculine or feminine in our culture. 

 

I graded out fairly close to evenly balanced between masculine and feminine - I have traits that our society sees as one or the other. 

 

My wife graded out as 90% masculine. 

 

Yep, I’m very much the “girl” in our relationship. 

 

Understanding these traits helped us understand each other. And also understand that these were cultural interpretations, not inherent gendered traits. (In fact, many of my “feminine” traits would have been considered “masculine” at other times in history - for all their faults, the Victorians valued emotion in men.) 

 

What this does mean, however, is that my wife’s confidence, assertiveness, lack of manipulation and game-playing can get her labeled certain ways in our culture. Those traits are more valued in women than they used to be, but we have a long way to go still. They do, however, make her a good boss, which is why once the kids could handle her working day shift, she moved to management. (And she was definitely actively recruited.) 

 

Unfortunately, these same traits did not endear her to my mother, who has strong opinions about how women should perform “femininity.” These are also tied up with fundamentalist authoritarian religion for her, so failure to do things her way is also seen as defying God Almighty. 

 

My wife continued to work after the kids were born. We split breadwinning and childcare more equally. I took on a good bit of the cooking duties (at least until the kids were able to assist - now we each cook one day out of the week). Neither of us loves housework, so our house isn’t particularly spotless. My wife refused to see her body as a dirty source of (male) sin, and wore normal, flattering clothes. She didn’t spend her time as a mother freaking out about our kids experiencing pop culture of their generation. She didn’t act submissive, but like anyone’s equal. And, she advocated for herself openly, without resorting to manipulation and emotional blackmail (the way women of a certain generation were taught to do.) And, perhaps most unforgivable of all, she told my mom “no.” 

 

I really makes me sad that my mom chose to destroy a relationship over gender performance, but that’s exactly what happened. Unfortunately, when you believe you know the mind of God, your own cultural preferences become a divine mandate. And when you love your cultural preferences more than you love a child, you pick needless and senseless fights. 

 

We are also seeing this play out in our nation, with the right wing entirely sure that women are performing gender incorrectly, and need to get back to popping out [white] babies, staying in abusive marriages, and after they can no longer give birth, being unpaid child care workers. Certainly they shouldn’t be pursuing careers - women’s value is entirely tied up in their ability to make more humans. I have never before in my life seen this much vitriol directed at childless women. 

 

That same hatred toward women who won’t (or can’t) reproduce is behind the drag queen panic. Even by existing, both assert that femininity isn’t limited to one performance, or one system of one’s body. That there are many ways of living and of being a man or a woman (or neither.) And as a corollary, that women should be valued as humans, not as mere reproducers. 

 

So, get out and see a drag performance. Maybe go to one of those Drag Queen Story Hours if you have one in your area. Enjoy the artistry, the exaggeration. Relish those feelings of discomfort - that’s the social indoctrination you have had all your life experiencing cognitive dissonance. And ask yourself just how many of your beliefs about gender are really just cultural prejudice. If you are honest with yourself, you will see a lot when you open your eyes. 

Money in the Bank by P. G. Wodehouse

Source of book: I own this

 

I have made it my goal to read one P. G. Wodehouse book every year, even though I know that at that rate, I will never finish all his books - he lived a long life, and wrote an incredible number of books. 

 

I have written a lot about Wodehouse on this blog, starting with my introductory post. I will list all of the book reviews at the end of this post, should you wish to explore more. 

 

Money in the Bank dates to the 1940s, when Wodehouse was suffering from some unpopularity due to his boneheaded (although likely coerced) broadcasts from Nazi-occupied France during the war. I have discussed this a bit in my review of The Code of the Woosters. Wodehouse was not a fascist or a sympathizer - and none other than George Orwell - an OG of antifa to be sure - came to his defense. Indeed, in the runup to the war, The Code of the Woosters mocked British fascists such as Sir Oswald Mosley, parodying him in the character of Roderick Spode, one of the finest villains in Wodehouse’s work.

