TV Quote of the Day (‘The Office,’ With a Problem Posed Often This Time of Year)

Stanley Hudson [played by Leslie David Baker]: “How many freakin' vampires am I supposed to care about these days?”—The Office, Season 7, Episode 6, “Costume Contest,” original air date Oct. 28, 2010, teleplay by Justin Spitzer, directed by Dean Holland

Spiritual Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on How Lies Formed a Human Monster)

“I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape….

“Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also -- either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.”—Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Several months ago, I thought of using the above quote to mark the 70^th anniversary of the publication of East of Eden. Though I didn’t have time to write at the length I wanted then, it may have turned out for the best. This meditation by John Steinbeck on a monster in beguiling human form is appropriate for the present moment—the weekend before Halloween, not to mention an evil hour in the life of the American republic.

Several years ago, when the American version of House of Cards was still in production, a close relative of mine asked about Robin Wright’s Lady Macbeth-type political wife, “How could a woman so beautiful be so evil?” 

Claire Underwood’s American psychological predecessor was Steinbeck’s Cathy Ames, who sheds lovers, homes—even past identities—as periodically as a serpent does its skin.

I use “serpent” advisedly, as East of Eden, as alluded to in the title, is an allegory. 

The two male characters with first names beginning with “A”—Adam and Aron Trask—are innocent or naïve, like Adam and son Abel in the Book of Genesis. The three males with first names starting with “C”—Cyrus, Charles and Caleb—are analogous to Cain—wild, resentful and despairing.

The letter “C” also suggests Cathy’s affinity with the second set of Trask males. But as the novels’ principal female, she also functions like Eve or Lilith, the she-demon of Near East mythology.

Since its publication, East of Eden has not been treated warmly by literary critics, who have complained that Steinbeck grafted this allegorical structure onto a historical saga about his maternal family, the Hamiltons; that the novel is long and ungainly; and that the author intruded commentary on the action, violating the injunction to today’s creative writing students to “show, not tell.”

But, though East of Eden may not be perfect, it is surely compelling, with its dramatic qualities recognized when it was turned into a film in 1955, a network TV mini-series in 1981, and (now in development) a Netflix limited series written by Zoe Kazan.

Hollywood’s divergent treatments of this sprawling epic partly set in Steinbeck’s own Salinas County resulted in different main characters. The movie’s director, Elia Kazan, narrowed the plot to the book’s last quarter, spotlighting James Dean in a prototype thereafter indelibly associated with him: a conflicted, tortured youth.

But in the early 1980s, the golden age of the mini-series, TV offered the opportunity for a more expansive treatment of the novel—6½ hours that concentrated on Adam and Cathy. Inevitably, viewers focus less on Adam, who fundamentally changes little, than on Cathy (played by Jane Seymour, pictured in the image accompanying this post).

Midway through the plot, Cathy abandons her life as wife and mother to become Kate, a prostitute and madam. Her sexuality is not itself sinful. It’s her use of it, combined with her propensity for deceit, that makes her fascinating and unpredictable.

As cunning as Eden’s serpent, Kate becomes additionally cynical as she learns how the hypocrisy of her clients in the sex trade leaves them utterly vulnerable to her insatiable drive for wealth.

While middle-aged Adam is scrupulous to a fault, refusing gains from son Caleb’s speculation on beans in a wartime economy, Kate says in business by keeping a stash of photos of brothel clients for blackmail.

Rereading East of Eden after over 40 years, I found inadequate Steinbeck’s explanation that monsters like Cathy/Kate are “variations from the accepted norm to a greater or a less degree.”

But the better word to describe this heinous type is “violations” rather than “variations.” While “variations” are something inherent that a person is born with and unable to change, “violations” are products of free will.

Cathy/Kate violates every norm of responsibility and selflessness. She shares with Cyrus, Charles and Caleb a willfulness that leads to destructive outbursts, but unlike them never resists this impulse.

That lack of remorse renders her utterly alien, Steinbeck observes, in the same way that, “To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish.”

