In which we see Ms. Bradstreet stretch in unfamiliar directions
The Maria Chronicles, #40
The old, familiar pain is evident to Maria when she moves from her bed to the bathroom on Tuesday morning, and the thought of its return hurts as least as much as the sharp twinge every time she puts weight on the knee. She still remembers the doctor showing her the arthritic fragments on the x-ray two years ago, ascribing it to the aging process. He prescribed Vioxx, which worked, but she worried about the side effects, especially since her dad had died of a heart attack. But that medication is long since gone, in any case. She'd have to go see someone new.
Maria had been pleased when the chair of the History department, Jen Abruzzi, invited her to lunch at her upper-west side apartment for President's Day. The walk the two subsequently took in Riverside Park with Jen's chocolate Labrador retriever had gone on much longer than either of them had anticipated (they turned back when the reached 72nd Street, which meant the whole excursion was about three miles). Maria likes and respects Jen, and was glad to hear about the new guy she's been dating, mindful of how sorely lacking she is for friends here in New York. The weather was surprisingly warm, and the park had a stark beauty. She probably would have kept going even if her knee started to hurt then, which it hadn't. In retrospect, Maria realizes she should have taken Advil before going to bed, but didn't even think about it. She wasn't hurting, and three miles really isn't that much, for God's sake.
The pain accompanies her as she putters around her apartment, getting ready for work. It abates for the drive to school, but resumes when she walks across the parking lot. Maria is at work early today, hoping to grade a few essays before her first class, but she sees as she arrives that the first buses are already there, disgorging their human cargo onto the sidewalk. Some of the kids mill around, talking and laughing, while others trudge into the building. She finds herself envying them their rude vigor. Although she in many ways loves working with young people, there are times Maria finds it a psychically punishing experience. The lean frames, firm asses, taut stomachs, good skin (well, maybe not that much good skin): it can be so exhausting.
Like right now: Maria is walking down a corridor of sophomore lockers, where a group of boys are playing lacrosse in the hallway. A heavy white ball hits a cinder block wall with a thud, and bounds away from her, leading a boisterous pack of three in hot pursuit. It takes her a moment to figure out what's happening, which prompts a series of thoughts:
One: This is not good, and I need to intervene.
Two: I don't want to intervene.
Three: Will they respond if I do intervene?
Four: This is not good, and I need to intervene.
Maria is just about to shout "Boys!" above the din when she suddenly sees the white ball bounding right at her. She holds up her hand and the ball flies right into it, the pain surprising but bearable. It all happens at blinding speed; she'd never be able to do this if she thought about it for more than a millisecond.
The three boys at the far end of the hall are standing silent; the fourth boy, facing her in the aftermath of his failed attempt to intercept the ball, is still wearing an "oh shit!" expression.
Maria gives him a rueful smile. "I think you guys better take this outside."
"I'm really sorry," he says, taking the ball from her outstretched hand. "We'll move right now. C'mon, guys," he says. "We can go to the lower field."
"I gotta go to the computer lab anyway," a boy at the far end says. "Me too," says another. The fourth just drifts off.
"I guess that wasn't very smart," the first boy says, turning back to Maria and walking past. "Thanks, Ms. Bradstreet."
Maria is surprised the kid knows her name, and that he thanks her, which, she thinks, is about right: this could have gone a good deal worse for him. She's also a little surprised at herself for how well she acquitted herself in this set of unexpected circumstances. Guess the old mare isn't quite ready to be put to pasture, she thinks.