 

With Money in the Bank, Wodehouse avoids politics altogether, instead choosing to parody his usual bumbling aristocrats, but also private detectives and American con artists. And really, Wodehouse is hilarious when he takes on us Rebel Yanks and our unique shady elements. 

 

This book also does not contain any of the usual recurring characters - it is a stand alone story - but it does contain Shipley Hall and Lord Uffingham, who appear in a later book, Something Fishy. Shipley Hall was patterned after Fairlawne, a country house that Wodehouse’s daughter lived in after she married. 

 

As with any Wodehouse book, the characters and plot are complicated and filled with, um, complications. Let me see if I can set this up in a way that makes sense. 

 

Lord Uffingham is highly eccentric, and has just placed all of the family fortune (except for Shipley Hall) into diamonds, which he then hides in various places around the house. This goes wrong when he is in an accident which affects his memory. Now, he cannot find the diamonds, and has no way to pay his bills. 

 

Enter Clarissa Cork. Ms. Cork is a one-time adventuress, hunting game in Africa, who has now turned to the “health” industry as her profession. She rents Shipley Hall from Lord Uffingham to use as a vegetarian resort. 

 

Lord Uffingham’s niece, Anne, is Ms. Cork’s assistant, and negotiates the contract, which has the unusual term that the butler, Cakebread, must stay on. “Cakebread,” it turns out, is Lord Uffingham in disguise, and he stays on both to cosplay the butler and to search for the diamonds. 

 

But there is more! Anne is secretly engaged to Ms. Cork’s nephew, Lionel Green. Ms. Cork suspects the relationship, and does not approve. Lionel wants her to lend him money for the interior decorating firm he is trying to start, but she withholds the money until she is sure that he is not after Anne. Thus, Lionel insists Anne keep the engagement secret. 

 

As if this weren’t enough, there is a pair of shady con artists at the retreat, Soapy and Dolly Malloy. They are Americans from Chicago (of course!) who hope to get Ms. Cork to buy their fraudulent stock shares. But then, Soapy seems to be flirting with Ms. Cork, and Dolly suspects infidelity. (Although in reality, Ms. Cork is also being courted by Mr. Trumper, another guest.) 

 

Meanwhile, Ms. Cork catches Cakebread searching her room, and asks Anne to engage a private detective to watch him - she suspects he is trying to rob her. Dolly suggests her old buddy, J. Sherringham Adair, a private detective (and that isn’t his real name, either - it’s Chimp Twist…) 

 

When Anne goes to hire Adair, due to a series of humorous circumstances, Chimp is hiding in the cupboard, and Jeff Miller, a young attorney who has recently broken up with his fiance (to his great relief) and is coincidentally trying to apologize to Chimp, is mistaken for Chimp/Adair. Suddenly smitten with Anne, he impersonates Chimp/Adair in order to be near Anne. 

 

Oh, and it turns out, he is an old school enemy of Lionel Green. And Chimp shows up at Shipley Hall after he hears about the missing diamonds from Dolly, and….

 

Well….complications. 

 

And hilarity, of course. 

 

Will the diamonds ever be found? Who will win the hand of Anne, Lionel or Jeff? Will Chimp, Dolly, and Soapy get away with a heist? Can they even get along for long enough to pull anything off? 

 

I guess you will have to read the book. 

 

As usual, I have a bunch of witty lines to share. Some may be spoilers, so you can feel free to stop here and read the book first if you like. 

 

First, from Mr. Shoesmith, Jeff’s intended father-in-law (before the engagement is broken a couple chapters in.) 

 

Jeff had his little circles of admirers, but Mr. Shoesmith was not a member of it. About the nastiest jolt of the well-known solicitor’s experience had been the one he had received on the occasion, some weeks previously, when his only daughter had brought this young man home and laid him on the mat, announcing in her authoritative way that they were engaged to be married. 

He had said ‘Oh, my God!’ or something civil of that sort, but it was only with difficulty that he had been able to speak at all.

