I'm going to read a piece in sections.
It's about money.
And what happened was that this magazine, Salmagundi, did
a special issue on money, and they
asked me to contribute to it.
And I felt very nervous.
This wasn't a subject I particularly
wanted to write about.
But then I realized, what is there to write about?
There's sex, there's death, there's art, and there's money.
So I might as well do it, you know?
So, first section is "A total idiot about money."
I was once asked as a recently-published author
to give the business community some advice.
Unfortunately, I am a total idiot
when it comes to finances.
My comprehension in that department is nearly zero,
and all I could offer was a window into my vacuity.
Still, political campaigns often spend millions trying to court
the undecided vote, and in the process,
working overtime to ascertain the psychology of those
dunderheads who cannot make up their minds just days before
the election.
So perhaps the business world should pay me big time
to gain insights into my really rather remarkable ignorance.
When did it start?
How is it that I, reasonably intelligent in other subjects,
should have utterly failed to pick up
a glimmer of understanding when it comes to money?
Hedge funds have been explained to me half a dozen times,
and still, I am unsure what they do.
As soon as someone tries to give me
a tip about playing the stock market
or refinancing my mortgage or switching to a better health
plan, my mind drifts off the same way
it does when I ask for driving directions
and the answer leads to more than one turn.
I suspect terror is at the heart of this resistance.
My father struggled during the Great Depression,
an experience then that not only scars a person
for life, but sometimes his progeny as well.
I'm terrified of going into debt.
I bought a new car with cash, depleting my savings account
in the process, so that I would not
have to pay finance charges.
I refused to take out a home repair
loan despite my wife's insistence
that everyone does it.
In this age, when every self-respecting college student
is applying to MBA programs or scheming
to make his first million by 30, I
appreciate that I am out of step.
In the early 1960s, when I first dreamed
of becoming a writer, I--
we-- assumed that meant spending decades honing one's craft,
meanwhile working at ill-paid jobs and living on a pittance.
This was before the Brat Pack era,
when large advances were given out
to cute-looking, photogenic authors.
My plan worked.
I got through the lean years by taking
odd jobs, of which more later, and eventually turned myself
into a midlist writer of essays, poetry, and literary fiction.
I never assumed there would be a big payday.
All I wanted was the respect of my peers.
Could anyone have shown less business sense?
What is wrong with me?
I simply can't make myself care about accumulating
lots of money.
Or am I fooling myself?
It could be that I disdain profit-making in part
because I am just no good at it.
But which came first?
Suffice to say that I and the profit motive
are barely on speaking terms.
I am willing to donate my brain to science
when I expire if it will help the business community solve
the riddle of people such as myself.
Two, "The order of things."
In the beginning, God created money, dollars, shekels,
cruzeiros, kopeks, rubles, riyals, francs, euros,
lira, pieces of eight, pounds sterling, krugerrands, yen,
deutschmarks, obols, created he them.
Next came camels, sheep, burrows, oxen, and parrots.
Then God absconded, leaving money to rule over the Earth.
"What I truly feel about money."
I love money.
Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.
Seriously, I welcome money whenever it is offered me.
I do not regard it as bad in the slightest, much less the root
of all evil.
At the same time, the thought of money freezes my brain.
It's a shameful, unpleasant desire for it that irks me.
All my life, I've forbidden myself to want it.
No, no, no.
"Playing the stocks."
I had a friend, the great poet, Kenneth Koch,
who told me that of course he invested in the stock market,
because how else could one expect
to get a reasonable return on one's capital?
I was stunned.
Though what he said made perfect sense,
it came from another planet.
I would never have assumed I was entitled
to receive a cushy return from the money I earned.
Koch had grown up securely middle class
in Cincinnati, whereas I had been
reared close to the poverty line in Brooklyn.
Twice, when I had a little extra savings,
I went into the stock market, and both times, I
pulled out once the volume of stocks started plummeting.
My investments were virtually wiped out.
