From the first printed lines on of Florence King's Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, I knew I was in the presence of a kindred spirit. Not, exactly, that we have a great deal in common. She considered herself to be -- or, at least, by the mercenary divisions of print publications, got categorized as -- some sort of conservative. More precisely, as she puts it, "to the right of Baby Doc." The most precise sense in which this is so, however, is at times difficult to pinpoint, as Phyllis Schlafly, Fundamentalist Christians, and the "God 'n' Country Club" all come in for a skewering at her hands -- backed up, as in all the best wit, by a wholly earnest loathing.
Ultimately, if someone has found a way to be a 1980s right-winger while also being a sexually non-conforming bisexual despiser of family values and children, a one-time writer of pornographic "historical" bodice-rippers set in fifth century Christendom, a prophet of the "spinster" lifestyle (read: confirmed bachelorette), and a self-declared "monarchist," you know you are in the company of a sufficiently dedicated eccentric that you can forgive any and all faults -- indeed, can celebrate the faults as essential to the virtues.
And none of this, by the way, is perpetrated in a spirit of naivety. King knowingly cultivates eccentricity and its justificatory ideologies like a keeper of sour grapes. She quotes Mill's famous paragraphs from On Liberty celebrating the unique virtues of the English eccentric -- such as the necessity of a capacity for eccentricity to any sort of moral courage. She insists that all artistic achievement derives from the ability to concentrate, and that this by definition requires putting one's needs above those of others -- and that means blossoming, as she puts it, into "a double-barreled bastard."
The only thing astonishing is that King is not British herself. How can she write like this, without that particular national predisposition to desiccatingly dry wit? How can she alone of writers this side of the Atlantic appeal so automatically and effortlessly to my inmost soul? Ah, the answer is revealed. She had an English father.
Not that there isn't anything unmistakably Southern U.S. about her. In King's self- and other-deprecating descriptions of her childhood, she and her relatives emerge as the Gothic inhabitants of a McCullers or Capote novel. They -- just like the people in the McCullers novel that gave her the title of this essay collection, indeed -- are relentless non-conformists, yet they ostensibly live amidst the most tightly restricted and conformist of all human societies. (King's Granny, for one, is constantly trying to raise young Florence to be a proper "Southern lady," but all the time she is herself an incorrigible weirdo who -- writes King -- "buttonholes strangers and strikes up conversations that leave them bug-eyed with wonderment").
They are rebels without meaning or desiring to be. In this contradiction lies the key to the Southern grotesque -- the heart of the lonely hunter.
In McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye, Captain Penderton (one of the grotesques) remarks that he disagrees with the view "that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness." King disagrees with it too.
But she also isn't interested in ideologies of collective liberation. All of the fun of being an eccentric and non-conformist is precisely that one outrages the majority. She isn't interested in joining the mainstream. She denounces the domestication of lesbianism -- its subsumption into "family values."
She is far more interested in the ways in which societies have historically found compromises between insiders and outsiders: just-good-enough work-arounds that allow the non-conformists to exist among humanity on a sort of sufferance, even with a kind of distant respect and fear. She burnishes the label "old maid" as a ascetic aspiration. She writes that the jokes made in former times at their expense contained within them a kind of awe, signifying "that emotional deprivation (if such it be) has its compensations."
Returning to the subject of her outrageous grandmother, King opines: "One of the reasons children are such sheeplike conformists who won't make a move without checking their peer pressure is that they are never exposed to old people in the fullness of their carte blanche."
To be allowed to non-conform and get away with it. This is King's ideal. Not to be "accepted." Not to be assimilated. That would deprive it of all its pleasure.
It's an attitude that is easier to maintain when one enjoys enough other social privileges to be sure one can safely walk the balance. When the price of non-conformity to the rule may not be merely the bemused toleration of one's still-loving relatives, but death or total ostracism, the need for social approval becomes more urgent and unmistakable.