In the postwar period, the United States struggled to understand the radical evil that gave birth to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union. But Americans’ aspirations for liberty didn’t eliminate their own vulnerability to cynics ready to exploit falsehood and bent on power.

After all, East of Eden arrived halfway through the reign of terror perpetrated by Joseph McCarthy, as careless about truth as he was about the damage he created through his access to the media and investigative responsibility in the U.S. Senate.

Steinbeck abominated McCarthy but did not find him alien to the Eden of American democracy, according to an article this past week in the British paper The Guardian. 

In an essay that originally appeared in 1954 in the French journal Le Figaro Litteraire (now published in English for the first time by Strand Magazine), the novelist wrote:

“We have always had a McCarthy. I could list names and movements going back to the beginning of our history. And always the end was the same … It changes its name every few years. It always uses the bait of improvement or safety.”

The exterior of Cathy Ames may have been beautiful, but her interior was as ugly as Joe McCarthy’s. The senator, Steinbeck warned in his French essay, represented “the taking of power by a self-interested group.”

Current events lead me to think that Cathy schemed enough but didn’t dream big enough. All she wanted was wealth accumulated and invested as a sex worker.

Nowadays, if applied on the campaign trail, her reckless disregard for truth, her mockery and infringement of every civilized norm, could have landed Steinbeck’s monster on Capitol Hill, a serpent in the temple of American democracy.

Photo of the Day: Fifth Avenue, Source of ‘Some Semblance of American Unity’

Among the many photos I have taken over the years, I searched unsuccessfully for something with the wide vistas that Kathryn Jean Lopez mentioned in the following contribution to a National Review collection of articles from Sept. 9, 2019 on “What We Love About America”:

“Freedom, in fact, is what I feel like I’m breathing in as I see the blue of the sky or the road that leads down to Washington Square Park. Anything seems possible on Fifth Avenue. And one miracle in particular: some semblance of American unity. At some places on Fifth, the Stars and Strikes seem to be everywhere. It’s as if America does, in fact, still mean something we can all agree on. I keep looking and I think about [Abraham Lincoln’s phrase] ‘the mystic chords of memory.’ Fifth Avenue inspires gratitude. I don’t want to look at my phone. I want to keep walking. American culture today can be overwhelming with noise and soil-crushing images. But here, even with the traffic, things seem quieter.”

Then I came across what you see here: a photo of a Tom Ford shop display at the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store in Midtown Manhattan, which I took a few days before the Fourth of July six years ago.

In one way, it seems a bit crass to transform the Stars and Stripes—something people have carried and even died for—into such commercial fodder.

But at least, the instinct this window display appealed to was pride in America. These days, the most powerful instinct is fear.

Maybe, at this current perilous moment in American history—when the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been critically wounded in their home, when Capitol Hill lawmakers of both parties and Supreme Court justices are investigating, as never before, security arrangements for themselves and their families—it would do well for us all to catch our breath, and remember the “gratitude” and “semblance of American unity” that Ms. Lopez evoked.

In a tweet from last night about the assault on Paul Pelosi, Ms. Lopez also noted that “Sometimes it’s better to pray for fellow human beings and that by some miracle the temperature of hate and anger is turned down.”

Well, I suppose that’s a start. But more than a few of us are getting tired of hearing “thoughts and prayers” or their equivalent evoked for victims of violence.

More basically—and painfully—we need an examination of conscience, and a commitment to the “mystic chords of memory” and “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right” that infused President Lincoln with the political courage to take on those accepting aggression to tear the Union asunder.

Quote of the Day (Michelle Goldberg, on Ambivalence About Cancel Culture)

“In my experience, most people, especially those who are middle-aged and older, have complicated and contradictory feelings about the rapid changes in values, manners and allowances that fall under the rubric of cancel culture. They’re glad to see challenges to elite impunity, and uncomfortable about what can seem like mob justice. The notion of separating the art from the artist has gone out of fashion, but a progressive version of old-fashioned morality clauses isn’t a satisfying replacement.”—Opinion columnist and TV commentator Michelle Goldberg, “Finally, a Great Movie About Cancel Culture,” The New York Times, Oct. 23, 2022

The photo accompanying this post, of Michelle Goldberg at the 2012 Brooklyn Book Festival panel, was taken on Sept. 23, 2012, by Joann Jovinelly (editrrix) from NYC.

