City of Smoke – Page 26 – New York in History and Anecdote

Mayoral Election Digest: The End of Ideology

[From New York Press, December 4, 2001]

The revolutionary left did not contest this year’s municipal elections. The Communist, Socialist, Socialist Labor, and Socialist Workers tickets were not on the ballot. Somehow the ballot seemed incomplete without the SWP’s striking emblem: a lightning bolt shattering the chains of capitalism wrapped around the globe. As for more idiosyncratic candidacies, one daily reported that Kenny Kramer, the Libertarian mayoral nominee, received 2620 votes, a shade less than one-fifth of one percent of the poll.

Kramer’s claim to fame is derived from Jerry Seinfeld, who used his appearance and personality in creating a character, also named Kramer, in his television comedy. Kramer is merely the latest attempt of the Libertarian Party (in most states, a party of ideas; in New York, a party of stunts) to gain attention by nominating a celebrity to high office. Some may recall the Libertarians nominated Howard Stern for governor some years ago. Stern withdrew from the race on learning that he would have to file public reports about his income and investments—something that all candidates for state office and many civil servants do as a matter of course.

The other minor celebrity in the mayoral race, Bernhard H. Goetz, subway gunman turned vegetarian activist, polled only 1300 votes as the Fusion Party’s candidate. Goetz failed to publish his platform in the city’s Voter Guide. If he had, he might have polled more votes: apparently, upon taking office, Goetz intended to appoint Rudy Giuliani his first deputy mayor and let him continue running the city.

When Kenny Kramer, whose activities largely involve milking his false celebrity, outpolls Bernie Goetz, there may be no justice in this life. At least Goetz performed a socially useful, albeit violent and unlawful, act by shooting four punks who were threatening him on the subway. Thus, for a few weeks, Goetz was among the most popular public figures in the city. Jimmy Breslin seems to have consistently argued that Goetz’s odd, nerdy demeanor at the time of the incident was an open invitation to the punks: that he wanted to be attacked by muggers so he might kill them, in self-defense, of course. Other than Breslin, no one taken seriously suggests this, and not even Breslin argues that a law-abiding subway rider, however odd his appearance, should be harassed with impunity.

The Fusion Party is controlled by Dominick Fusco, an elderly Bronx lawyer of considerable self-importance. His tiny party’s name has historical resonance. Fusion, in New York City politics, traditionally refers to the legal device by which a single candidate, nominated by several parties, aggregates the votes cast for him on each party line. Fusion became synonymous with the reform movement—something wholly different from the so-called Reform Democrats—which historically advocated honest, nonpartisan government in the interests of the wealthy elite. The other piece of any successful reform campaign was the Republican Party, which elects mayors only in coalition with some Democratic splinter group or reform-minded new party.

The City Fusion Party arose in 1933 in response to the scandals in city government revealed by the Seabury hearings. Fiorello La Guardia, nominated by the Republicans and the City Fusionists, polled nearly half his votes on the new party’s ticket. However, the Fusionists had no interest in patronage—the loaves and fishes by which one builds a permanent mass movement. Enthusiasm flags in the absence of a paycheck. By the 1950s, the party had nearly faded away. Its tattered remains—largely the right to use a four-leaf clover as a ballot emblem—became the property of Counselor Fusco, a Republican turned Democrat turned Perotista. No election since the late 1960s has been complete without Fusco or his friends somewhere on the ballot. Fusco last ran for citywide office in 1997, when he polled fewer than 1000 votes running for mayor as a Fusionist. This year, he ran for comptroller on the Fusion ticket with Bernie Goetz and polled 6989 votes. From the Little Flower to the Subway Gunman—what a fall was there, my countrymen. As far as ideas are concerned, Fusco’s remain a mystery: he, too, published no platform in the city’s Voter Guide.

Last and least of the mayoral candidates was Kenneth B. Golding, the nominee of his one-man machine, the American Dream Party. Probably the Board of Elections was too busy running the primary, runoff, and general elections within a few weeks to notice that the very name of Mr. Golding’s party was illegal under section 2-124 of the Election Law, which forbids the use of the word “American” in a party name. But, then, no one noticed Golding, including the voters. I met him briefly on election night, when I was going home from the gym: he was standing near the top of the escalator leading down to the E and F trains at 53rd Street, distributing his fliers and urging people to vote. His platform seemed a tissue of idealism and gentle good will. This didn’t count for much in an age of anxiety: Golding polled 583 votes to come in ninth of nine candidates.

During my ride home, a panhandler entered my subway car, demanding alms because he didn’t rob people or use drugs. The reappearance of the permanent homeless on subway benches seemed somehow symptomatic of the Mayor’s loosening of the reins as he moved toward the end of his second term. Instead of maintaining general public order, the police power seemed focused on punishing ordinary citizens for the crimes of terrorists by forcing us through intrusive personal searches. Liberty—one of the ideas for which this country supposedly stands—is a negative thing. It is simply the right to be left alone in the peaceful conduct of one’s affairs. That right has been destroyed with no effective protest.

One saw it coming even before September 11. Earlier this year, a police officer prevented me from leaving the building in which I work. He simply told me that I couldn’t leave the building. I attempted peaceably to go my way. Then his sergeant came up and said I couldn’t leave the building because the President was in the vicinity. I attempted to step past him. He threatened me with arrest.

Now, I had been convicted of no crime, made no disturbance and was not subject to any court order restraining my passage on a public street. I had not consented to the restraint. However, as I told the sergeant, I obeyed him because he had a gun. Naked force counts for a lot with an unarmed man.

Now some Neanderthal security guard can paw through my briefcase when I enter a public library as well as when I leave one. Deputy U.S. marshals examine my clients’ papers when I enter a federal courthouse. I am compelled to offer the contents of my pockets for examination on entering the Brooklyn and Manhattan municipal buildings. Amidst all this, I keep remembering Ben Franklin’s epigram: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

If one can be so cynical as to suggest someone can earn a public office in the gift of the people, then within the context of New York City’s political system Mark Green had earned the mayoralty. As commissioner of consumer affairs and public advocate, Green had held city offices giving him publicity without power, which meant he made no serious mistakes while becoming and remaining one of the city’s best-known politicians. I had been acquainted with Mark Green for more than two decades, since we opposed each other for a Democratic congressional nomination in 1980. I found him arrogant and condescending. He seemed compelled to prove his intellectual superiority by insulting people. Nonetheless, I voted for him at the 1980 general elections, being a good loser, and voted for him again when he ran for U.S. senator in 1986, as he seemed more qualified than his opponents.

Over his decade in public life, as he ducked and weaved from left to center, he reminded me of the suggestion of Pierre Laval, a brilliant French politician of the years between the World Wars. He once told a youthful rightist, “You’ve made a strategic mistake. When you are young, you should go to the Left. Go as far to the Left as you can. And spend the rest of your life coming back. They’ll think you’re a statesman.” Laval began his career as a revolutionary socialist. He ended up against the wall, shot as a traitor. With Green, one’s distaste stemmed from the sense that his politics had moved to the center from calculation rather than maturity or conviction. This is the sort of thing that weakens one’s faith in a politician’s sincerity. You should believe in something, even if you only believe you’ll have another drink.