Not only did I not have the courage
to wait out the downturn, I could not
find the tiniest available unused corner of my mind
to attend to the value or trajectory of individual stocks
the broker had bought in my name.
"The absence of money."
It is difficult to speak about having grown up
poor without sounding self-pitying or self-righteous,
but it was simply a fact.
We had no surplus.
My mother used to flirt with the deli man
so that she could delay paying our weekly tab.
There was a period when my father was laid off
during which we ate macaroni and cheese for months and little
else.
I used to steal dimes from my mother's pocketbook
or from the corners of the living room
where she had sequestered coins for a rainy day, a kind
of peasant superstitious, and go down to the street
to buy a knish or a whipped cream connection
called Charlotte Russe.
My criminality was plotted by a grumbling stomach.
Later, in freshman year at college, I craved books,
especially the square-bound, quality paperbacks that were
just coming into circulation, like Noonday's or Grove
Press's, Shocken's or Anchor's.
I needed what was in those books--
Kierkegaard, DH Lawrence-- and didn't
have the money to buy them.
So I stuffed them into my coat or down my shirtfront
until the fear of getting caught chastened me.
Those first two years in college were
the poorest I would ever be.
I used to lie in bed, mornings, trying to come up
with money-making schemes.
Though I had won a full scholarship to a good college,
I could not think of any way of loaning my brainpower to dimmer
others in return for cash.
It was my first way of understanding
that I must not have been as smart as I thought I was.
If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?
"Class distinctions."
"The rich are different than you and I."
"Yes, they have more money."
This is a famous exchange between
American literary titans, Hemingway one-upping
Fitzgerald, showing he was not intimidated
by wealth, though I've always thought Fitzgerald
was the more correct.
I have had occasional dealings with the rich.
They are different.
One difference I find is that most of their domiciles
look disappointingly impersonal, as
though the interior decorator they hired
chose from the same catalogs and auction houses
as did high-end hotels, or as though they thought
an expressively lived-in, cluttered quality,
proof that human beings actually inhabited the place,
was a sign of inferior breeding.
When I taught at the University of Houston during the 1980s,
there were so few professional writers in town
that I was invited to the homes of the cultured wealthy.
They were amiable, hospitable, and touchingly deferential
to creative folk.
But I found it impossible to promote a real friendship
with any of these moneyed people.
I did not know the code of manners that might lead
to greater intimacy with them.
My celebrity value as a writer wore off, and in the end,
they preferred to be among people of their own tax
bracket, just as I found it more comfortable to be
among my economic peers.
Nouveaux riches are the best.
They're not jaded.
They still believe in the power and joy of money.
They still want.
When I encounter satires in 19th-century novels
of the parvenu nouveaux riches trying to acquire refinement,
my heart goes out to them.
The superior scorn that artistic types
direct toward the bourgeoisie seems wholly unmerited.
Maybe it's that I've never doubted I was artistic,
whereas it has taken me some doing
to climb into the middle class, one
of my proudest achievements, though it goes without saying
that I am still trapped in a mindset
somewhere between working class and lower middle class.
Perhaps for that reason, it offends me
when politicians who should know better phrase their election
promises entirely in terms of helping middle-class families.
I would like to think, having finally
made it into that privileged rung,
that others need governmental help more,
such as the homeless, the deserving poor,
and my favorite category for support, the undeserving poor.
"What I did for money."
Money and labor aren't necessarily connected,
but in my case, I always knew that if I
wanted the kale, the gelt, the moolah,
I would have to work for it.
The world was under no obligation
to subsidize my literary pursuit, nor was my family,
bless them, capable of doing so.
I put myself in harness early.
My first paying job was singing in the Silbermintz
choir, a Hebrew boy's and men's chorus I joined when I was 11.
I was paid $25 a year to rehearse regularly and sing
at weddings, bar mitzvahs, high holiday services, and concerts
with famous cantors.
My older brother, Leonard, and I were
the only public school kids, not yeshiva boys, in the choir.