Which is not to say the pain in her knee has gone away. Maria knows it's not going to any time soon, just as she knows she's not going find, much less get an appointment with, a doctor any time soon. Maria remembers that she forgot to take the Advil she intended to before she left home, but also that she has some in the top left hand drawer of her desk. That'll do for now. She'll manage.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Jim is observing President's Day. He's spending a lot of the holiday weekend in his car, in which he's been listening to the marvelous soundtrack from the new feature film Crazy Heart, starring Jeff Bridges the washed-up country singer Bad Blake. The storyline involves Blake's attempt to come to terms with the success of a protege, Tommy Sweet, a good-looking hot new star played by Colin Farrell, as well as navigate a relationship with a single mother played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It's a fine little movie that also features Robert Duvall as Blake's bar-owning pal (Duvall is a producer of the film), but its principal attraction is Bridges, who once again demonstrates why he's the greatest American actor of his generation in his astounding range. That range extends to a surprisingly credible performance on the soundtrack, which was assembled by the veteran producer T-Bone Burnett in collaboration with longtime session man Stephen Bruton, whose recent death has resulted in a disputed will (here's a recent Times story on the controversy). The album as a neoclassical feel to it, including chestnuts from Buck Owens, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Waylon Jennings, as well as appearances from the much more contemporary Ryan Bingham. But what really brings it to life are set of Bruton-Burnett songs that are remarkably simple but sturdy in their resonance. These include the Oscar-nominated theme song, "The Weary Kind," as well as the marvelous "Fallin' and Flyin," ("Funny how fallin' seems like flyin'/For a little while," goes the chorus, which includes this resonant bridge:
you never see it comin’ till it’s gone it all happens for a reason even when it’s wrong especially when it’s wrong
The song, like number of others, is performed in multiple permutations, all of which have their satisfactions. At a time of tremendous cultural fragmentation in popular music, it's a reassuring pleasure to savor the deceptively simple joy of traditional country music. Old Abe Lincoln would surely agree.
Jim is also taking a break from historical reading by returning to an old favorite, Sue Grafton, whoseU is for Undertow is the twentieth book in her now-fabled abcedarian series featuring her plucky PI protagonist, Kinsey Millhone. This time Kinsey is hired by a less than credible college dropout who believes that as a child he witnessed the aftermath of a long unsolved murder from the 1960s. Grafton's novels, which she started publishing in the early eighties, have proceeded much more slowly than in real time; this one is set in 1988 with (skillfully executed) flashbacks to the sixties. This strategy increasingly makes the books historical documents in their own right; Grafton is happy to deny Kinsey the Internet, which would surely make her work easier -- and a lot less fun.
With a final nod to AL and GW, whose vision, and loyalty to that vision, have made a nation that offers such democratic pleasure, a Happy President's Day to all.
On the joy of sharing a room with a man a few days before he dies
He's right there when I enter the classroom first thing in the morning, his gentle smile directly in my line of sight. That's just the way I wanted it. The photograph is in the public domain, and so I could have gotten it for free, but I was glad to pay an online poster company for an image that's about 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide. It came shortly before his hundred 199th birthday. Now I celebrate every day.
It's a pretty famous picture. One of about a half-dozen we have engraved in our collective memory, trotted out by retailers for Presidents’ Day sales. It was taken by Alexander Gardner, former assistant of the famed Matthew Brady, who got tired of Brady getting credit for his pictures and struck out on his own. Gardner had been out in the field taking pictures at the front, but came back to Washington and had secured an appointment with the president. Though there's some dispute about the dating, the consensus is that was taken on April 10, 1865, about four days before he died. This was just after the fall of Richmond, one of the few truly happy days of his presidency. Earlier that week, he'd gone to the Confederate capital itself and swiveled in Jefferson Davis’s desk chair (he had a rebel five dollar bill in his pocket that night at Ford’s Theater). He had the good grace to be embarrassed when a group of former slaves threw themselves at his feet on the street, thanking him for their freedom. It was God, not I, who freed you, he said. Only one day earlier, Lee had surrendered to Grant; for all practical purposes, the war was over.
One of the things I love so much about the picture is that smile on his face, slight but unmistakable. That's very rare. People tend not to smile in 19th-century photographs because exposure times were relatively prolonged, and such expressions seem fake if you have to sustain them for more than a moment. Of course, there was also the matter that he didn't have a whole lot to smile about in those terrible days. The fact that he was doing so here, just after his gargantuan task was accomplished and just before he became another casualty in the struggle, seems almost unbearably moving.
Indeed, the smile, real as it is, does not hide the deep sense of sorrow etched into his face. He fingers his glasses with a kind of absent-minded gentleness. His bow tie is slightly off-center; to the last he never lost his rumpled quality. He managed to retain a full head of jet black hair and beard, only slightly touched with gray. Yet there's something almost steely about them. Though his face seems about as soft as the bark on a tree, I find myself wishing I could run my hand across it. Walt Whitman had it right -- he's so ugly that he's beautiful.But it's the eyes that haunt me. His right eye is a socket; he looks like he's half dead already. His left eye is cast downward slightly. It does not seem focused on anything in the room, but seems instead to be gazing within, saturated with a sadness that nothing will ever take away. They say he had a great sense of humor and loved cracking jokes to the very end, and I believe it. Surely there was no man on the face of the earth who could have savored a good laugh more. A look into those eyes could leave no doubt.But the strongest impression conveyed by the photograph is one of compassion. Kindness as a form of wisdom. That's my aspiration. In a few minutes, this room will be filled with hungry, well fed adolescents. Some will be laughing, some will be content. But surely it will do someone some good to have him there. He'll be gazing out for the discussion of Little Big Horn, the Pullman Strike, the New Deal, the request for an extension on the research essay, and lunch. Long after I'm gone, he will remain.