Perhaps Green believed—his arrogance can rise to the level of delusion—that his independence of the usual Democratic Party constituencies would enable him to govern without having to pay off the leadership of the unions, the teachers, the blacks and the gays. As we now know, however, you have to win the election before you can govern, and if your party’s constituents don’t turn out for you, you will lose.

This is a kind of institutional veto, and not a bad thing. As a longtime regular Democrat and clubhouse lawyer put it to me as we leaned on the brass rail at Dusk on W. 24th Street, “Mark Green,” he remarked, before pouring most of his Maker’s Mark down his throat, “is a man who has no friends. We”–gesturing grandly to encompass the entire city–“would have been fucked.” The election of Green’s opponent doesn’t guarantee that we won’t be. It proves we knew enough to try to avoid it.

December 4, 2001, New York Press

Albert Jay Nock, Superfluous Man

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of acquaintance, impossible of knowledge. In a sense Nock was describing himself.

His secrecy achieves epic grandeur in his brilliant autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943). He does not disclose the place and year of his birth (Scranton; 1870), the names of his parents or the occupation of his father (Joseph Albert Nock, an Episcopal clergyman, and Emma Jay, a descendant of John Jay), the name of his college (St. Stephen’s, now Bard), his twelve years as an Episcopal priest, his failed marriage (he left his wife after his second son was born in 1905), or his brief career in minor league baseball. He felt such information was unnecessary. Memoirs, the book’s publisher noted, was a “purely literary and philosophical autobiography.” A reader might know Nock’s mind through his work without needing to know him.

To our culture, Nock’s secrecy is unnerving. When he worked for The Nation during World War I, he refused to provide his superiors with his home address. During the early twenties, when he was editing The Freeman (a peer of H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, Harold Ross’ New Yorker and Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair for consistently brilliant writing), his editorial staff believed, according to his literary editor, Van Wyck Brooks, that Nock could be contacted outside the office only by leaving a note under a certain rock in Central Park.

Nock read by the age of three. He taught himself in his father’s library until he was eight, when he began studying Latin and Greek with some slight assistance from his father. At fourteen he began formal classical studies while developing his taste for German beer and the local “alfalfa-fed” girls. Then he went to St. Stephen’s. According to Nock, the college was, outside of certain Jesuit institutions, “possibly the last in America to stick by the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.” At graduation Nock felt himself prepared for living, albeit in proud ignorance of the natural sciences since Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny, or any history since 1500, including that of the United States. His education, he believed, had left him without a “lumber of prepossession or formula to be cleared away.”

Nock then bounced among universities, receiving an advanced degree almost by accident, and played minor league baseball. He was ordained in 1897 and served in various parishes until he left the priesthood in 1909. As a journeyman muckraker in New York, Nock wrote memorably about William Wirt’s experiments in progressive education in Gary, Indiana and the lynching of an African-American millworker in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He knew offbeat reform politicians, including New York Governor Martin Glynn and Mayors William J. Gaynor of New York and Brand Whitlock of Toledo, Ohio.

In 1915, during the first year of WWI, Nock traveled to Europe as an agent of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. According to Michael Wreszin’s The Superfluous Anarchist, Nock was to investigate State Deptartment employees’ surreptitious cooperation with British agents. Apparently, Bryan had no one else he could trust. However, Nock returned to America on Bryan’s sudden resignation on June 9, 1915. What he found and would have told Bryan is unknown.

Nock then worked for The Nation, which so strongly opposed American intervention that the government closed it down. In 1920, he organized The Freeman, which he intended as a radical publication.

Great editors inspire great magazines. Nock claimed only two gifts as an executive. One was judgment of ability: he claimed, “I can smell out talent as quickly and unerringly as a high-bred pointer can smell out a partridge.” The other was his belief that “a good executive’s job is to do nothing, and [one] can’t set about it too soon or stick to it too faithfully.”

Nock never gave orders, assigned subjects or set general policy. He sought merely writers (1) with a definite point of view, (2) stated clearly, (3) using “eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.” He told one would-be contributor, “Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that—glad to have it.”

Nevertheless, the paper had a distinct point of view. When The Nation welcomed The Freeman to “the ranks of liberal journalism,” Nock replied that he didn’t want to seem ungrateful, “but we hain’t liberal. We loathes liberalism and loathes it hard…”

Within two years, success became a bore. On February 10, 1924 after an extended sick leave and a dispute with his backers, Nock announced the magazine would fold with the issue of March 4, 1924. A day later, he sailed for Brussels, his favorite city, where he largely remained for fifteen years.

In 1926 Nock published Jefferson, the first of three biographical studies that occupied him for the next thiteem years. Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics,dismissively suggested Nock had created a Jefferson with the inner vision, aspiration and values of Albert Jay Nock. Nonetheless, the critics found it “provocative and insightful” and “sparkling, charming, witty, and all the other adjectives inevitably called forth by Nock’s inimitable prose style.”

After lecturing on education at Bard and the University of Virginia, Nock published The Theory of Education in the United States (1932). Education, to Nock, was a preparation for living, to see things as they are. Getting a living is merely a question of training. Few are educable; all can be trained. Certain intellectual and spiritual experiences are open to some and not to others: to Nock, this was simply a fact of nature, such as one’s height.

Nock argued that the distinction of education and training had been destroyed because the meanings of equality and democracy had been perverted. The first now meant “the rabid self-assertion…of ignorance and vulgarity.” Similarly, as he later wrote in Memoirs, “…the prime postulate of democracy is that there shall be nothing for anybody to enjoy that is not open for everybody to enjoy. Hence, despite human experience, everybody must be educable.”

Nock’s intellectual framework shifted in 1932 when the self-professed radical and Jeffersonian stopped believing in the improvability of man. This was catalyzed by Ralph Adams Cram, a distinguished architect, whose essay, “Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings,” appeared in the September 1932 issue of The American Mercury.

Cram’s reputation as an architect (he redesigned the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights) obscures his social criticism. In his essay, he argues that most men do not behave like human beings because they are not human. They are Neolithic barbarians with delusions of grandeur. In Cram’s view, the doctrine of progress—that the most recent stage of human development is superior to earlier stages—is unsupported by recorded history. Cram argued that anthropologists had erroneously categorized all men as human.

Nock soon professed his new faith. He wrote of momentary distress at seeing a man scavenging in a garbage pail. A few minutes later, he was undisturbed at seeing a dog do the same thing. Then he realized his erroneous presumption: that the man was a human being, rather than merely a man. Now, he no longer found any anomaly in a man’s behaving as a brute and not as a human being. To Nock, the distinction between the mob (which he called “mass-men”) and the few who were a glory to the human race (which he called the “Remnant”) was greater than that between the mob and certain higher anthropoids.

Oddly, he claimed he no longer hated anyone or lost patience with anybody. He wrote in Memoirs, “One has great affection for one’s dogs, even when one sees them reveling in tastes and smells which to us are unspeakably odious… One can hate human beings…but one can’t hate subhuman creatures, or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly… If cattle tramp down your garden, you drive them away but can’t hate them, for you know they are acting up to the measure of their psychical capacity… The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox, or polecat in the land. How, then, is one to hate them, notwithstanding the appalling evil they do?”

In this frame of mind, he wrote Our Enemy, the State (1935). Nock saw the state as antisocial, commandeered by one group or another of “mass-men” to legalize their appropriation of the product of others’ work without compensation. Revolutions merely reapportioned “the use of the political means” for such exploitation. He argued that most liberal reforms, such as the income tax, merely enhanced state power to further exploitation. If “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so many trade names for collectivist Statism,” he asked, why should one think more of Roosevelt than of Hitler?