We had little piety, but liked to sing.
The Silbermintz choir, reputed to be
the second-best Jewish choir in the New York area,
was sufficiently large that during the high holidays,
we would be split up, some of us sent
to a big synagogue on the Grand Concourse
in the Bronx and others to a King's Highway shul
in Brooklyn.
I had been promoted to part leader because I had a good ear
but was rarely given solos.
My voice, I gathered, sounded too American.
It lacked the shtetl trill that could bring tears
to the old congregants' eyes.
After I turned 13 and had my bar mitzvah,
I quit the choir, telling myself I had been
underpaid and disrespected.
Also, my voice had started to change with puberty.
Only recently have I realized what a fool I'd been.
The Silbermintz choir was a classy outfit.
I should have stayed on the job and learned all I could.
Subsequently, I was hired as a tutor in Hebrew and English
to a downstairs neighbor's boy, Georgie.
They paid me something like a dollar an hour,
a raise from my previous choir salary.
And I lasted over a year before being
fired for slapping my aggravating pupil
a time or two.
I had much to learn about teaching.
Around that time, I also worked as a counselor in a summer camp
for mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed
children in upstate New York.
I got along all right with my charges,
but clashed with the director of the camp,
and was forced to leave before the summer ended.
In high school, I took an after-school job
at an import-export house across from the Flatiron Building.
The job consisted of taking carpets to the backyard
and beating them to get out the dust.
I lasted a week, then called in and claimed
my father or grandfather had died, the old "kill off
a relative" gambit.
I worked as a messenger several summers between school years.
The jobs paid somewhere along the lines of $30 a week.
The first time, I pretended it was my life's ambition
to work for the firm American Standard, which
manufactured toilets.
I had no desire to be anything other than a mail boy, I said.
College was out of the question.
Right after Labor Day, I joined a conga line
of boys who gave notice, to the disenchanted disgust
of the mailroom supervisor.
The following summer, I worked for a public relations firm,
sorting mail and delivering liquor bottles
to journalists whose cooperation was solicited.
I walked around the city reading Russian novels
on my deliveries.
All went well, until one afternoon,
when I was being driven somewhere in Midtown
by the mailroom head.
And as soon as we stopped, I unthinkingly or insouciantly
opened the company limousine door,
which was promptly rammed into by an oncoming car, requiring
major garage repair.
I was not forgiven.
While still a freshman at Columbia,
I ran away from home in Brooklyn,
which meant I had to find ways to feed myself and earn
spending money.
I sold soda at the college football games,
worked in the school library, washed dishes
in the cafeteria-- mine, a pair of hands that took trays from
the conveyor belt and dumped the excess down a smelly slop bin--
and checked for jackets and ties in the Student Center.
I also sold catalogs for special exhibitions
at the Metropolitan Museum on weekends.
During my last two years of college,
I ran a campus film series showing 16 millimeter prints,
and it made money overall.
One of our biggest hits was Hitchcock's Notorious
with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
I ran an ad in the campus paper as Spring Break approached,
saying, you can't go home until you see Notorious.
We were supposed to use the profits to pay
for our own filmmaking projects, but most of it
ended in my pocket.
I was often too excited counting the take
to watch the first half hour of the movie.
After graduating college, I spent a few years
trying to write the great American novel,
bringing in zero income, and being
supported by my first wife.
This Eden could not go on indefinitely.
I became a ghostwriter.
I would answer ads for editorial assistance, a euphemism,
I discovered, for writing some article or conference
paper from scratch.
It was decently paid, $7 an hour,
all the more so since I did the work at home
and could pad my hours.
Ghostwriting is a fun profession.
It sharpened my ability to manipulate personae and voice
on the page and my fiction-writing skills.
But the work was irregular.
I needed to get a full-time job and pretend, at least,
to be a responsible adult and wage-earning husband.
I went to work for the National Enquirer as a proofreader,
taking the bus each morning from the Port Authority
to the paper's printing plant in Tenafly, New Jersey.