 

 For that matter, Jeff isn’t at all sure he wants to marry Myrtle Shoesmith. 

 

He was still quite at a loss to understand how the ghastly thing had happened. The facts seemed to suggest that he must have let fall some passing remark which had given the girl the impression he was proposing to her, but he nad no recollection of having done anything so cloth-headed. All he knew was that at a certain point of time in an evening party he had been a happy, buoyant young fellow, making light conversation to Myrtle Shoesmith behind a potted palm, and at another point in time, only a moment later, or so it seemed to him, he was listening appalled to Myrtle Shoesmith discussing cake and bridesmaids. The whole thing was absolutely sudden and unexpected, like an earthquake or a waterspout or any other Act of God.

 

This is, of course, a recurrent trope in Wodehouse - the accidentally trapped bachelor. But somehow, he manages to find a new and hilarious way of telling the story, with yet another witty and well turned sequence of words. 

 

The description by Dolly of the vegetarian retreat is also good. 

 

“It’s a sort of a crazy joint. You eat vegetables and breathe deep and dance around in circles. It’s supposed to be swell for the soul.”

 

Wodehouse usually finds at least one place in every book to sneak a ridiculously long and rare word, often in the most unexpected place. Here is the moment in this book. 

 

Anne Benedick had been waiting in the hall of Lord Uffingham’s club some ten minutes before his lordship finally appeared, descending the broad staircase with one hand glued to the arm of a worried-looking Bishop, with whom he was discussing Supralapsarianism. At the sight of Anne, he relaxed his grip, and the Bishop shot gratefully off in the direction of the Silence Room. 

 

If you are enough of a theology nerd to recognize the reference to Calvinist doctrine, congratulations. 

 

For Jeff, one of his biggest problems is that, since he is impersonating someone, he needs to find a way to keep those who know either him or Chimp from blowing his cover. For Lionel, even though they are enemies, he is able to use a carrot and a stick to keep him in line. (I won’t spoil it.) And he keeps his promise. 

 

He had never been fond of Lionel Green, and saw little prospect of being fond of him in the future, but there are moments when common humanity makes us sink our prejudices.

 

Not that he is entirely successful in his quest. Dolly, for one, would prefer he meet his demise. Jeff finds he respects her. 

 

And in addition to her psychic gifts, it now appeared, she had also this remarkable capacity for direct and rapid action. True, after swallowing most of his cigarette and looking up with a jerk that nearly dislocated his neck, he had not actually observed her leaning over the banisters, but an ormolu clock, last seen on an antique chest of drawers on a first floor landing, does not descend into the hall of its own volition, and he had no hesitation in assuming that Dolly’s was the hand which had started it on its downward course. He might be wronging her, but he did not think so. 

 

There is also this later passage, a musing by Soapy.

 

Dolly had always been the brains of the firm. He himself, he was aware, had his limitations. Give him a sympathetic listener, preferably one who in his formative years had been kicked on the head by a mule, a clear half-hour in which to talk Oil and plenty of room to wave his hands, and he could accomplish wonders. But apart from this one talent he was not a very gifted man, and he knew it.

 

Chimp Twist gets his own fun line later, when he decides to show up at Shipley Hall, not expecting what he will find. 

 

The hour of seven-fifteen found Chimp Twist at the main gates of Shipley Hall, humming a gay air beneath his breath and feeling that God was in His heaven and all right with the world. He surveyed the rolling parkland, and admired it enormously. He listened to the carolling of the birds, and thought how sweet their music was. Even an insect, which got entangled in his moustache, struck him as probably quite a decent insect, if one had only got to know it. His mood, in short, was one of saccharine benevolence. 

 

I appreciate the reference to Browning there. This moustache comes in for a bit of further action later, in this exchange between Chimp and Lord Uffingham - I quote just the highlights, because it goes on for a full page. 

 

‘That moustache. Had it long?’ he asked, like a doctor making the preliminary inquisition concerning some rare type of disease. ‘When did you first feel it coming on?’