From 1933 to 1939 Nock contributed a current affairs column, “The State of the Union,” to The American Mercury. He consistently assaulted the New Deal’s swineries, both foreign and domestic, and after 1936 argued American foreign policy was conducted to provoke war. In 1941, he published “The Jewish Question in America,” a two-part article in the Atlantic Monthly. Wreszin calls it “subtle and restrained.” Indeed, the prose is elegantly polished; the tone is serenely analytical; the venue is respectable; and the argument favors excluding the Jews through apartheid. Nock claims, as Wreszin says, “that he wished to launch a meaningful dialogue whereby intelligent Americans might probe the bigotry that infested not merely the lower orders but all society…” He claims to be charting “quicksands and rock formations so the piers of some future structure might be secure.”

He argues that Jews, being Orientals, cannot understand or communicate with Americans, who are Occidental. He suggests the Jews have failed to know their place, and anticipates seeing the “Nuremberg Laws reenacted and enforced with vigor.” Finally, Nock dismisses criticism by claiming Jews would be peculiarly unable to understand his meaning.

Thereafter, fewer editors accepted Nock’s articles. He began appearing in Scribner’s Commentator, an odd mixture of general essays and Nazi apologia, until it folded after Pearl Harbor. Finally, he was reduced to reviewing books in the Review of Books, published by Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council, a front for the few rightists openly opposed to the war after Pearl Harbor.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man appeared in 1943 to great praise. Clifton Fadiman, that most energetic of second-rank men of letters, wrote, “I have not since the days of the early Mencken read a more eloquently written blast against democracy or enjoyed more fully a display of crusted prejudice. Mr. Nock is a highly civilized man who does not like our civilization and will have no part of it. He is a rare bird, one of an almost extinct species, and as he very properly puts it, a superfluous man. We are not apt to see his like again.” The New York Herald Tribune’s Isabel Paterson wrote, “Whether for instruction or for entertainment, this is a unique book, of instant timeliness and permanent value.”

In Memoirs, published two years before his death, Nock wrote of being asked what he thought were the three most degrading occupations open to man. He replied that the first was holding office in a modern republic. The second was editing an American metropolitan newspaper. As for the third, he was unsure whether it was pimping or managing a whorehouse. He died on August 19, 1945, ten days after the bombing of Nagasaki.

New York Press, January 21, 2001

The Young Lion of Wrath

The rushed decisions are the worst. Imagine being a politician: not an orator or a legislator, but an administrator, one who governs, daily responsible for implementing policies devised by others. Imagine constantly making decisions with incomplete understanding and insufficient knowledge and not enough time to fill either gap; living with the paranoia—after all, does not the word bear translation as “higher knowledge”—that nearly everyone around you has a hidden agenda and plays you for a sucker….

(Pontius Pilate, by Ann Wroe. Random House, New York, 2000. 412 pg., $25.00)

Make things darker, more personal, and more dangerous. Your spouse is your only confidant. Your colleagues, the men with whom you work, eat, drink, and relax, would abandon you at a finger snap. The people you govern mistrust you and sometimes hate you enthusiastically.

Worse still, you can draw strength only from the love you bear the institution you serve, from your sense of its tradition, greatness, and enduring glory. Yet the man who gave you the job is monstrous, as are most politicians: a tissue of lusts rising to perversion, insecurities shading to paranoia, and self-confidence curdled into megalomania. Your dinner guests gossip of his misconduct. You “listen in the awful, sinking knowledge” that this man has made you what you are, and sometimes his obscenity sickens you.

Ann Wroe, who edits the American section of The Economist, has written the most remarkable book I have read this year: a biography of a minor politician of the first century. Merely writing the book seems an insuperable challenge. There are nearly no records. Even his numerous public works (an aqueduct, military roads, and public buildings, all probably padding his pocket—bribes were an accepted prerogative of the job, called unguentaria, ointment money)—have vanished. All that remains is a single limestone block found amidst the ruins of Caesarea, bearing a fragmentary inscription with his name and office:

PONTIVS PILATVS
PRAEFECTVS IVDAEAE

Though one of the most famous men in world history, Pontius Pilate, fifth Prefect of Judaea, is a difficult subject. As Wroe found, even the evidence of his existence is fragmentary. Though his name has been uttered daily in prayer for nearly two thousand years, even this is a fragment: we do not know his first name, the praenomen, “the name his mother and wife and friends called him by.” None of his writings survived—not even a leaf of a decade’s daily reports to the Emperor. He must have made thousands of decisions during his decade in power. We remember only one.

Today, the contemporary documents of his existence might be transcribed onto three or four typed pages, double-spaced. Flavius Josephus, a Romanized Jew, mentions him not unfavorably in The Jewish War, written four decades after Pilate’s return to Rome. Philo of Alexandria knew Pilate. He savages him in a few pages of his voluminous works. But Philo hated all Romans and the portrait is two-dimensional. Tacitus mentions Pilate once in the Historia. Even that is a fragment: Tacitus’s chapters for the early thirties are missing and may have said much more. Last, the Dead Sea Scrolls call him “the Young Lion of Wrath.”

Starting with these materials, Wroe studied the Apocrypha (the religious works excluded from the official Bible, early victims of consensus reality) and Pilate’s hagiographies (the Ethiopians consider him a saint, as the means by which the prophecies were fulfilled and one of the first to believe in the Resurrection: “I believe that you have risen and have appeared to me, and you will not judge me…”). She read the surviving Roman literature from his lifetime or shortly before or after for a sense of how he would have seen the world; the “fairy tales, legends, travelogues, guidebooks, to follow where his ghost had walked around Europe”; and numerous lives of Christ to see how commentators have seen Pilate over the last two centuries. She viewed or read the modern works in which Pilate appears as a character, including Antonio Ciseri’s historicist masterpiece, Ecce Homo, which graces the cover.

The result is a beautiful, compelling study of the man who ordered the Crucifixion. Pontius Pilate was a professional soldier, probably not much older than thirty, the statutory minimum for a Roman governor. His temperament and character reflect a man not yet smoothed by experience, efficient but not mature, “enthusiastic, sarcastic, nervous, occasionally brutal.” The Gospels suggest he had a short fuse. All the sources unite on this: he was a man of action, not reflection.

He probably disliked the Jews because they despised him. Even the high priests and Pharisees who dragged Jesus to Pilate’s palace in Jerusalem refused to pass its doors, for Pilate and the Romans were unclean. Then there were the rebels, “mavericks, prophets, and impostors,” the usual cross between bandits, vandals, and freedom fighters. Roman policy favored their comprehensive elimination. His predecessor Gratus crucified hundreds; his successor Varus would crucify thousands. Yet, as his foes agreed, he kept the peace for ten years. The most important messianic disturbance of his rule was suppressed with only three crucifixions.

Wroe notes that his clan, the Pontii, was not Roman but Samnite: Italian tribesmen conquered by the Romans in the third century BC. His family was thus probably respectable, but second class: members of the knightly class, special administrators, and trouble-shooters, never rising to patrician rank.

His cognomen, Pilate, comes from pilatus, “one skilled with the javelin.” It meant more than this, of course: his father or he had excelled with a difficult weapon, showing traits of “decisiveness, strength, straightness of aim.” Yet, the evidence of his political life shows little of that.