It was there I learned that many of the scandal sheet's items
were hoary bits in the public domain, recycled to look new.
They kept retouching the photos of killers
in keeping with some Lombroso-like pseudoscience
about the way psychotic criminals
were supposed to look.
The foreheads got lower and lower, the eyes piggier,
and the end results appeared more like courtroom sketches
than photography.
The two veteran proofreaders whom I assisted
were cultivated, well-read men in their 50s,
but I saw in their blanched, torpid
faces my fate if I were to stay at that job, and got out.
The ensuing search led me to a non-profit social agency
in the Lower East Side, part of Lyndon Johnson's
anti-poverty program.
When the agency discovered I could write,
they put me to work analyzing a questionnaire
about satisfaction or dissatisfaction
with the program, which had been administered
to a group of Hispanic paraprofessionals
and their trainers.
The trainers' answers, I was instructed,
were marked by the category T1, and the paraprofessionals
by T2.
At the time, I was a fervent Marxist,
and I assiduously provided explanations
for every statistical variation along Marxist lines.
And my boss was delighted, taking the results
down to Washington, where she presented them
to polite bureaucratic approval.
Everyone was happy until it was discovered
that a mistake had been made.
T1 were actually the medical paraprofessionals
and T2 their trainers.
In short, the radical views came from the agency supervisors,
and the conservative ones from the striver workers.
Though the mistake had not been mine,
the questionnaire had been compromised, and I was let go.
I ran into Kenneth Koch, who asked me what I was up to.
And when I said I was looking for employment,
he told me he was giving up his gig teaching children creative
writing in the Bedford Lincoln Neighborhood Muse,
and I could take it over if I liked.
I did not think I had any interest in kids,
nor did I see myself as a teacher,
but I was desperate and agreed to try.
To my surprise, I turned out to like children and teaching
both quite a lot.
I then applied to Teachers & Writers Collaborative
of Artists in the Schools organization,
and they sent me into a commercial high school,
where I got in trouble for encouraging
the students to write freely on any topic they liked.
They chose sex and drugs, naturally.
I was banished from the school, but that
seemed appropriate, radical martyrdom
through challenging the system being the fashion.
Running away again, this time from my first marriage,
I landed in Berkeley, California,
and tried to find some honest manual labor,
only to discover that I was in competition with masses
of downwardly-mobile, post-doctoral students,
not to mention unemployed workingmen.
I settled, finally, on a job in the post office, which
they were required to give me by virtue of my
having passed a civil service exam.
I never went out on a mail route,
sorting mail instead for seven or eight hours a day
in the back room with the marijuana-sniffing dogs.
After several months of this tedious, back-hurting labor,
I quit and took a job in a 16 millimeter film
rental house, Audio-Brandon, from which
I had rented in my days of running a campus film festival.
Though it seemed a fine thing at first to book
16-millimeter prints of such classics
as Potemkin and Seven Samurai for college campuses,
the novelty quickly wore off.
I was essentially a shipping clerk, and a poorly paid one.
We are talking about money, are we not?
I convinced a private school in Oakland
to hire me as a creative writing specialist
and ended up teaching seven writing classes a day
plus monitoring the after-school playground.
My educational philosophy conflicted
with the headmistress.
This time, a poem about vomit got me in trouble,
and I was fired.
Several parents approached me to ask
if I would agree to run a new progressive school they
were thinking of starting.
The thought terrified me.
Homesick for New York, I hightailed it back east.
Teachers & Writers kindly took me on again
and sent me to Harlem to work with adolescent dropouts
seeking a general education diploma.
I did my best to help them with their reading, math,
and science, meanwhile mixing in the occasional creative writing
exercise.
I again got into trouble, my third time,
by sponsoring a student literary magazine whose contents
irritated the agency directors.
Unfazed, or secretly approving of my troublemaking,
Teachers & Writers promoted me to direct a team of writers
at a West Side public school, Pier 75.
