The Last Patrician (18 page)

After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.… Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.
4

Gatsby is unlikely to have charmed Catullus. Caesar's tale of the youthful adventure in which he was captured by Mediterranean pirates is not only far more winning than Gatsby's (Caesar's story reads like a chapter of
Candide
), it has the additional merit of being true. The very phrases Gatsby uses are “so worn and threadbare,” Nick Carraway says, that they evoke “no image except that of a turbaned ‘character' leaking sawdust out of every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.”
5
Gatsby is not a great-souled man of the type beloved of Stendhal and Nietzsche and Machiavelli; he is a curious mixture of disciplined Puritan (he drinks little and boasts that it took him only three years of disciplined work to “earn” the money he used to buy his house) and eighteenth-century rogue charmer, a cross between Benjamin Franklin and Lovelace, the anti-hero of Richardson's
Clarissa,
a man with a winning smile who is handy with accounts, a seducer of women who can read an income statement. His dreams of glory are sadly, oppressively, overwhelmingly pedestrian. His heart, we are told,

was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.
6

It is possible, of course, that Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick Carraway, the Middle Western patrician whose family claims to be descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, has distorted the qualities of Gatsby's plebeian imagination; Carraway admits that Gatsby is the embodiment of everything for which he has an “unaffected scorn.” And yet the fact remains that the modern entrepreneurial hero is
not
a particularly interesting character; by the standards of Old World greatness he is not a great man at all. The East Egg patricians who, like Theodore Roosevelt, attempted to revive those standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could not help but despise the new breed of entrepreneurial West Egg heroes who, like Gatsby and Joseph Kennedy himself, fell so far short of their lofty, great-souled ideal.

If the entrepreneurial hero is not an intellectually or spiritually compelling figure, he nonetheless tells us a good deal more about the requirements for success in the modern world than Caesar and Alexander or even Teddy Roosevelt do. Ordinary men and women might not need the superabundant self-confidence of a Jay Gatsby or a Joseph Kennedy to get by in the world that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment brought into being, but even modest success in our complicated system of political economy requires a degree of the confidence that the tycoons possessed. The Stimsonians, however, turned away from the problem of self-confidence. Their programs did nothing to strengthen self-confidence in those who were without it. Their public policies, like those of the kings and emperors of the Old World, were conceived in almost exclusively heroic and monumental terms; one finds in those policies little sympathy for the aspirations of the individual men and women they were supposed to benefit. Robert Moses's public architecture, a public architecture conceived with little understanding of the soil in which it was planted, is a perfect example of the Stimsonians' attraction to the grandiose and the monumental, a perfect example of their indifference to the individual. Moses, the prodigy of Yale and Oxford, succeeded in creating a public architecture that Haussmann and Napoleon III might have envied. Like Caesar Augustus, who said that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, Moses, too, fundamentally altered the character of his city. He found New York a city of neighborhoods and elevated trains and left it a city of reinforced concrete and elevated highways.

The vast bureaucratic structure of the welfare state is a no less telling monument to the Stimsonians' love of the grandiose at the expense of the individual. Emblematic of the Stimsonian approach were the great housing projects the bureaucrats built, monuments to Enlightened intentions gone awry, behemoths conceived without any conception of human proportion or scale. Looming hideously over the nation's decaying ghettos, the projects had been built, Bobby said, without “relevance” to the “underlying problems” of “alienation” that had caused many people to “need assistance in the first place.”
7
They had become places of “despair and danger.”
8
In conceiving these and other bureaucratic programs, the architects of the welfare state had “ignore[d] the shaping traditions of American life and politics.”
9
Having no relation at all to the individuals they were intended to serve, the welfare bureaucracies did nothing to endow those individuals with a feeling of confidence in themselves.

Emerson, Lincoln, and the Idea of “Self-Trust”

I
N QUESTIONING THE
ability of government agencies and government programs to solve the human problem at the heart of the ghetto, Bobby did more than rebel against his own Stimsonian heritage, he drew inspiration from a much older liberal tradition, the liberal individualism of Emerson and Lincoln.

Emerson and Lincoln were perhaps his two greatest American heroes.
10
Emerson was his favorite American poet; Jack Newfield remembered him reading Emerson's poem “Fame” aloud one evening in his New York apartment.
11
And Bobby was a careful student of Emerson's
Essays.
12
His admiration for Lincoln was, if anything, even greater. Bobby purchased, at considerable expense, a rare copy of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; an acquaintance who toured Lincoln's house in Springfield, Illinois, with him in 1956 remembered how “deeply moved” Bobby had been by the experience.
13
After the burial of his brother in the cemetery at Arlington on November 25, 1963, Bobby, riding back to the White House with his widowed sister-in-law, ordered the driver to take them to the Lincoln Memorial, where they paused in silence to gaze up at the Daniel Chester French statue of the sixteenth President.
14

Bobby's devotion to the greatest of America's propounders of the power of the free unfettered individual was not merely fortuitous, he believed as passionately as they in the promise of the individual. Bobby derived from his study of Emerson's philosophy and Lincoln's life not only an admiration for the ideal of the self-reliant individual, but also an insight into the central obstacle to the creation of a nation of self-reliant individuals: the absence in large numbers of men and women of self-confidence, or what Emerson in his
Essays
calls “self-trust.”
15