Perhaps these traits were unnecessary. As Wroe observes, the Emperor Tiberius preferred unknown quantities in high office. It may have amused him. At best, Tiberius looked for decent behavior and good character. In a pinch, even decent behavior might be dropped: Tiberius appointed Pomponius Flaccus governor of Syria on the strength of a thirty-six hour orgy, endorsing his commission with “A good fellow at all hours, day or night!”

The Emperor was tall, robust, and handsome, slow spoken, with something of an affected drawl, shrewd, suspicious, and devious. He was an alcoholic with a taste for naked swimming-and-sex sessions with minors of both sexes. We are told that some, whom he called his “minnows,” gave him particular pleasure by swimming up to him underwater and taking him in their mouths.

The Emperor believed the revelation of his thought a calamity. Dio Cassius wrote, “he put many to death for no other offense than having grasped what he meant.” He trusted no one, and of his twenty or so intimates over his seventy-seven years of life, all but two or three were put to death. In a killing mood, “which lasted for most of the time Pilate was governor of Judaea,” he executed people “on the least word of any informer, and informers were everywhere.” Perhaps this is why Pilate, as presented by John the Evangelist, flinches when the Jews suggest that if he spares Jesus, “You are no friend of Caesar’s.”

This mediocrity is the hinge of Western history. The Evangelists were fond of citing famous events to provide a temporal reference for their story. Thus, at the time of the birth of Jesus, Caesar Augustus commands a census be taken so all the world may be taxed. The head tax, literally per capita, could be audited only by taking a census. It was unpopular: Copronius, one of the first prefects, crucified Judas the Galilean, a tax protester. So one would remember, or remember hearing from one’s father, about the census and then paying the tax. Thus, Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas the high priest, Herod the king, were not merely names, characters in a narrative, to the Christians who first read the Gospels, but men, as real in the memory of the First Century as FDR or JFK are in our own.

Pilate is more important than the others, as Wroe observes, “because he stands at the center of the Christian story and God’s plan of redemption. Without his climactic judgment of Jesus, the world would not have been saved. Without Christ’s death, pronounced by Pilate, there would have been no Resurrection, no founding Christian miracle.”

She describes the book in her introduction as a collage of biographical scenes, drawing on a diversity of traditions and writings. Perhaps it is the only way to sketch someone so unknowable. “We long for records, letters, diaries, the memories of friends,” Wroe writes.

As she notes, we cannot presume the Romans to be just like us, save for their clothes and haircuts. We would find them alien. Their sensual appreciation of blood is repellent; their admiration of suicide repugnant; as Wroe notes, Marcus Aurelius, among the noblest men who ever lived, considered putrescence a thing of beauty.

Yet, we know one thing that intrigued Pilate as it does us. At the trial of Jesus of Nazareth as presented by St. John the Evangelist, the defendant and judge endure a frustrating exchange. Pilate asks direct questions. When Jesus answers at all, he is responding on a different plane. The two men are simply not talking about the same things.

At last, Jesus states that he has come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Pilate replies with a question so strange that you know he said it: “What is truth?” or, in Greek, then still the working language of the eastern empire, “Ti estin aletheia?”

Wroe points out the subtle difference: Pilate is speaking of a narrow, particular truth: the truth of facts and testimony and evidence. But Jesus was speaking of “he aletheia”—absolute Truth. Wroe observes, “Jesus was referring to a truth that was overpoweringly different: as different, Polybius had once said, as when a galley rower, trained on skeleton ships on dry land, suddenly felt in the live ocean the pull of the oar and the craft’s response.”

And Pilate? Perhaps, as an Academician, he believed the way of wisdom was acknowledging the uncertainty of knowledge, and he felt the claim of Jesus was recklessly certain. Or perhaps, as Kazantzakis wrote, the Roman believed in nothing at all, “neither in gods nor in men, nor in Pontius Pilate.”

What is truth? The question is relevant to Pilate’s biography, too. In writing the life of a man nearly two thousand years dead, who disappears from the record after his recall from office, one is not transcribing a life. One seeks the truth, or at least, the truths, with a certain resolute desperation.

Yet Wroe gracefully presents the alternative theories of the essential moments in Pilate’s career and of his background (the Italians call him a Spaniard and the French and English a German) without stalling her narrative. Her prose is clear, supple, and quite beautiful. She captures the texture of power, particularly the confusion and exhaustion stemming from its exercise, with clarity and common sense. Anyone who has wielded limited authority has been there: to be tired, confronted by someone who wants something very badly, about which you care little save as it may affect your mission. To grant it is unjust. Yet if you give it to them, they will leave you alone.

She captures this so well. She brilliantly juxtaposes images spanning two millennia—the Dead Sea Scrolls, David Bowie, 19^th century academic painters, modernist playwrights—with a dexterous ease that betrays intellectual power and integrity. Pontius Pilate is impressive, concise, and fast moving, with eloquence that naturally flows from the grandeur of her material rather than a rhetorician’s self-conscious flourishes.

Ann Wroe has not written a book so much about Pilate as all our Pilates: how each generation projects on the tabula rasa that is this man our image of how he lived and saw the world. Yet somehow she gives us the sense of “a man actually walking on a marble floor in Caesarea,” a narrative pieced from a thousand fragments into the outline of a life.

New York Press, June 7, 2000

More Catholic than the Pope

The titles of the Pope sound like a fanfare: Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the Servants of God. He is elected in secret conclave, met in the Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Upon his election, the ballots are burned: their white smoke, rising from a Vatican chimney, signals a new pope to the world.

Until the 1960s he was crowned amidst unbearable splendor, culminating when, placing the tiara on the Pope’s head, the Cardinal-Archdeacon intoned, “Receive this tiara adorned with three crowns, and know Thyself to be the Ruler of the World, the earthly Vicar of Jesus Christ our Savior, to Whom be glory and honor without end.” Many elements of the baroque grandeur of the church before the Second Vatican Council were merely the accretions of nearly 2000 years’ worldly power and as such, though often thrilling, poetic, or touching, secondary to its divine mission: saving souls. Most were swept away in the post-conciliar upheaval.

For the people in the pews, the most important change involved the Mass, the center of Catholic worship. The Mass is not a communion service, a reenactment, a commemoration, or a symbolic performance. To believers, it is literally the sacrifice of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Savior of the World: perhaps the most important thing in this life. In the 16th century, Pius V and later the Council of Trent confirmed the traditional Roman rite, popularly called the Tridentine Rite, and commanded that it endure for all time. It lasted four centuries, followed without variation throughout Catholicism: celebrated in Latin, with the priest facing God at the head of the people, its focus the sacrifice itself. One might attend Mass anywhere in the world and be at home.

In April 1969, Paul VI authorized the Novus Ordo to replace the Tridentine Mass as the universal liturgy of the church. The old rite was never abolished, although the elite favored doing so. Often those who spoke most of opening the church to the people forced the new rites on those who preferred the old one. The American media vulgarized the changes as no more than celebration of the Mass in the vernacular. This was incorrect. Important things were changed. The emphasis shifted from the sacrifice to the congregation. The rhetoric was different, and the new language often ambiguous, bureaucratic and unsatisfying. The priest now faced the congregation rather than God.