…

‘Sometimes I use wax.’

‘Beeswax?’

‘Just ordinary wax.’

‘And that’s what makes it stick out?’

‘Yessir, that’s what makes it stick out.’

‘Well, it looks bloody awful. If it was mine, I’d have it off at the roots.’

 

Ironically, here it is Lord Uffingham who gets the subjunctive mood wrong. Later, he takes Anne to task for it, after she storms out of the room saying “I wouldn’t marry Mr. Miller if he was the last man on earth.” 

 

‘Not “was”. “I wouldn’t marry Mr. Miller if he were the last man on earth.” Dash it,’ said Lord Uffingham, driving home his point, ‘the thing’s a conditional clause.’

 

People hiding in various places are another recurring situation both in this book and in Wodehouse generally. Chimp takes refuge in a wardrobe, which, unfortunately, turns out to be in Mr. Trumper’s room. But before that, he sees Chimp dash up the stairs. 

 

Thoughts of burglars flashed into Mr. Trumper’s mind. Then he dismissed the idea. Burglars, he reflected, were creatures of the night and would not be likely to put on what amouinted to a matinee performance. Nor did they, it occurred to him, skim up stairs in this volatile fashion. They prowled and prowled around, like the hosts of Midian, but always, or so he had been given to understand, at a reasonable pace. 

 

Mr. Trumper’s character can be summed up in this line about what he did when he heard Chimp sneeze. 

 

Eustace Trumper had no objection to danger to the person, provided it was some other person.

 

Anne is, to put it mildly, slow to warm to the idea of loving Jeff rather than Lionel. Lord Uffingham is on Jeff’s side, at least. I loved this explanation of why Uffingham thinks Anne picked Lionel.

 

‘That,’ he concluded, becoming profound, ‘is the whole trouble with fellers like Lionel Green. If you see one without actually wanting to kick him, you think, “This must be love.”’

 

It is predictable what will happen, if you know your Wodehouse. 

 

In the relations of Lionel Green and Anne Benedick, there had always been on the part of the former something a little superior, a shade condescending. A charming girl, he had felt, but one who required moulding. He had looked on himself as the wise instructor with the promising pupil. And now, all of a sudden, she had changed into something formidable and intimidating. 

I myself just went ahead and married the formidable and intimidating woman. Which was a wise choice. 

 

And, speaking of weak, insecure men, here is another appearance by Soapy. 

 

At his least appearance in this chronicle, it may be remembered, Soapy Molloy was far from being in debonair mood. Introduced to the pistol which he was now bearing with such a flourish, like a carefree waiter carrying an order of chipped potatoes, he had quailed visibly, as if he had found himself fondling a scorpion. 

 

Finally, at the risk of spoilers, this hilarious exchange. 

 

‘You were kissing me? It was not just a lovely dream?’

‘No. I was kissing you. You see, I thought you were dead.’

Jeff paused. They were approaching the nub. From this point, he would have to follow her answers very carefully.

‘Do I have to be dead for you to kiss me?’

‘Not at all. I would prefer it otherwise.’

Jeff’s brain was still a little clouded. 

‘I don’t quite follow this.’

 

Good stuff. As always, I recommend Wodehouse for classic British humor. 

***

 

The Wodehouse books:

 

The Adventures of Sally

Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen

Biffen’s Millions

Cocktail Time

The Code of the Woosters     

Jeeves and the Mating Season

Love Among the Chickens

The Luck of the Bodkins

Summer Lightning

Thank You Jeeves

Uncle Dynamite

Uncle Fred in the Springtime

The Uncollected Wodehouse

Young Men in Spats

 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Source of book: I own this.

 

This book was this month’s selection for The Literary Lush Book Club, our monthly gathering of friends to discuss books. It is difficult to believe, but I think I have been part of this club for seven years? It has been a wonderful experience because of the great people who are part of it. 

 

This book has an interesting back story within our club. Typically, we nominate books for a three-month period, then vote. Top three win, and we read those. The fourth most popular book gets renominated for December - our “second chance” month. 