Quote of the Day (Shirley Jackson, on a Daughter Becoming a Teen)

“Last year I sent my daughter, an agreeable child who liked to play baseball and thought boys were silly, off to camp. I got back – and it only took two months – a creature who slept with curlers in her hair, bought perfume from the five-and-ten, and addressed me as nothing but ‘Mother, honestly!’

“By now she also calls me ‘Honestly, Mother!’ and ‘Mother, really’ and sometimes just plain ‘Mother.’ She worries constantly about her figure—usually with one hand in the refrigerator. She thinks any beardless adolescent who sings through his nose is ‘cute.’ She has perceived that in addition to being slightly behind the times in my dress and manner, I am hopelessly dated in my grasp of teenagers–especially of what ‘everyone else’ is allowed to do. This, incidentally, is a phrase I can't even write without feeling a little chill down my back. My daughter says it without difficulty. I tell her, ‘I don’t care what everyone else does…’ and ‘No daughter of mine is going to…’ and ‘When I was your age, I had…’ Neither of us listens to the other. She no longer thinks boys are silly.”—American horror and humor writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), “Motherly, Honestly!”, originally printed in Good Housekeeping, reprinted in Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, edited by Laurence Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt (2015)

It can be hard to believe that the author of such disturbing fiction as “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle could deliver slices of wry like the above passage to the same primary audience—American housewives and mothers—as Erma Bombeck would later do.

But these humorous essays on her family—whose tone could also be modulated to ironic short fiction like “Charles”—helped pay the bills for Shirley Jackson, as she raised the four children of herself and her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman.

And they can still be appreciated by readers—even those who, in October, might be more tempted to seek out the macabre novels and short stories that make Jackson a crucial link between Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King.

For a brief description of the life and career of Jackson, see my blog post from six years ago, on the centennial of her birth.

Quote of the Day (Ian McEwan, on the West’s Post-Cold War Descent)

“By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?”— English novelist Ian McEwan, Lessons: A Novel (2022)

(Accompanying this post is a photo of Ian McEwan taken during the 2011 Paris book festival on Mar. 20, 2011, by Thesupermat.)

Quote of the Day (Jason Gay, on Tom Brady’s Ill-Fated Comeback From Retirement)

“[Future Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Tom] Brady’s title hopes in Tampa Bay are evaporating, and his personal life has become tabloid fodder. He’s gotten flak for taking off Wednesdays—I thought we were all cool with remote work now?—and for attending the wedding of Patriots owner Robert Kraft the Friday before the Bucs lost to Pittsburgh. Brady was caught on camera during that game going nuclear on his underperforming offensive line, looking like a cranky guy who couldn’t believe his 5:15 p.m. restaurant reservation wasn’t ready at 5:15 p.m.”—Sports columnist Jason Gay, “Glum Days for the Geezer Greats,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 25, 2022

The photo accompanying this post—of Tom Brady being sacked by Daron Payne of the Washington Football Team during a game against the Buccaneers—was taken Jan. 9, 2021, by All-Pro Reels of Washington, DC. 

With a little less than half the season played now, Brady, with 10 sacks, is on track to at least match and maybe exceed his totals for 2020 and 2021 (21 and 22, respectively).

At age 45, with seven Super Bowl victories and who knows how much money earned, what does he have to prove at this point? Does he think he’s going to recover faster from these hits than he did before?

Five years ago, Gisele Bundchen blurted out what her husband had not previously admitted: that he’d had multiple concussions. Even then, she was extremely worried about his future health.

I never expected to write that a supermodel could be the one with brains in a family, but that is clearly the case here. Hope that Brady still has his senses intact when the season is over, but don’t bet on it.