Many Catholics still resent the modernized vernacular liturgy. By contrast with the rampant supernaturalism of the old rite, as Michael W. Cuneo observed, contemporary Catholic worship in America is sanitized and culturally respectable. But it is bourgeois: bloodless, unimpassioned and decorous. In the suburban parish where I grew up, the Mass became a matter of enveloping us in hazy good will, forced handshakes, and a middle-class coziness. It calls to mind Hugh Cecil’s characterization of the Church of England as “a spiritual pharmacy to which one may send for a bottle of grace whenever one happens to want it,” with “no sense of belonging to an unseen Kingdom with a loyalty to an unseen King.”

Some traditionalist Catholics have gone their own ways. Desiring the unified, triumphalist church of half a century ago, they seek it through schism. Some flirt with the unauthorized Tridentine Masses of Father Gommer de Pauw’s Catholic Traditionalist Movement or of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X.

Beyond Lefebvre lie the fever swamps. Sedevacantists (literally, “the chair is vacant”) hold that as Catholic doctrine is eternally valid and unchanging and the papacy exists to preserve it as such, any so-called pope who would alter these teachings is illegitimate. For example, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatus Humanae, affirms the spiritual value of other religions and calls for interreligious cooperation. At first glance, this apparently contradicts encyclicals of Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XI and Pius XII, published from 1832 to 1943. Each affirmed that the Catholic Church alone possessed fullness of truth and the certain means of salvation. A pope speaks with infallibility on matters of faith and morals. To traditionalists, the principle of noncontradiction means either these popes were right or the Council was right. Both cannot be right at the same time.

Sedevacantists hold that by calling the Council and enunciating its teachings, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and now John Paul II are heretics and not popes. (Some also hold John XXIII was a Freemason and the tool of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy and as such ineligible to be the Vicar of Christ.) Some sedevacantists go from proclaiming the seat vacant to filling it themselves.

At one time, being an antipope meant something. Once during the Great Schism of the West (1378-1417), Pope Gregory XII and two antipopes, Benedict XIII and John XXIII (not to be confused with the modern John XXIII) disputed pontificality. The last was particularly controversial: Edward Gibbon wrote that when John XXIII was indicted by the Council of Constance in 1417, “The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.”

Today’s antipopes command neither armies, nor territories, nor much of a following. One doubts the Vatican is much concerned with Gregory XVII of Troyar la Palma, Spain; Gregory XVII of St. Jovite, Quebec; Michael I of Kansas; Peter II of Pennsylvania; Peter II of France; or Peter II of Germany. Happily, some maintain Web pages, like that of the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church. Its bishop, James H. Hess, part-time cleric and full-time CPA, also sells “a board game which I created and copyrighted.” A persistent salesman, Hess writes, “…you of the clergy, accept the truth of apostolic Roman Catholicism, work to establish a true papacy.”

…and then, if in your ministry, you find you need good vestments and altarware at good prices, write to Pax House, Apdo. Postal 39-181, Guadalajara, Jalisco 44171, Mexico.

Clemente Dominguez Gomez of Troyar la Palma claimed the Virgin had revealed to him Paul VI’s secret imprisonment and replacement by “an exact impostor.” As if Marian apparition were insufficient, Dominguez said Paul VI had confirmed this through “bilocation.” On these credentials, the Spaniard persuaded Pierre Martin Ngo-Dinh-Thuc, an exiled Vietnamese bishop, to ordain him a priest on January 1, 1976. Eleven days later, Thuc consecrated Dominguez a bishop. When Paul VI died in 1978, Dominguez proclaimed himself Pope Gregory XVII.

In 1968, Father John Gregory of the Trinity, founder of the Apostles of Infinite Love at St. Jovite, Quebec, announced he had been mystically crowned Pope, also under the name of Gregory XVII. Thirty-one years later, he was arrested for child molesting, on charges going back as far as 1965.

Now John Paul II has another rival. According to the True Catholic website (www.truecatholic.org), Earl Pulvermacher was elected Pope Pius XIII on October 24, 1998. Pulvermacher states that he was born in Wisconsin in 1918 and ordained in 1946. Thirty years later, he rejected the Novus Ordo and became a freelance priest. Pulvermacher’s “conclave movement” holds that the entire hierarchy of the church—pope, cardinals, bishops and priests—having fallen into heresy, have ipso facto vacated their offices. Thus, under natural law, the true Catholics have the right to fill the vacancy by electing a pope.

He claims the organizers of the 1998 conclave took three years to plan and organize the election. They approached “all known true Catholics,” requiring would-be electors to sign documents relating to their baptism, age, beliefs with respect to the Second Vatican Council, and nonassociation with any individuals connected with the “Novus Ordo Church.” On October 23, 1998, three scrutinizers at a telephone began taking votes from electors. They worked until the next day, recording each vote on a separate paper ballot. Then they communicated the result to Pulvermacher by speakerphone. Presumably, they asked something resembling the old question, “Reverend Lord, the Sacred College has elected thee to be the successor of St. Peter. Wilt thou accept pontificality?” Pulvermacher accepted, and, according to the website, “at that very moment, the papacy was restored.” The site shows a picture of the “White Smoke” rising from the eaves of a prefabricated log cabin.

Again according to the site, “Catholics world-wide rejoice and offer their thanks to Almighty God for restoring the papacy to the Catholic Church,” while “the youth of the world…are getting the answers they seek, answers from traditional Catholic teaching…giving their ‘Profession of Faith’ and joining the true Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.” The documents accessible through the website offer no comment from the secular or religious press, no words of affirmation from distinguished laymen—or anything that might not have come from a fertile imagination and decent catechetical library. The photographs show only Pulvermacher, his henchman Gordon Cardinal Bateman, two other persons in ecclesiastical robes and, of course, a couple of altar boys.

There are no Swiss Guards, no Chamberlains, no papal knights, no throngs pressing against the rail. Only once, indeed, does Pulvermacher’s site note the actual number of participants in any of his ceremonies: twenty-eight, who attended his consecration as a bishop in a rented hotel ballroom in Kalispell, Montanna. Each shared a slice of a frosted cake decorated with the words, “Long Live Pope Pius XIII.”

New York Press, April 4, 2000

The Truth as You See It

In 1900, when newspapers were still the only mass media, over thirty daily papers of general and specialized circulation were published in Manhattan alone. But by the Twenties, a combination of massive capital investment and increasing difficulties in getting through traffic jams to deliver the newspapers to customers made launching

For example, the Daily News, first published on June 26, 1919, was founded by Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, an heir to the family that published the Chicago Tribune. Within five years its large photographs, wild headlines, and popular columnists had given the Daily News a circulation of 750,000, making it the most widely read daily in the United States. In 1924, William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal and the New York American, declared war on Patterson by starting his own tabloid, the Daily Mirror.

But these papers, however sensational, still published something that could be recognized as news. Nothing had prepared journalism for Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Graphic.

Macfadden proved that material success can be won by the hard-working, ambitious, and utterly humorless. He was an ignoramus with the courage of his convictions, believing that whatever interested him would interest everybody else, and for an amazingly long time, he was largely right.

He was a graphomaniac health nut: during his long career, he published some 150 books on diet and fitness. He was also fixated on sex, although to call his focus on the human body an obsession is to lend glamor to a grimly Celtic fanaticism.