 

This cycle, one of the books that won was nominated by a friend. It looked interesting to me, and apparently enough of us agreed. 

 

The problem was, nobody noticed that it wouldn’t actually be published until….December. So much for that. This meant kind of a last minute pivot. We picked The Bell Jar because it came in fourth and because it was easy to obtain quickly. I myself found a cheap paperback to add to my library. 

I wanted to find a less depressing picture of Plath - she was more than her illness and suicide.

I was surprised at this book, honestly. I expected it to be really dark and depressing. It isn’t. It is actually full of humor and positivity, and brilliant writing. Sure, it is about a descent into mental illness and attempted suicide, but it is about a lot of other things as well. 

 

The tragedy of Plath’s life is well known, of course. She committed suicide at age 30, during a time of incredible stress. Her life choices were, more than anything else, catastrophic for a person like herself - but they were made largely in response to societal pressures and expectations. One wonders if she had been born in the 1980s rather than the 1930s, if she would have felt free to eschew marriage and motherhood, as well as found better help for her mental health. If only…

 

The book does have its flaws. Most notably, the kind of casual racism that is unfortunately common in white writers of the 20th Century. And also, a lot of casual homophobia and gay stereotyping that has aged terribly. At least in the case of the latter, she has the excuse that the science hadn’t caught up with reality yet, and she died six years before Stonewall brought gay rights to the attention of the mainstream. 

 

I would also say that the book has some uneven writing, as one would expect for a first novel by a young writer. When the writing is good, it is really good, but there are some clunky spots too. 

 

As with any semi-autobiographical work, it is difficult to tell where Plath’s reality ends and fiction begins. She didn’t want the book published in the United States, because she knew people would recognize themselves in the book. Her mother was a bit traumatized, which is too bad, because I felt that it was a rather sympathetic portrayal. Anyone who thinks the mother is the villain in this book has missed the point. 

 

For many of us in the book club, we saw ourselves in Plath’s protagonist, Esther. For me, the feeling of being good at school, but not at life, reminds me SO MUCH of my early 20s. I have always had Imposter Syndrome, so Esther’s struggles really resonated for me. 

 

Another club member pointed out that he felt the core of the book was Esther’s metaphor of the fig tree. She sits on a branch, unable to decide which fig to eat, and while she fails to decide, they wither and rot and she starves. 

 

This too is real. Trying to choose a life path is tough, and sometimes all those choices can be paralyzing. 

 

Given the social pressures Esther is under: growing up poor due to her father’s untimely death, her constant pressure to excel so she can get scholarships, the competing pressure to marry money and stability, her difficulty in social situations that the rich girls thrive in - it actually feels perfectly natural that she goes crazy. From inside Esther’s head, a mental breakdown and suicide feel perfectly logical. That is the power of the book, bringing all that to life. 

 

But amidst this are so many humorous observations. Esther’s takedown of the fashion industry in New York City, the incident where the young women all get violently ill from food poisoning, the petty politics in mental institutions, and so many more, are laugh out loud funny. Again, I was not expecting that. 

 

I ended up writing down a bunch of lines that I loved in the book, for various reasons. 

 

I’ll start with a fun legal thing from the introduction. The book was first published in England, but Plath didn’t want it published in the United States. The problem wasn’t merely that copies could be - and indeed were - smuggled in. The law at the time (“Ad Interim”) was that any book by an American citizen and first published abroad had to be published in the US within 6 months, or it became public domain. 

 

Yikes! 

 

So, American publishers figured out really quick that they could simply publish it without paying royalties. This put Plath’s estate in a bind, and it had to agree to release the US rights and publish the book, so they could could get paid - it was going to be published either way. 

 

The book starts with Esther’s trip to New York, for an internship of sorts. She and the other young women were expected to enjoy the city, but Esther can’t seem to do so. 

 

I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react.

 

This really sets the stage for her eventual breakdown. It is a classic symptom of depression or a depressive episode. 