In which we see Ms. Bradstreet indulge in some investigating The Maria Chronicles, # 39
Maria gives in to the itch she's been longing to scratch: she looks up Jack Casey on Google. She'd been resisting for weeks. There was the date they went on, then her unfounded conviction that he'd slept with Jen Abruzzi (who's now dating a college counselor at Collegiate), and then Eleanor's Bernstein's jarring mention of him as a crook when Maria had her performance review with Ellie last week. Through it all she had rejected the persistent idea that she investigate who the guy really is. Besides a feeling that it was somehow underhanded (though, really, anything she found would be a matter of public record), doing so would give her interest in Jack a level of reality she didn't want to acknowledge. Partly this was because she feared Dani was right, and Maria hated the thought she had succumbed to the charm of a sleazy man. But her resistance preceded knowing this possibility, and it confuses her.
But two glasses of wine in bed with your laptop on a lonely Friday night will weaken your resolve. Maria had considered calling her friend Janice, but rejected that idea because she knew she'd end up talking about Jack, and Janice would express incredulous exasperation at Maria's scruples. "Maria, what the hell is wrong with you?" she can hear Janice saying. "Of course you should Google him! You think I would get involved with a guy without googling him?" It's as if Janice is speaking through Maria's cell phone right now.
So Maria goes ahead. She makes the mistake of simply typing in "Jack Casey," which of course spits back about six million results. Then she types in "Jack Casey Bear Stearns," which is better, because, as it turns out, there are only two. One is apparently in Human Resources. But the other is her quarry. She sees his picture on one entry.
Jack appears to have had a high-level job. Executive VP for credit derivatives marketing. She sees mentions of him at professional conferences, interviews in trade publications, his presence at charity events. Seems a world away from the "Cuff Man" she had taken to calling him when she'd see him in the hallways or the cafeteria at school. The quotes she reads has his inflections. But it doesn't quite seem real that he's the same person.
It's only on the third page of results that she finds what she guesses she was looking for, a story in a financial blog: "Bear Stearns Execs Cashed Out Before Stock Cratered." The story mentioned Jack among a number of people at the firm who by selling a large block of shares at $170, just before the the financial tsunami hit, had netted at least $13 million more than they otherwise would have had they done so six weeks later, when the price was a mere fraction of that value. While the tone was one of raised eyebrows, the writer of the piece reported that there was no evidence that they had done anything illegal.
Another piece, however, suggested otherwise. In a piece entitled "Unindicted Co-Conspirators Worked with Cioffi," Maria came across the following:
"Prosecutors in Manhattan did not identify the co-conspirators. But people familiar with the investigation confirmed that they included John ("Jack") Casey and Thomas "Mack" McDonaugh, senior managers in the firm's derivatives division, as among those investigated. McDonaugh denied any involvement with Cioffi; Casey declined through his attorney to have any comment."
Mack McDonaugh: He was the guy who accosted Jack and Maria when they'd had dinner at the Mexican restaurant. No wonder Jack was uncomfortable. "Jesus," she says out loud.
Maria finishes her glass of wine and puts it on her bedside table. She opens a new tab on her browser and goes to her email. She writes:
Jack,How long were you going to wait before you told me about your questionable financial dealings with Bear Stearns? Did you really think I wouldn't find out you were an unindicted co-conspirator? I'm disappointed by your lack of candor, and your estimation of me.
Maria stops, unsure what to say next. She stares at the screen for a moment even after her cell phone rings.
"Hi Mom!"
"Hello Felicia. How are you, sweetheart?"
Felicia is fine. And as Maria settles into the familiar rhythms of talking with her daughter, she sees how foolish she is to remonstrate with Jack. A few conversations and a dinner with a man hardly requires him to disclose the inner working of his business, much less his mind. This is Maria's problem: her standards are too rigid. Just let it go, she thinks. So the guy isn't who he appears to be. Big deal. Just let him get on with his life, as you get on with yours. Maria pours herself another glass as she listens to Felicia explain her plans for a trip to Paris. Tomorrow she'll tweak her syllabi for the new spring electives she's teaching.
