Poisonous privilege

Tennessee Williams and I talk about why life should require effort (plus a postscript cancer update)

The diplomatic years: Look how excited Evo Morales is to be photographed with me!

Theo’s enthusiasm for the Glass Menagerie led me to reread it during a lazy Sunday afternoon. I was glad I did, for there was so much I had not remembered from studying and seeing this play as a young actor. Even more interesting to me was Williams’s 1947 essay printed at the back of the play, an essay that originally ran in the New York Times in 1947, “The Catastrophe of Success.”

As I read this, as I imagined myself in his posh hotel suite in Manhattan, I began to feel as sickened with his condition as he did. Perhaps it’s the nausea of the chemo seeping into everything. But I immediately recognized how empty this hotel room would be if you were not possessed of a passionate need to work and express something. While I fantasize about spending time in fancy hotel suites, I recognize that they are not a fulfilling end to anything.

Even more did I appreciate his thoughts on the people who waited on him and cleaned up after him: “But life should require a certain minimal effort. You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing people in the world for they continually remind you of inequities which we accept as the proper thing. The sight of an ancient woman, gasping and wheezing as she drags a heavy pail of water down a hotel corridor to mop up the mess of some drunken overprivileged guest, is one that sickens and weighs upon the heart and withers it with shame for this world in which it is not only tolerated but regarded as proof positive that the wheels of Democracy are functioning as they should without interference from above or below. Nobody should have to clean up anybody else’s mess in this world. It is terribly bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service.

I have been corrupted as much as anyone else by the vast number of menial services which our society has grown to expect and depend on. We should do for ourselves or let the machines do for us, the glorious technology that is supposed to be the new light of the world.”

This naturally brought to mind the people who worked for us when Tim was in ambassadorial posts. Each post came with a cook, a cleaner, great privilege, and nagging guilt. The staff were all paid good wages, but the fact remained that they cleaned up after us. When I look back at various journals from these years, I find that I was not any happier in those posts than I was in a small flat in London, making our own dinner. So much was beyond my control. I faced strangers before coffee every morning. I had new responsibilities. Illness and disability still found me.

Perhaps part of my guilt was that my privileges were unearned. They were not a result of my achievements—although they were a result of Tim’s decades of labor. I had done nothing to deserve staff. At least Williams had earned his hotel suite. When I moved in with Tim in Yemen, I spent my first night vomiting, not from illness but because I could not believe this life was my own. When the cook asked what I wanted for lunch, I told her I would make myself a sandwich. Tim had to gently urge me to let them do their jobs.

I also learned quickly that privilege does not improve personality. I found myself becoming capable of criticizing the staff, of developing expectations. I loathed the person I could easily have become. I listened to other diplomatic wives moan about their staff, their homes, their drivers, and vowed I would not be like them. But I understood how it happened.

Williams wrote that fame made him indifferent to people. He no longer trusted that anyone sincerely loved or admired him. While I have never (yet!) been famous, I have been in a position that protected me from sincerity. The people who stayed with us, who ate at our table, who mingled with us at receptions, had to be nice to me because of my relationship to diplomacy. Not because they found me charming or witty. When we left post, all of these people would be equally obsequious to our replacements. I could never trust that anything said to me was genuine.

My unease with the stark inequalities in our lives never abated. The countries we lived in, Yemen, Bolivia, and Uzbekistan, all made our privileges sickeningly clear.

Privilege didn’t necessarily mean creative freedom. I did not write more when we were in posts. They were busy times, with constant engagements. Having staff somehow did not translate to more free time. It often took me longer to find a recipe, translate it, and print it than it would have taken me to make it myself. I could never find my clothing if I didn’t put it away myself. I worked at home, where there were constant interruptions. Strangers were in our house all day long every day. They had questions for me. (See how easy it is to complain about staff??? Horrifying,)

I agree with Tennessee’s contention that “life should require a certain minimal effort.” The “clawing and scratching” out a life invigorates, fills my body with new blood. (Caveat—I could do with less scrabbling than life with cancer requires, but hey ho).

Williams writes that the best condition for a writer is “that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable.”

Such is the position in which I find myself now. I cannot avoid writing because writing keeps me clinging to the cliffside of lfe. I cannot avoid writing because I am in a place without any distractions save from the disorder of our house, which none of us has time to clean. We’ve gone from having our floors cleaned every day to cleaning our floors every six months or so, whether they need it or not (I am reminded of Quentin Crisp’s comment that “There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.”).

None of this is to glorify poverty or financial issues. We are no longer threatened with luxury; rather, we find ourselves now under unexpectedly great financial strain. We fret about the cost of groceries and how we will find a way for Theo to go to university. If security is indeed a “kind of death” as Williams contends, we are safe. Though I do wish our situation were less dire. Fortunately, I have been able to make a bit of money working with a Parisien author; my editing wages paid for our recent trip to London. But our bodies and minds were made for struggle. An effortless life is no life at all.

What we need, Williams writes, is an “obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive—that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims.”

This essay was still on my mind while talking Theo one evening. She had been explaining what makes a boy she knows particularly attractive, an evergreen topic. She talked about how he put effort into being funny, that that effort was obvious. She said he was enthusiastic. Emotional. Not “effortlessly cool.”

Why should we aspire to be “effortlessly” anything? she asked. “I like people who are making an effort, who are openly enthusiastic and show their feelings.” She told me that the teacher had been reading aloud from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in her class, and when she had to make the noises of a man turning into a rhinoceros, the kids laughed at her. She asked a student to take over, and Theo volunteered. “And I gave my all to making the noises I thought that a man would make who was trying to turn into a rhinoceros,” she told me. “I was as rhinoceros as I know how to be.”

That, I think, is one of the joys of effort.

PS: Just before sending out this newsletter, I got my latest blood tests, in advance of my scan tomorrow. The news is not good; my tumor markers are rising again, despite the taxol and bevacizumab. I am shattered and scared. And will tell you more next week.