The Emersonian influence on Bobby's evolving thought is important enough to make a closer examination of the
Essays
themselves desirable. A great part of the first series of essays is devoted to the problem of self-trust. In self-trust, Emerson says, all the other virtues are comprehended.
16
Emerson attempted, in such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “Heroism,” and “History,” both to understand the ways in which ordinary men and women—the “cowed” and the “trustless”—develop self-confidence and at the same time to instill a degree of this confidence in the ordinary men and women who were his readers.
17
The
Essays
have some claim to being the first, as they have certainly a claim to being the greatest, of American self-help books. (The term “self-help” was itself first used by Emerson's friend Thomas Carlyle in his book
Sartor Resartus
). A man “takes up Emerson tired and apathetic,” John Jay Chapman wrote, and “presently finds himself growing heady and truculent, strengthened in his most inward vitality, surprised to find himself again master in his own house.”
18
The
Essays
are the literary equivalent of Prozac; they admonish the reader to put aside his timidity and his reticence, his fear and his embarrassment, his tendency to bow down before great names and august personages; they urge him to “believe” his own thoughts, to “trust” himself, and to be unashamed of the “divine idea” that he represents.
19
If we develop a faith in ourselves, Emerson tells us, we will succeed in banishing “discontent,” which he said is only another name for “the want of self-reliance” and self-confidence.
20
Bobby himself was moved by such Emersonian celebrations of self-confidence as this one, which he underscored in his copy of the
Essays:
“When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself to the world.”
21
Bobby praised Allard Lowenstein, the liberal activist whose confidence in himself and his principles helped ignite the Bust Johnson movement in 1968, in similarly Emersonian terms:

For Al, who knew the lessons of Emerson and taught it [
sic
] to the rest of us: “They do not yet see and thousands of young men as hopeful, now crowding to the barriers of their careers, do not yet see that if a single man plant himself on his convictions and then abide, the huge world will come round to him.” From his friend Bob Kennedy.
22

Drawing both on Romantic theories of creative genius and radical Protestant conceptions of a divine “inner light” that revealed itself in certain men and women, Emerson developed a novel democratic theory of self-reliant individualism. Lincoln's life was in many ways a perfect illustration of that theory; Emerson prophesied that America's democratic civilization would produce men fully as great as the great-souled men of the past, fully as great as Plato and Caesar and Shakespeare. Lincoln, who emerged, unschooled and unpolished, from the frontier towns of Kentucky and Illinois to become one of the great world-historical figures of the nineteenth century, appeared to be a striking vindication of Emerson's philosophy of self-confident, self-reliant individualism. The vision of Emerson and Lincoln powerfully influenced Bobby; one can trace the intellectual origins of his own antipathy to handouts to Emerson's and Lincoln's contempt for them. Bobby did not, like Emerson, go so far as to condemn as a “wicked dollar” every dollar that men doled out to charity.
23
But he shared with Lincoln the conviction that a dole tended to undermine an individual's capacity for exertion and achievement.
24

The Neuroses of the Unconfident Self

T
HE DIFFICULTY WITH
Emerson's project lay in the fact that so many Americans—in Bobby's time no less than in Emerson's—lacked the self-confidence that Emerson celebrated in his writings. How much talent, how much energy, Bobby wondered, did his nation forfeit merely because the possessors of that talent and energy had grown up under conditions that destroyed their self-confidence and prevented them from developing their gifts to the fullest degree? This absence of self-confidence was especially evident in the inner city. But it was not limited to the inner city. The “pathological fear and anxiety” that Robert Coles detected in ghetto children could be found in many other Americans as well.
25
That overwhelming and almost obnoxious self-confidence that European visitors like the Duc de Liancourt and Alexis de Tocqueville believed to be a universal American trait in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not encountered nearly as frequently in 1965.
26
In some ways this was good: Americans had matured as a people; they were less complacent than they had been in the past; they were more conscious of the difficulties of existence, and had perceived the terror of life. But even the stereotypical shallow and self-satisfied American of the period before the Civil War might be preferable to the people Bobby saw too frequently in his own time, and we ourselves encounter so often today—men and women who, crippled by pain and neurosis, shrink from life, become dependent on drugs (tranquilizers thirty years ago, antidepressants today), and are so acutely conscious of their own deficiencies that they find relief from the burdens of self only by engaging in a variety of self-destructive behaviors. These behaviors are the intellectual strategies by which men and women prevent themselves from doing that which they could do were they not so morbidly afraid of failure and humiliation. They are the neuroses of the unconfident self, neuroses that have transformed America from a vale of soul-making into a vale of soul-breaking.

Had America failed? Had it lost its way? Or had the country and its philosophical system been doomed from the beginning? Critics of the American democracy believed that it was bound to fail precisely
because
it was so hopelessly premised on the ideal of the self-reliant individual. These skeptics believed that individual Americans, cut off from the sustaining nourishment of ancient cultural traditions, would inevitably become either shallow, self-confident successes (entrepreneurial heroes) or neurotic, self-doubting failures (almost everyone else). Commerce might flourish, but not art, or manners, or learning. Henry James maintained that the American atmosphere was too culturally thin to sustain a very high or happy level of civilization. In a famous passage in his book on Hawthorne, James drew up a list of reasons why an artist—and by implication a civilized man—must find American society insupportable: