Private Faces, Public Places, Part 1

By John Broening (June 2018)

 

 

 

 

Nowadays, at a superficial glance, it seems as if Auden, who in his personal life was a singular combination of the chaotically informal and the papal, would have been happy with the current state of affairs. There are a multitude of private faces in public places: from Jimmy Carter onwards, our presidents have felt the need to broadcast their compassion, their ability to suffer and come out redeemed, their warmth, their shirtsleeve down-to-earthiness, even (in Carter’s case) the lust they felt in their hearts in the presence of attractive women other than their wives. The personal note that began to creep into the interview with the statesman has transformed that interview into nothing but personal notes.

 

And lower down the ladder of power, the private face has made itself at home in the public place, loudly sharing intimate details on its cell for everyone within earshot to share, wearing its laundry day clothes every day of the week, eating and drinking with an admirable lumpen unselfconsciousness that Rousseau would have approved of, treating the entire world as its living room.

 

In the world of literature, the private face has dominated the public space for some time now. What is called either the personal memoir, or misery lit, or—my favorite—autopathography, has become the defining genre of our time.

 

An autopathography is literally a work about one’s own illness: an autobiography that tells the story of one’s own addiction, mental illness, self-destructive behavior or abuse at the hands of another.

 

Autopathography can be about addiction to alcohol (Happy Hours, Dry), pills (Pillhead), heroin (Permanent Midnight) or meth (Tweaked). There are also misery-lit memoirs on anorexia (Wasted), depression (Prozac Nation), bipolar disorder (An Unquiet Mind) and sex addiction (Love Sick, The Surrender).

 

 

In its elevation of the ordinary, its rejection of traditional privacies, its obsession with pathology, its exhibitionism masquerading as healing, and its score-settling masquerading as honesty, misery lit strongly resembles another popular contemporary form: reality TV.

 

The Surrender).

 

 

Similarly, almost 40 years ago, the autopathography movement arose not from a prose memoir but around, of all things, a collection of sonnets.

 

In America, misery lit has a distinguished pedigree in the realm of poetry. The works of poets John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and, above all, Robert Lowell, drew on their struggles with mental illness and on intimate details of their own lives for their material.

 

For example, when Lowell published his sonnet sequence The Dolphin (1973), which described his own mental breakdown and quoted from letters and private conversations with his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and his current wife, Caroline Blackwood, his approach was still a novelty.

 

written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife? This is . . . a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book, presumptuous (in balancing) injury done to others with injury done to (oneself).”

 

And, just as importantly, are we benefited by revealing our own secrets? Joe Orton, the playwright, was one of the brilliant Lords of Misrule that the Sixties produced in such abundance, a talent whose Wildean wit was always pointed towards the subversive. But even he recognized early on the downside of confessionalism. In his play “The Ruffian on the Stair” (with typical Ortonian perversity, the title is taken from a poem by Henley, that stuffy Victorian poet), a character makes a devastating confession:

 

The number of humiliating admissions I’ve made, you’d think it would draw me closer to somebody. But it doesn’t.

 

And Orton the playwright recognized something else about the urge to confess one’s secrets: its theatricality. Rather than being a hallmark of authenticity, it seemed like the opposite. If the public faces in private places of Auden’s time were characterized by pomposity, those of our time were marked by the theatrical nature of constant self-revelation.

 

Similarly, in his wicked contemporary memoir, Difficult Women, her former close friend David Plante reveals that Germaine Greer would hold forth to a room of strangers about her drawn-out battles with her mother and but, one on one, would not discuss personal matters.

 

Though some cultural critics, chief among them David Shields, have declared that the novel is a spent literary form and the authentic contemporary genre is autobiographical writing, the truth is that the theatricality of confessionalism is paralleled by the artificiality of its literary expression: most memoirs have the same basic structure, the same conventions derived from both the 12-step movement and a watered-down Christianity, the same arc of bottoming out, followed by redemption.

 

And there has been no greater cheerleader for the memoir than The New York Times, where the memoir rules not just the book review pages, but the Sunday column “Modern Love.” Even the style of the cultural pages is marked by the example of the memoir: the embarrassing and often gratuitous personal anecdote, the tone of forced intimacy, the lavish use of the first-person pronoun.

 

However: there are exceptions to this, memoirs that are relentlessly revelatory and naked but also marked by an awareness that personal unhappiness has a source in forces greater than the thin truths of the self.

 

The confessional revolution has taken place alongside two other revolutions that have upended our sense of what is public and what is private:

 

The first is the rise of social media, computer-maintained instantaneous communication and networking systems that, if not obliterate, at least make hazy, the old distinctions between public and private.

 

Facebook, for example. Is it public or private? Are our communications to our Facebook friends privileged? Can we safely use it to vent about a tyrannical boss or express a borderline seditious political opinion? And conversely, do we use it to break up with people, to quit jobs, to express our love for someone in the cyber-presence a small public crowd? Does it—and Twitter and Instagram—make the public private and the private public?

 

The second revolution that has upended our sense of what is public and private is the revolution in surveillance: drones, remote telephone monitoring devices, small self-propelled aerial cameras, facial recognition software and spyware, software which is used mostly for tracking internet users’ habits and the drastic curtailment of civil liberties that has happened since 9/11, a curtailment that is remarkable also for the lack of public protest it engendered, a lack of protest enabled by our enfeebled sense of the value of our own privacy.

 

And the increasing use of surveillance technology has not just happened at a macro level: a CCTV system that can be operated from a laptop or cellphone is now financially within reach of any homeowner or small business owner. And even smartphones can double as surveillance systems.

 

Some of these trends, like the increasing use of surveillance technologies, are trends that we have little control over. Others—how often we use social media, how much of our personal lives we choose to share with the world at large, are behaviors we appear to have near complete control over. But can we, do we, really have control over them? As Marshall McLuhan said, “First we create the machines, then they create us.”

 

I am a cultural conservative. What this means is that, when I am confronted with the confusion and ugliness of modern life, my first instinct is to look to the past for answers as well as for comfort, specifically, because I was trained as a literary critic, towards the Anglophone literature of the last 150 years: Henry James’s fiction, Eliot’s poetry and literary criticism, Matthew Arnold’s poetry, above all his lament to the unexpressed and unexplored, The Buried Life. How did our ancestors in the pre-confessional age regard the contrasting needs for privacy and self-expression or self-revelation and, as we like to say today, how did they deal with, how did they process trauma, unhappiness, madness, secrets and scandal? I examine two Victorian trials, the divorce proceedings of the Irish patriot Parnell and the more famous trial(s) of Oscar Wilde. In the pre-confessional age, often the only way the public would gain a glimpse of the private lives of the living famous was in the wake of a civil or criminal trial. I examine the sad story of the suicide of Henry Adams’s talented, disturbed wife Clover, and its absence from Adams’s classic Autobiography. I look at the now-discarded idea of the Open Secret and the way it played out in the lives of Noel Coward, Franklin Roosevelt, JFK, and Susan Sontag.

 

Finally, I examine the literature of dystopia, including not just the obvious choices 1984, Brave New World and Philip Dick’s science fiction but the little-known fantasy writings of Primo Levi.

 

One of the central themes of science fiction, which is of course as much about the present as the future, is the struggle between a centralized, technologically energized power structure and the autonomy and privacy of the individual.

 

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John Broening is a freelance writer based in Denver, Colorado. His writing has appeared in Gastronomica, Departures, The Baltimore Sun, The City Paper, The Faster Times and The Outlet and his article on the Noble Swine Supper Club was featured in Best Food Writing 2012.

More by John Broening.

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