Bernard Adolphus McFadden was born near Mill Spring, Missouri on August 16, 1868. No one knows when or why he changed his name: one memoirist wrote, “…there was a legend around the Macfadden magazines…that the name was a misprint of Bernard, but that upon seeing it misspelled by a printer he had decided to keep it.”

He arrived in New York in 1894 after a brief stint as a professional wrestler with Sandow, the Strong Man. Four years later, already a vegetarian and non-drinker, Macfadden launched his first magazine, Physical Culture, from the Flatiron Building. At first he wrote most of the magazine himself, including its serialized novels. He also posed for the magazine in various stages of undress as an exemplar of Healthy American Manhood. He lectured, denounced alcohol and tobacco, and advocated fasting, natural healing, and exercise.

In 1912, his five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture argued that all major illnesses, including polio, cancer, and Bright’s disease, could be cured by simple diets, water therapy, and modest exercises. One diet called for grapes—nothing but grapes—which Macfadden insisted would eradicate any cancer in the system.

His four marriages produced eight children, six of whom were daughters—Berwyn, Braunda, Beverly, Brynece, Byrne, and Beulah. They were a handsome family, and he loved publishing photographs of his children as representative of ideal American youth, often wearing costumes that Graphic reporter Lester Cohen later described as looking “like…a number of silk handkerchiefs, hanging here or there.”

Then he made his fortune. True Story began publication in 1918. It was the first modern true-confessions magazine. It warned young women against “random flirtations and promiscuous sex.”

One of his writers once asked an editor, “Can a heroine of True Story have sexual intercourse?”

“Yes,” the editor replied, “if she doesn’t enjoy it.”

Perhaps the greatest argument for Macfadden’s sanity is that, when the magazine’s sales dipped in 1920, he did a complete turnabout, publishing stories that placed a heavy emphasis on women who sought sexual gratification outside the bounds of marriage (although Macfadden still drew a conventional moral lesson from his characters’ unhappy lives).

At a time when most magazines still used illustrators, Macfadden used posed photographs of actors or models to illustrate his stories. He always admitted the photographs were posed, usually in microscopic type on the contents page. The mere use of photographs blurred the line between fiction and fact: many of his readers believed the stories were true.

True Story became enormously popular. It spawned legions of imitators. Then he started True Detective Stories and other gritty pulp magazines. He made $30 million within five years. This was not enough: he had to publish a New York City daily. Thus, on April 15, 1924, the New York Graphic hit the streets for the first time.

Of course, Macfadden’s paper would publish Nothing but the Truth: it said so on the masthead. He knew what the public wanted: after all, he’d succeeded with True Story and his other magazines. And it would be a crusading newspaper, fighting for health and physical fitness and against medical ignorance, fighting against the use of pharmaceuticals and against what he called “Prurient Prudery,” to advance “a new human race, free of inhibitions and free of the contamination of smallpox vaccine.” Within days, the joke was that the Graphic was for fornication, against vaccination.

Macfadden, then in his late fifties, was slender, beaky, and about five feet, six inches tall. He looked vaguely exotic: many thought he had Native American blood. He spoke with a bizarre accent: one listener compared it to a combination of Old Scotch and Choctaw.

Macfadden had assembled some interesting professional talent. Money can do that. His managing editor, Emile Gauvreau, had been editor of the Hartford Courant at twenty-six; his memoirs, My Last Million Readers, is a fine, racy impression of Twenties tabloid journalism. Macfadden’s greatest catch was an unknown, Walter Winchell. It was Winchell’s first job on a daily newspaper. He was the nightclub editor, sports columnist, and dramatic critic. Within months, his gossip column made him famous; within two years, it landed him a job with Hearst. Better than Macfadden, perhaps, he knew what “they” wanted.

Between his own genius, the keyhole journalism of Walter Winchell, and contests (the Graphic appears to have been the first American daily to offer cash prizes in crossword puzzle competitions), Gauvreau built circulation from 30,000 to 300,000 within two years. Headlines like “Nude Models and Students in Mad Revel at Paris Ball” and “Boys Spill Beans on Nude Coeds in Reservoir Swim” helped a lot.

So did the Composograph, “a depiction, posed in the Art Department, of a sensational real-life scene that…could not be photographed.” To Macfadden, it was simply the logical extension of the sort of thing that his magazines had done for years. His competitors found it fraudulent and unethical.

The tabloid photographers would do almost anything for a great shot. Thus, on January 12, 1928, Tom Howard, a Chicago Tribune photographer on assignment to the Daily News, concealed a miniature camera in his pants to illegally smuggle it into Sing Sing so that he could snap murderess Ruth Snyder, bound and hooded in Old Sparky, just as the executioner flipped the switch.

They were nearly two years behind the Graphic, which had used a Composograph to cover the execution of cop-killing post office bandit Gerald Chapman, whose polished manner had won him the tabloid nicknames “Gentleman Gerald” and “The Count of Gramercy Park.” Gus Schoenbaechler, a Graphic staff, posed as Chapman; his editor hung him from a steam pipe for the shot; Schoenbaechler nearly strangled himself when he accidentally kicked away the chair; and the picture made the Graphic’s front page on Tuesday, April 6, 1926.

More importantly for the Graphic’s prurient readership, as long as the darkroom held out, the Graphic could simply fake front page photographs showing celebrities in intimate situations, as in the misadventures of Daddy Browning and his child-bride, Peaches.

Edward West Browning (1875-1934) rose from office boy to real estate multimillionaire by the age of forty. He first appeared in the tabloids when his wife left him for the family dentist in 1924. He complained, “How can any sensible woman fall in love with a dentist, particularly with the dentist who has done her own work?” Mrs. Browning’s response was to allege Browning’s weakness for little girls.

The divorce settlement left Browning with custody of his adopted daughter Dorothy. Within a year of the divorce, Browning, claiming she needed a sister, advertised in the Herald Tribune for a “pretty, refined girl, about fourteen years old…” He allegedly interviewed 12,000 applicants over two weeks, bouncing the girls on his knee as he caressed and pinched them. Unfortunately, the successful candidate was soon exposed as a twenty-one-year-old impostor.

A year later, Browning met Frances Heenan at a sorority dance. The fifty-one-year-old was entranced by the fifteen year-old blonde. He said, “You look like peaches and cream to me! I’m going to call you Peaches.” The tabloids had already named him “Daddy.”

At five feet, seven inches and 145 pounds, Peaches was a healthy girl. Damon Runyon wrote, “She is…one of those large, patient blondes…her legs are what the boys call piano legs. They say she is fifteen, but she is developed enough to pass anywhere for twenty.”

They were married on April 11, 1926; on October 2, 1926, less than six months later, she marched out of their hotel lugging $30,000 worth of jewels, furs, gowns, and gifts while screaming, “Money isn’t everything!”

Daddy and Peaches each held numerous press conferences, at which they washed, as one writer commented, not only their dirty linen but their scanties and socks as well. Before their five-day divorce trial, Peaches confusingly claimed that: that he had forced her to perform unnatural acts, that she had had nightly relations with him “except when ill,” and that she had never slept with Browning at all.

At trial, Peaches testified that Browning had forced her to look at pornography and eat breakfast with him in the nude. He loved to hide behind doors and screens and then jump out naked to surprise her, shouting “Woof! Woof!”