Mary Karr didn't actually launch the memoir boom of the 1990s (Tobias Wolff, following in his brother Geoffrey's example in The Duke of Deception in 1979, can plausibly claim that honor with This Boy's Life in 1989). And she may not represent the zenith of that boom (Frank McCourt's 1996 book Angela's Ashes was more of a global blockbuster). But Karr's 1995 account of her wild Texas childhood, The Liar's Club, was perhaps the quintessential expression of the movement. The book was a surprise hit, because while she had been building a reputation as a poet, Karr was not a well-known public figure. And her tale, while notably dramatic and filled with vivid characters, was also rendered with great literary flair. In her wake, comparably talented writers like Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), along with some less talented ones like Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors), scored popular success. Meanwhile, the movement over-ripened into a fad and curdled into controversy following the publication of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces in 2003 when Frey revealed that much of his story had been fabricated. Memoir now seems firmly established a commercial literary genre, but the charm of its novelty has long since passed.
Karr, for her part, has continued spinning her tumultuous life into a literary commodity. She followed up The Liar's Club with Cherry (2000), which recounted her sexually active adolescence. Her latest book, Lit, picks up where Cherry left off, but does so in a neatly segmented way that requires no prior knowledge of her other work. The story this time is of Karr's descent into alcoholism and subsequent resurrection by way of a conversion to Roman Catholicism.
After a prelude in California and an unfinished undergraduate career at an unnamed Midwestern college (Macalester), Lit follows Karr's marriage to blue-blooded poet, the birth of their son, and the couple's struggles over work, money and love. Karr's drinking problem grows steadily worse, and its impact is depicted in terms of her family life, her professional aspirations as a writer/teacher, and the other addictive personalities she encounters along the way. In its depiction of a struggle to attain (and maintain) a semblance of a middle-class life -- and a strenuous, educated-class reluctance to submit to the perceived hokiness of the recovery movement -- Lit is reminiscent of of the late Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story (1996). But Karr's work is peopled with a cast of much more bumptious characters, beginning with her mother, and is rendered with a tangy Texas wit she attributes to her father ("wouldn't say sooey if the hogs were eating her" is among the gems she attributes to him). But some of Karr's encomiums go well beyond her rich provincial roots, as in this resonant exchange with a husband impatient with the lushes she's entertaining while he tries to sleep:
He whispers, I can't sleep from the noise. If you don't ask them to leave, I'll have to.
I hiss at him, You're such a control freak.
He says, you knew I was like this when you married me.
The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it's a cliché that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while every husband signs up believing his wife won't: both dead wrong.
Tellingly, there are no quotation marks here. Even given the lax factual standards of the genre, Karr feels compelled to signal her subjectivity. Such hedging is not sufficient to put one's skepticism to rest, however, given that Karr repeatedly confesses that much of her memory of her drinking days has been blacked out. Moreover, her portrayal of her repellently parsimonious husband strains credulity, if for no other reason than to make one wonder why she would cast her lot with him. The great pitfall of books like these is that the author wears out her welcome with her reader, and while Karr never quite crosses this line, she certainly flirts with it. Yet she ultimately maintains control of her material, revealing that for all its pleasingly democratic implications, the success of contemporary memoir finally depends on a sense of iron-willed literary discipline applied to God-given talent.
Which, in turn, testifies to one source of the book's likely durability. Lit should find a lasting life in the the discourse of addiction and recovery. It also can help explain why, for all its considerable liabilities, the Roman Catholic Church has a singular power to fuse spirituality, ritual, and a sense of social solidarity difficult to match elsewhere in American life. But beyond the title's allusion to biological and religious intoxication, it also points to a third figure in what is finally a trinity: a life saved and lived through the power of the written word. Whether it's in scenes depicting the joy of poetry as experienced by the mentally handicapped women Karr teaches, or the thrill of encountering a real, live poet in the flesh, Lit is a testimonial to Good Books and the sense of purpose and structure they offer. This sense of purpose and structure is psychological, but material as well. Few things give Karr as much joy as the $750 she gets as an advance for one book, or the car she can buy when she lands a publisher for The Liar's Club. Compared to other ways of making money, this one is laughably inefficient, and one that -- speaking as a fellow addict -- can and perhaps should seem bizarre to those inclined to pursue more practical livelihoods. But a great many of us, lit remains nice work if you can get it. And a remarkably compelling even when you can't.