Thus began the happiest employment experience
of my life.
My team and I taught K through sixth-grade kids
to write poetry and fiction, which we published
in a stream of chapbooks.
We helped them make Super 8 films and videotapes,
shown in the school and at various film festivals.
We started a radio station whose tapes were rebroadcast on WBAI.
We had them draw comic books and printed the results.
We mounted plays written by them as well as
full-scale productions of West Side Story and Uncle Vanya.
We also collaborated with the regular school teachers
and got involved in the Parents Association and the daily life
of the school.
I had learned how to assist the educational process
without going down in flames.
It was a wholly satisfying experience,
which I described in my book, Being with Children.
After the book came out, I became
regarded as something of an educational expert,
and spoke to teachers' groups around the country.
The problem was that my Teachers & Writers
salary had reached the upper limit
at $13,000 a year, which, even adjusting for inflation,
was peanuts in 1981.
38 years of age, with three books at the time to my credit,
I was still making barely enough dough to get by.
Regretfully, I left teaching and went off
to academia, the University of Houston
my first stop, followed by Bennington, Hofstra,
and now Columbia University.
College teaching at last afforded me an escalator
to a decent salary.
"Money and books and movies."
I am fascinated with narratives about money.
Those storytellers who use the pressure of money
as a device seem to be more grounded in reality,
while those who ignore it strike me as somehow airy, less
substantial.
Balzac often subjected his characters
to a shortfall to get them moving.
Dreiser showed the problem from both ends
in Sister Carrie through Hurstwood's fall
and in The Financier through Frank Cowperwood's connivances.
Perhaps one reason Dreiser was criticized
as being vulgar was because of his preoccupation with cash.
F. Scott Fitzgerald depicted the strains of social class less so
than having or not having filthy lucre.
Trollope's The Way We Live Now is
a beautifully precise narrative about financial speculation.
In Gissing's novels, the debt collector is never far away.
Jane Austen doesn't go near the stuff, nor George Eliot
for the most part, though Eliot drew a vivid portrait
of a miser in Silas Marner.
Gender cannot be the dividing line.
Willa Cather touches on money frequently,
and in The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
constructed a classic novel around downward mobility.
The Chinese writer Lu Hsun said that if I
wanted to understand what the world was like,
the surest way was to fall from wealth to poverty.
Central to Japanese culture is the notion of indebtedness.
One sees it, for instance, in the films
of Naruse and Mizoguchi, where women are often
forced to sell their favors to get themselves
or their families out of debt.
Not so much in Ozu, who, for all the psychological weight,
sticks mostly to the financially-protected corporate
lifers of the middle class.
One reason I find Murakami slight
is that he rarely discusses money.
Stories about waging bets for high stakes that could bankrupt
the better, such as Dostoevsky's The Gambler or Schnitzler's
Daybreak, induced queasy palpitations of excitement
and dread in me.
Similarly, all movies about being
in debt to the mob with time running out gripped me.
When I came to write my novel, The Rug Merchant,
I used the plot device of an imminent, drastic rise in rent
to get my passive, dreamy shopkeeper hero off his duff,
hoping that financial pressure would keep the tension
high throughout the book, like a tightening noose.
In my two pairs of novellas, Two Marriages,
I made the characters comfortably well off, much
more so than their author, because I wanted
to imagine what it might feel like to be
without monetary concerns and what other problems-- jealousy,
excessive leisure, and the resulting
vocational purposelessness-- might come to the fore.
I sacrificed grounding in reality
for the delights of fantasy.
In my own life, possessing a sense of vocation, whether it
be writing or teaching, has, luckily,
sustained me, though I am inclined to think
both ensued as much from money anxiety
as from talent or devotion to these crafts.
Vocation gave me a direction, a path,
through the exigencies of earning a living,
a rationalization for not having more of a bank
account in periods of gaudy capital expansion,
and, in short, a way to distract myself from the wolf scratching
at the door.