 

The one thing that does seem to break through for her is a hot bath. Her description is amazing. 

 

I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath. I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

 

I also loved her bit about how to survive an upscale dinner. 

 

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty. 

 

She recalls an earlier incident, when she made a pretty hilarious mistake. 

 

That was where I saw my first fingerbowl. The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done. 

 

One line that got a lot of discussion at our club was the passage where Esther recounts all of the things she can’t do. 

 

I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. 

 

That’s where the fig tree story comes in.

 

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. 

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Contantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. 

 

That’s just brilliant. Looking back from nearly a half century old, I can certainly see how each decision has foreclosed many others. Some of these decisions I made myself, and I generally think I made the choices I would take again. Others were made for me, sometimes against my will, by my parents, and those are the ones I “regret” the most, although there is always the question of if I had been, for example, in a position to marry my wife if we hadn’t gone down the cult route. So it’s complicated. 

 

“Constantin,” by the way, is a vaguely foreign guy Esther goes out with. She ends up a bit disappointed that he isn’t interested in being her first sexual partner. But the food, though, that’s another matter. 

 

Constantin’s restaurant smelt of herbs and spices and sour cream. All the time I had been in New York I had never found such a restaurant. I only found those Heavenly Hamburger places, where they serve giant hamburgers and soup-of-the-day and four kinds of fancy cake at a very clean counter facing a long glarey mirror.

To reach this sort of restaurant we had to climb down seven dimly lit steps into a sort of cellar. 

 

My travel advice for everyone: wherever you go, no matter where you are, find this kind of restaurant. 

 

The book is also very much about sex, and coming-of-age, and especially about the double standard. When Esther finds out that Buddy, the local boy she thinks she is going to marry, has had a month’s long fling with a waitress, she decides that keeping herself “pure” is overrated, and seeks throughout the book to toss her virginity to….someone. Whoever she can get. 

 

There are multiple flashbacks in the book, often involving boys she knew. She mentions Eric, a southern boy at Yale, who she considers sleeping with, until he tells how he lost his virginity in a brothel. It wasn’t a thrilling experience. 

 

It was boring as going to the toilet. I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldn’t seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. 

 

Yeesh. That’s pretty sad too. I for one think that sex with a woman you love isn’t close to boring, but maybe your mileage might vary. 

 

This episode led to a recollection of one of those “purity culture” articles Esther read, that claimed that the best men were virgins on the wedding night, and even if they weren’t, they would want to be the ones to teach their virgin wives about sex. And how men lose all respect for a woman who will sleep with them (or others) and yada yada yada. (Been there, heard that a few thousand times…) Esther has a different perspective. 

 

Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt. 

It might be nice to be pure and then to marry a pure man, but what if he suddenly confessed he wasn’t pure after we were married, the way Buddy Willard had? I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a pure single life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not. 

 

Esther is right, of course. The whole point of the sexual double standard has always been to keep men from having to raise children that aren’t biologically theirs. It is solely from the male perspective, addresses male concerns, and really expects male ownership of women. 

 

Also, as an attorney who has done family law for a couple decades, I can attest that sexual experience is actually not related to success or failure of a marriage. (Unless someone chooses to make it an issue.) I have seen two-virgin marriages come apart viciously, and I have seen excellent and lasting marriages between two people who had prior spouses and partners. If you are going to focus on anything, find a spouse who matches you in their approach to financial matters - and who is willing to be an equal breadwinner. Trust me on this - egalitarian marriages with financial compatibility are the most lasting statistically. 

 

Whether or not Esther is justified in despising Buddy for his fling, what is clear is that she does not love him anyway, and he is a bit of a prick - a normal prick for the 1950s white culture - but still a prick. 

 

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

 

Unfortunately, that was the reality for too many women in that era. And even our own. There is still definitely that expectation in some subcultures. My parents fully expected that after having children, my wife would “feel differently” about her career. When it turned out she didn’t feel differently, and went back to work after each birth, they felt obliged to despise and denigrate her (particularly my mother.) 

