From Skidmore College's Salmagundi magazine, No. 185/186, Winter – Spring 2015:
A Disquisition on the Sine Qua Non
A Total Idiot About Money
I was once asked, as a recently published author, to give the business community some advice. Unfortunately I am a total idiot when it comes to finances, my comprehension in that department is nearly zero, and all I could offer was a window into my vacuity. Still, political campaigns often spend millions trying to court the “undecided vote,” and in the process work overtime to ascertain the psychology of those dunderheads who cannot make up their minds just days before an election. So perhaps the business world should pay me big-time to gain insights into my really rather remarkable ignorance.When did it start? How is it that I, reasonably intelligent on other subjects, should have utterly failed to pick up a glimmer of understanding when it comes to money? Hedge funds have been explained to me half a dozen times, and still I am unsure what they do. As soon as someone tries to give me a tip about playing the stock market, or refinancing my mortgage, or switching to a better health plan, my mind drifts off, the same way it does when I ask for driving directions and the answer leads to more than one turn.
I suspect terror is at the heart of this resistance. My father struggled during the Great Depression, an experience that not only scars a person for life, but sometimes his progeny as well. I am terrified of going into debt. I bought a new car with cash, depleting my savings account in the process, so that I would not have to pay finance charges. I refused to take out a home repair loan, despite my wife’s insistence that everyone does it.
In this age when every self-respecting college student is applying to MBA programs or scheming to make his first million by thirty, I appreciate that I am out of step. In the early 1960s, when I first dreamed of becoming a writer, I—we—assumed that meant spending decades honing one’s craft, meanwhile working at ill-paid jobs and living on a pittance. This was before the Brat Pack era, when large advances were given out to cute-looking, photogenic authors. My plan worked: I got through the lean years by taking odd jobs (of which more later), and eventually turned myself into a midlist writer of essays, poetry and literary fiction. I never assumed there would be a big payday; all I wanted was the respect of my peers. Could anyone have shown less business sense?
What is wrong with me? I simply can’t make myself care about accumulating lots of money. Or am I fooling myself? It could be that I disdain profit-making in part because I am just no good at it; but which came first? Suffice to say that I and the profit motive are barely on speaking terms. I am willing to donate my brain to science when I expire, if it will help the business community solve the riddle of people such as myself.
The Order of Things
In the beginning God created Money. Dollars, shekels, cruzeiros, kopeks, rubles, rials, francs, euros, lire, pieces of eight, pounds sterling, krugerrands, yen, deutschmarks, obals, created He them. Next came camels, sheep, burrows, oxen and parrots. Then God absconded, leaving Money to rule over the earth.
I love money. Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme.
Seriously, I welcome money whenever it is offered me. I do not regard it as bad in the slightest, much less the root of all evil. At the same time, the thought of money freezes my brain. It’s the shameful, unpleasant desire for it that irks me. All my life I’ve forbidden myself to want it. No no no!
Playing the Stocks
I had a friend, the great poet Kenneth Koch, who told me that of course he invested in the stock market because how else could one expect to get a reasonable return on one’s capital? I was stunned. Though what he said made perfect sense, it came from another planet: I would never have assumed I was entitled to receive a cushy return from the money I earned. Koch had grown up securely middle-class in Cincinnati, whereas I had been reared close to the poverty line in Brooklyn. Twice, when I had a little extra savings, I went into the stock market, and both times I pulled out once the value of stocks started plummeting. My investments were virtually wiped out. Not only did I not have the courage to wait out the downturn, I could not find the tiniest available unused corner of my mind to attend to the value or trajectory of individual stocks the broker had bought in my name.
The Absence Of
It is difficult to speak about having grown up poor without sounding self-pitying or self-righteous. But it was simply a fact: we had no surplus. My mother used to flirt with the deli man so that she could delay paying our weekly tab. There was a period when my father was laid off, during which we ate macaroni and cheese for a month and little else. I used to steal dimes from my mother’s pocket book, or from the corners of the living room where she had sequestered coins for a rainy day, a kind of peasant superstition, and go down to the street to buy a knish (by the way, the knishes of my youth were much tastier, more oniony, earthy, certainly not the so recently frozen and defrosted ones today) or a whipped cream concoction called Charlotte Russe. My criminality was prodded by a grumbling stomach. Later, in freshman year at college, I craved books, especially the square-bound quality paperbacks that were just coming into circulation, like Noonday’s or Grove Press’s, Schocken’s or Anchor’s. I needed what was in those books (Kierkegaard, D. H. Lawrence) and didn’t have the money to buy them, so I stuffed them into my coat or down my shirt front, until the fear of getting caught chastened me. Those first two years in college were the poorest I would ever be. I used to lie in bed mornings trying to come up with money-making schemes. Though I’d won a full scholarship to a good college, I could not think of any way of loaning my brainpower to dimmer others in return for cash. It was my first ray of understanding that I must not have been as smart as I thought I was. “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
“The rich are different from you and me.”
“Yes, they have more money.”
Famous exchange between American literary titans, Hemingway one-upping Fitzgerald, showing he was not intimidated by wealth, though I’ve always thought Fitzgerald was the more correct. I have had occasional dealings with the rich: they are different. One difference I find is that most of their domiciles look disappointingly impersonal, as though the interior decorator they hired chose from the same catalogues and auction houses as did high-end hotels, or as though they thought an expressively lived-in, cluttered quality—proof that human beings actually inhabited the place—was a sign of inferior breeding.
When I taught at the University of Houston during the 1980’s, there were so few professional writers in town that I was invited to the homes of the cultured wealthy. They were amiable, hospitable and touchingly deferential to creative folk. But I found it impossible to promote a real friendship with any of these moneyed people. I did not know the code of manners that might lead to greater intimacy with them. My celebrity value as a writer wore off, and in the end they preferred to be among people of their own tax bracket, just as I found it more comfortable to be among my economic peers.
Nouveaux riches are the best. They’re not jaded. They still believe in the power and joy of money; they still want. When I encounter satires in nineteenth-century novels of the parvenu nouveaux riches trying to acquire refinement, my heart goes out to them. The superior scorn that artistic types direct toward the bourgeoisie seems wholly unmerited. Maybe it’s that I’ve never doubted I was artistic, whereas it has taken some doing to climb into the middle class, one of my proudest achievements (though it goes without saying that I am still trapped in a mindset somewhere between working class and lower-middle-class). Perhaps for that reason, it offends me when Democratic politicians, who should know better, phrase their election promises entirely in terms of helping “middle class families.” I would like to think, having finally made it into that privileged rung, that others need governmental help more, such as the homeless, the deserving poor, and my favorite category for support, the undeserving poor.
What I Did for Money....
....MUCH MORE