Macfadden found this material irresistible. A flood of Composographs followed, such as one showing Daddy (discreetly in his pajamas) advancing on a cowering, towel-draped Peaches, saying “Woof! Woof! Don’t be a goof!” in an overhead comic-strip balloon while Daddy’s pet African honking gander, “perched on the marital bed,” comments “Honk! Honk! It’s the bonk!”

Peaches was awarded $350 a week in temporary alimony, cut off when the divorce was finalized.

The death of film star Rudolph Valentino, the Great Lover of the silent screen, made the Composograph almost infamous. Near the height of his fame, Valentino was only 31 when he died suddenly of peritonitis on August 23, 1926. There was an orgy of frenzied mourning, encouraged by the studios and the tabloids, with hysterical mobs shattering windows to get into Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home on Madison Avenue where Valentino’s body lay in state.

Macfadden sent two photographers to Campbell’s before the body’s arrival. Presumably after a distribution of appropriate gratuities, one photographer posed in Valentino’s empty casket. The other snapped away. While developing the photograph, the darkroom boys superimposed the actor’s head on the photographer’s body. Thus the Graphic had a picture of Valentino in the box before Campbell’s had finished embalming him. The boys also created a picture of Valentino on the operating table (Graphic staffer Lester Cohen later wrote that he recognized two fellow reporters among the “surgeons” and “nurses” in the photograph) and yet another, based on a medium’s vision, showing Valentino standing with Enrico Caruso in heaven as scores of dead souls ascend the stairway to the Pearly Gates.

Macfadden responded to one critic of this sort of thing by snapping, “What’s the harm in telling the public the truth as you see it? I ask you, sir!”

Macfadden never tired of pushing his nuttier ideas into the paper against Gauvreau’s better instincts. In 1928, Gauvreau, worn out by fighting with his boss, left the Graphic for peace and tranquillity as managing editor of Hearst’s Daily Mirror, and the paper lost momentum with his departure. Macfadden, now convinced he should be President of the United States, further dissipated his energies by building a chain of newspapers and magazines to further his ambitions. Nearly all lost money.

On July 7, 1932, Macfadden folded the Graphic. In eight years, he had reportedly lost between seven and eleven million dollars. He never actually ran for President: in 1940, he ran for U.S. Senator from Florida in the Democratic primary, one of those old-fashioned races with sixteen candidates, and managed to poll a little over ten percent of the vote. A year later, the bankers took over Macfadden Publications and he was out.

In 1955, Macfadden was diagnosed with jaundice. Refusing all medical help, he trusted to fasting. He died on October 12, 1955—probably of his own prescription.

New York Press, January 11, 2000

Everybody’s Story

Anumber of shrinks of my acquaintance were heard to express impatience with Jennifer Melfi M.D. in the week before New Year’s, when HBO rebroadcast the first thirteen episodes of The Sopranos, preparatory to this Sunday’s launch of the new season. Dr. Melfi, therapist to Tony Soprano, is one of the central figures in the wildly popular series about a present-day Mafia capo who seeks counseling when the personal and professional pressures of his life becomes too great for him to bear.

Dr. Melfi is played by Lorraine Bracco, which is an interesting bit of casting.

[From New York Press, January 8, 2000]

Dr. Melfi is played by Lorraine Bracco, which is an interesting bit of casting. In GoodFellas, the film Martin Scorsese based on Wiseguy, Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction account of the glory days of a minor Mafioso, Bracco played Karen, Ray Liotta’s naive girlfriend and wife, and if there’s one thing The Sopranos is aware of, it’s Mafia movies—particularly the Coppola and Scorsese oeuvre. Karen bore a certain resemblance to the character played by Edie Falco in The Sopranos, Tony’s wife Carmela. Both are essentially infantile women, capable of experiencing life on only the most physical and primitive level, in terms of status and material gain. Consequently, when Tony seemed to be developing a crush on Dr. Melfi midway through the first season, it was sort of charming. The scene in which he tried to explain why he wanted his mistress to dress less like a mistress and more like Dr. Melfi was the first time we’d seen him manifest any remotely endearing quality. It was as though not Tony alone but the very figure of the gangland antihero was growing up.

Dr. Melfi has offices in the Montclair Medical Suites, not far from the North Jersey suburb where Tony lives; but we don’t know that at first, any more than we start out knowing that his usual approach to the office-block is through the doughnut shop beside the newspaper stand, out the back way, and across an alley to a little-used service entrance. We only find this out in the episode in which Tony panics thinking that Silvio—the henchman played by Steve Van Zandt—might have followed him to Dr. Melfi’s. (Actually, Silvio was just visiting a dentist on the same hall.) “I thought we were making progress on your narcissism,” Dr. Melfi comments, sounding discouraged. It’s the sort of remark that drives the mental health professionals in my family crazy.

Growing up around psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, I’m used to hearing them complain about how shrinks are portrayed in movies and on television. It’s everybody’s story. I don’t care who you are—hit man or head doctor. We’re all misrepresented, stereotyped by the media and by each other. What’s interesting is where the analytic community breaks down on the issue of Dr. Melfi. I did a little informal investigative work the week after New Year’s—asking questions, jogging memories, describing scenes, putting this or that practitioner’s remarks before this or that colleague. To a man, the analysts I spoke with all described Melfi as a mediocre if representative clinician. What nobody agreed on was whether or not she’s supposed to be perceived that way.

Is Bracco supposed to be a good shrink or poor one? Nobody seems to know. It’s an interesting question—not least of all because of the show’s stance vis-a-vis the Mob. The Sopranos is about the Mafia in decline, after its heyday. But psychoanalysis is also arguably past its prime. Are the creators of The Sopranos aware of this? If so—if Melfi is merely supposed to be typical of the current state of psychiatry rather than a credit to it—it would mean that The Sopranos was about not one but two dynasties in decline, two empires under siege: the Mafia, under attack by witness protection and RICO, and Freudian psychoanalysis by psychotropic drugs and the waning of clinical supervision.

In a way, it’s not surprising that The Sopranos should be hard to read on the issue of therapy. Its attitude toward the Mafia also hard to read. Or rather, it is and it isn’t. It’s unambivalently ambivalent, unambiguously ambiguous—that’s clarity of a kind. The Sopranos focuses on the world of organized crime but without buying into the gangster mystique that is so much a part of the American consciousness and popular culture. I think it’s one of several reasons why I was slow in warming to the series: I couldn’t understand why we were supposed to care about these people.

I also had a hard time with the duck trope. The first thing we learn about Tony is the strange attachment he’d formed to a family of ducks who’d been living in the swimming pool in his backyard. It turns out to have been their departure, in fact, that triggered Tony’s depression and panic attacks. “They were a family,” Dr. Melfi points out in the sort of intrusive interpretation she is given to. A couple of episodes of this and I was thinking, “Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?”

I was also initially irritated by the self-referential quality of the writing. The members of Tony’s immediate circle are always invoking gangster movies. They quote The Godfather and allude to Scarface. One of them has a car-horn that plays the first few notes of “The Godfather Theme.” Carmela sits around watching Mafia movies with the parish priest, and Tony’s nephew Christopher is thinking of selling his story to Hollywood. He knows someone who knows Tarantino’s development person, and later we find him writing a screenplay and worrying about the “arc” of his life. An early episode even included an appearance by Mr. Scorsese.

Finally, I felt that David Chase, the series’ creator, was playing fast and loose with the gangster-movie genre, commenting on it without really understanding it.