 

In Plath’s actual life, she married poet Ted Hughes, who was abusive, but even more than that, entitled. Sure, she wanted to write and all, but he still expected her to do all the child care, all the housework, all the cooking. 

 

I think she would have been far happier had she felt free to be childless. But at least he could have helped out equally. More on this later. 

 

There is another passage where she talks about a certain incompatibility with Buddy that sounded very familiar. To be clear here: no two people are completely “compatible” and if they could be, things would likely be boring. 

 

I found it hard to imagine Buddy lying quietly. His whole philosophy of life was to be up and doing every second. Even when we went to the beach in the summer he never lay down to drowse in the sun the way I did. He ran back and forth or played ball or did a little series of rapid pushups to use the time.

 

This is me and my wife at times. I am the one who likes to vacation hard, to be doing stuff. She likes to rest and relax. We compromise on this like we do on other things, and we actually do enjoy vacationing with each other. But we have different natural styles, which is why we also vacation separately from time to time. (I camp, she chills at the beach…) 

 

Esther’s first real shot at sex comes when a friend of her friend’s current flame takes her out to a party, and eventually tries to rape her. This is one incident where there is some unfortunate homophobia on display. 

 

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Women-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one. 

 

While in its most obvious sense, she means he is a misogynist - and he is. But it is also implied that he swings the other way, so to speak. Again, this is a dated and inaccurate stereotype about gay men: that they are irresistible to women, and that they hate women, leading to rape. Ouch. 

 

Later in the book, after Buddy is sent to a sanitarium for tuberculosis, and falls in love with a nurse, that nurse has a mental break and ends up in the same mental hospital as Esther. It is strongly implied that Joan, is at least bisexual. She is caught in a compromising position with another woman, and she goes on and on about Buddy’s mother. 

 

I think there is also the implication that Joan has the hots for Esther, and, after Esther finally does have sex, relapses and commits suicide. Yeah, kind of some bad “lesbian dies at the end” vibes there. 

 

There is also this:

 

I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.

 

Esther, for her part, can’t bond with anyone, so she pushes Joan away. This passage is fascinating for its depiction of how mental illness alienates. 

 

I looked at Joan. In spite of the creepy feelings, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own. 

 

There is a fascinating scene after Joan’s death, when Buddy shows up to visit Esther, and notes that both women he has wanted to marry have attempted suicide. He wonders if it is him, or them. 

 

Many many years later, after Ted Hughes’ longtime partner committed suicide, he wondered the same thing. Was he seeing himself in The Bell Jar? 

 

I also liked the description of the psychiatrist’s office. She skewers psychiatrists throughout the book, and it hits home because there still is a lot of god-complex and condescension in the profession. 

 

Doctor Gordon’s waiting room was hushed and beige. The walls were beige, and the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. 

 

Here we are in the 21st Century and the era of beige has returned…

 

As the book comes to a close, there are a lot of further musings about marriage and sex and children. Some of these come when she is being fitted with a diaphragm. 

 

She also makes the mistake of looking through an issue of Baby Talk, and the babies all nauseate her. Nope, she should not have had children. 

 

“What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,” I had told Doctor Nolan. “A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.” 

 

And also:

 

I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: “I am climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway, regardless…” 

 

This really is the great freedom that contraception has brought: the freedom to not get stuck. I have long wondered about the risk women take when marrying, particularly without sexual experience. A man is pretty guaranteed to be able to orgasm, but if statistics are any indication, a hell of a lot of men can’t find a clitoris with a map. If nothing else, a little experience can determine if a man is willing to learn or not, if they make female pleasure a priority. 

 

Just one of many things that I have reconsidered over the last few decades. So many things have their roots in either racism or misogyny, and finding an ethical way forward often means reconsidering things that I was taught were right and wrong, whether female subservience, or human sexuality. 

 

Anyway, I enjoyed this book, found it better than expected, and can see why it is considered an essential classic of the mid-20th Century.