Still, King's view contains an element of something I feel is true: the observation that the attempt to "accept everyone" and ourselves in our liberal society often makes us more, rather than less, conformist. It's so much harder not to wish to date people at all, for instance, now that everyone is permitted to have their own sexual orientation (so long as it is oriented toward someone). It is so much harder to preserve one's privacy when there are no longer lifestyles about which it would be considered poor manners to inquire.
King maintains there was a kind of unconscious wisdom -- by contrast -- in the way former societies regarded their eccentrics. They pushed them out, but also up. Rather than working on them with psychiatrists and self-help books until they became "normal," they made them witch doctors, shamans, or anchorites. "Despite its brutalities and superstitions," writes King, "the Middle Ages was an essentially well-adjusted era because it did not make its misfits worse by urging them to social and sexual triumphs beyond their capacities."
This is the round-about sense in which King is a conservative. She is interested in maintaining social norms, the better to break them. She holds that some positive consequences are only won at a cost, and that there are some things in this world to which we will never have a "right" -- there are some things with which we simply have to do without, and get along as best we can, if we value our individuality and privacy enough to forego them. There are some pleasures that can only be wrested from pain and isolation, some esteem that can only be won through hard and uncomfortable effort.
It's an odd sort of conservatism, to be sure, but a stripe of it nonetheless.
Some have argued that conservatives can't be funny (this would make King even more of a walking contradiction than she is already). Others have claimed -- as in a New Yorker review of Houellebecq's Islam book -- that only they can be funny.
The argument against the possibility of conservative humor is that "punching down" is never funny. The argument for it is the same, except that liberals are considered up and conservatives down. As that Adam Gopnik New Yorker review has it: "Like most satirists worth reading, Houellebecq is a conservative. [...] Satire depends on comparing the crazy place we’re going to with the implicitly sane place we left behind."
This, then, is the real trouble. We aren't sure who's up and who's down. Everyone in American life views themselves as the oppressed. The snot-nosed rich kid offspring of the LA suburbs who currently make up the ruling regime in the White House are convinced that they can't get a foothold anywhere in this hostile society of ours. The Harvard MBA-wielding Svengalis who placed the ship of state in the hands of our spittle-brained commander in chief have managed to persuade a generation of young white heterosexual men that they are the true underclass.
King, with her Old World sense of humor, despairs of the possibility of genuine wit in American life for exactly this reason. We are so heterogeneous as a society that we can't tell what the dominant value system is long enough to mock it. "A country in which one man's aberration is another man's ethos obscures wit's most tempting target. If you can't tell who the eccentrics are, you can't tell who the conventional people are, and if you don't know who the conventional people are, it's impossible to be witty at their expense."
This is why King, the ultimate non-conformist, embraces conservatism, which is all about the institution of conformist values. As an eccentric, she needs a set of norms against which to satisfactorily rebel.
It's the ultimate outsider's long-game. And dammit, it's just crazy enough to work! If there were any form of conservatism for which I could sign up, it would be exactly King's dialectical hail-mary pass. Sure, it may be self-defeating. But conservatism is something I very much want to defeat anyway.
***
Before I go, there is one final irony about this most paradoxical book. Or maybe not ironic, since it fulfills rather than defies an expectation. I'm not sure exactly what irony is, and will have to rest content with Brian Krakow's definition of the term in My So-Called Life -- that is: "When you realize the, like, component of weirdness in a situation."
Here's the component of weirdness. One of King's essays is devoted to the subject of how incredibly difficult it is to find a competent copy-editor in the industry.
She wasn't kidding. As you can see, I've devoted a whole series of posts to the topic of missed typographical errors in books that have already gone to print. And there are a couple in the present book. Here are the ones I found in King's undisputed masterpiece -- this is in the 1989 St. Martin's Press edition.
p. 68. "Straining at the bit the [sic.] 'live their own lives.'"
I make this one all the time.
p. 82 "regardless of what they may think of the the [sic.]"
This one too.
p. 124 "What do do?" That first "do" should be a "to." We are not talking in context about Ross Perot and his "deep voodoo," or anything like it.
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