There’s a wonderful essay called “The Gangster As Tragic Hero,” written in 1948 by a now-largely-forgotten critic named Robert Warshow, that sets out to analyze the gangster picture and it’s place in American popular culture. The first point Warshow makes is about the gangster’s connection with the urban landscape:

The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring… For everyone else, there is at least the theoretical possibility of another world—in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and more brightly lit country—but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it; not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.

According to Warshow, the gangster offers us a chance to experience Aristotelian tragedy at a visceral level: he is “what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.” Warshow’s second point is that the gangster film follows a Marxist trajectory: the gangster is the embodiment of enterprise who rises in order that we may see him fall—an interesting idea, if a little tendentious.

The gangster’s whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual, to draw himself out of the crowd, and he always dies because he is an individual… At bottom the gangster is doomed because he is under an obligation to succeed, not because the means he employs are unlawful. In the deeper layers of the modern consciousness, all means are unlawful, every attempt to succeed is an act of aggression…

Warshow’s third point is that the gangster is primarily “a creature of the imagination…even to himself.” He cites Edward G. Robinson’s dying words in Little Caesar referring to himself in the third person.

It’s an eloquent account of the genre—up to 1948. But then came Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese. Puzio and Coppola made the mobster glamorous. Pileggi and Scorsese made him post-narrative. By focusing on the peripheral figure—the mechanic rather than the capo di tutti capi—and by allowing him to tell his own story in his own voice, Pileggi and Scorsese introduced the unreliable narrator into the formula. Scorsese’s big innovation was to see what it would mean for us to watch glamorous people—stars—do truly horrible things while we listened to the same acts being fondly—admiringly— recalled by one of the participants. GoodFellas showed us sadism and brutality through Liotta’s eyes—all the while suppressing the crucial fact that Pileggi’s book began with. It’s only in the last few minutes of the picture that we discover Liotta is telling his story to the FBI.

If The Sopranos manages to avoid glamorizing violence, that’s partly because we’re watching actors, not stars, do horrible things. You can’t cast actors like Brando and De Niro and not have them appear larger than life to us. The key to our perception of the characters in the television series is the fact that although the writing isn’t particularly sympathetic to them, the extraordinary performances by Gandolfini and Falco and company are.

Of course, if you inject enough realism and sophistication into a genre, it ceases to be interesting, ceases to be itself. At first it seemed to me that this was what was happening with The Sopranos. The idea of juxtaposing the gangster worldview with that of psychoanalysis—not for comic purposes—felt wrong-headed. It is the mutual exclusivity of the two ethics that make their confrontation in Analyze This so funny. The psychiatrist tells us to adapt to a world in which we can’t have everything we want. The gangster says, “Give me what I want or I’ll kill you.”

If the gangster was always, as Warshow argued, an artistic construct, a sort of self-made metaphor, Tony Soprano’s problem is something closer to meta-self-consciousness. Tony and his friends are not only conscious of living in a post-Scorsese world, they know what that means. It means it’s over. “I was thinking it’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” Tony tells Melfi, referring to the day he first collapsed. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end. The best is over.” To which Melfi replies: “I think a lot of Americans feel that way.”

The Sopranos is about what it means to be a part of something whose chief characteristic is that over-ness, about living in a world in which the fat lady has for all practical purposes sung. It’s about the fact that in some sense we’re all living in a post-Scorsese world. In whatever way this manifests itself, we all feel our lives have become impossibly self-conscious. Bracco to Gandolfini: “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? The mystery of God or whatever you want to call it—and why we’re given the questionable gift of knowing that we’re going to die?”

Our problem, though, isn’t being aware we’re going to die; it’s being aware of being aware. In cinematic terms that manifests itself in the self-referential art form, the thing that cannot just be itself because it’s been so well observed and commented on. It’s the post-Freudian curse.

Is The Sopranos about two embattled value systems having a sit-down, confronting each other across the negotiating table? I honestly can’t tell. Certainly Tony thinks well of Dr. Melfi. “You were a good doctor to me,” he tells her with affection but no affect in the last episode of the first season, thinking he is going on the lam. And she’s certainly done her best. Still, it’s interesting that at this moment the patient should manage to achieve precisely the neutral-yet-caring tone that the doctor has so consistently failed to produce. It’s interesting, too, that the most insightful interpretations have come from characters other than Dr. Melfi—Carmela, for instance, who calls her friend the priest on his relationships with the married women in his parish, accurately diagnosing his need to create sexual tension that won’t be resolved.

Another bit of spiritual wisdom comes from Paulie Walnuts, the sweet-faced thug played by Tony Sirico. Paulie doesn’t know what Christopher is talking about when he starts using the language of story-structure. “Every character is supposed to have an arc. Where’s my arc?” Christopher laments. “Did you ever get the feeling that nothing was ever going to happen to you?” he asks Paulie despondently. “Yeah,” says Paulie, “and nothing did.” It’s essentially the lesson that old-fashioned Freudian analysis used to teach. You went in wondering why fate had handed someone so special a life so filled with disappointment; you learned to adjust your expectations.

Contemplating the start of the new Sopranos season, I find I’m less concerned with what is going to happen in either Tony’s life or his therapy than I am with what is going to happen in his relationship with art. The series virtually began with Tony uneasily confronting a work of art—a sculpture in Dr. Melfi’s waiting room. He looked bemused. Later, we watched him take irrational umbrage at another piece of the decor of her office, an inoffensive painting.

There’s a good deal about art in the series that has nothing to do with Mafia movies—good and bad art, mostly bad music. There’s the dreadful choir that Tony’s daughter is a soloist in. There’s the no-talent band that Christopher’s girlfriend Adriana wants to champion and “discover,” and the hopeless script that Christopher is writing. And then there’s the good “art”: the W.C. Fields movies that Tony is always quoting, the hit single that Tony’s friend Hesh (Jerry Adler) “co-wrote” with a talented young black musician in the days when he was still in the music business, before he became a shylock. And there’s the music that gets played at the beginning and end of each show. Music is in the very name of the title characters, in the phrase “soap opera” itself. (The Mafia: America’s Longest-Running Soap Opera is the name of a book written by one of the talking heads in a television program that Tony and his pals are watching in an early episode.)

Meanwhile, art and the gangster confront each other in every reference to Scorsese, as well as in such knowing jokes as the casting of E-Street Band-member Van Zandt (whose other employer, Bruce Springsteen, is another “Boss” with ties to New Jersey). Finally, art and the gangster confront each other in the dream-like, more-than-verbal puns that help draw the series together thematically, puns like “hit”—“a beautiful hit,” one character says in a late episode, referring to the murder of a long-ago Mafia bigwig. It’s the same episode in which Adriana is trying to break into the music business and in which the “gangsta” rapper with whom she wants to develop a mutually exploitative relationship confronts Hesh about the misappropriated royalties from that long-ago single.

Is a hit something that you write or something you do? What kind of a “killing” does it entail? “Art isn’t like betting or cards,” Christopher warns Adriana, meaning that it cannot be “fixed” or controlled. But of course it can. I’m waiting to see if The Sopranos knows this, or if it will end up glamorizing art in the way the gangster picture used to glamorize violence, intentionally or not. It’s a real cliffhanger. Art is one of the few things as irresistibly seductive as violence.

New York Press, January 18, 2000