In which we see Ms. Bradstreet hear a performance review -- of somebody else
The Maria Chronicles, #38
Maria is sitting alone with a cup of coffee in the office of the principal, Eleanor Bernstein, whom she has barely met. They conferred briefly last summer when Maria was interviewing for the job at Hudson High and Bernstein was about six months pregnant. Bernstein took a semester leave when the baby arrived in September, but while she delegated her authority to a series of people -- an unusual move, Maria thinks -- she's heard Bernstein continued to play a substantial role behind the scenes. (In the acidic words of her colleague Edie Wilson, "I can't tell whether she's a real cunt, or a real prick, though in the end I suppose it doesn't make any difference.")
Bernstein's secretary, an inscrutable gray-haired woman named Marnie Mayne, admitted Maria to the office, and returns a moment later to put a vase of fresh flowers and a cup of tea on Bernstein's desk and turn on her computer. "She'll be right along," Mayne says. Maria surveys the room -- framed posters of museum exihbits, a Georgia O'Keefe print, photographs of a handsome husband and another child in addition to the infant. Pretty much what you'd expect.
Bernstein's entrance, however, has surprising force, as she bursts into the office from the secretary's door. "No, I will not speak to her now," she's telling Mayne. "I'm done with that woman. If you can't tell her I'm in a meeting, then tell her I'm dealing with an unexpected emergency. Then email Dwight and tell him to call her. This shouldn't be my problem."
Her coat still on, she brightens -- briefly -- to smile at her visitor. "Maria Bradstreet. So nice to see you again." She extends a gloved hand. "Ellie Bernstein." Maria shakes her hand, and upon release Bernstein busies herself of shedding her coat, scarf and gloves. "Freezing outside," she says. "Lived here for almost 20 years now, but still haven't gotten used to it."
Even without knowing that Bernstein just had a baby Maria can tell she's young -- not yet forty, for sure, hard to tell how much below that. Everything about her, from her vocal delivery to her expensive clothes, hums with a sense of ambition. Maria remembers thinking during her interview that this is not a person who suffers fools gladly. Bernstein was polite, but a bit distracted for what at that point had been a formality: she had apparently accepted Jen Abruzzi's recommendation. Maria hears that Bernstein is looking to move on to a bigger arena. Apparently this is a good pit stop for a maternity leave. Maria wouldn't be surprised to learn she went on job interviews while she was on it.
Bernstein is now fussing with her email, and Maria has just about decided that this is crossing the line into rude when suddenly she looks up from the computer, locks eyes with her, and renders a smile. "I'm happy to say that this is going to be a brief meeting, Maria."
"I'm glad to hear that. I think."
Bernstein sips her tea. "Yes. Under normal circumstances, we would have talked about your performance long before now, and I would have dropped into one of your classes unannounced at some point this fall. But as you know" -- she tilts her head at a photo to her left -- "I've been juggling other projects."
"I see. Lucky you."
"I understand you have two of your own. Grown now. Started early." Bernstein sips again, and changes direction. "I'm pleased to report that the word on the street about you is good, Maria. My sources among the students say you're smart, prepared, and return work promptly. Colleagues say you're pleasant, if a bit distant."
Maria nods, willing to endure the slightly awkward silence that follows from her deciding not to say anything.
Bernstein smiles. "Good. I will tell you that I was not particularly enthusiastic about hiring you. At 49, you're set in your ways. And as a veteran, you were expensive. Frankly, I wouldn't have even had the budgetary option of taking you this year. But I -- and, from what I understand, you -- are a big Jen Abruzzi fan. Jen was willing to spend a lot of political capital with me in order to get a seasoned hand in the History Department. I consider Jen to be one of the real team players around here, the best department chair I've got, and I ultimately decided to back her on this, in part because I share her belief that that a strong, stable History Department an important anchor for the school as a whole."
"I'm glad to hear that."
Bernstein glances at her computer and smiles wryly before looking back at Maria. "If only I could get a few other departments into shape. The language department, of course, is a revolving door."
"I can imagine." Maria can: turnover among foreign language teachers has always been rampant at every school she's worked at.
"And don't even get me started on the math department." There's a twinkle now in Bernstein's eye: "You understand. You're faculty, sure. But you don't like dead wood any more than I do."
Maria smiles. Bernstein is presumptuous, but not altogether lacking in charm. Actually, Maria suspects she's got plenty at her disposal when she decides to dispense it. Which she's doing, in a measured way, right now.
"The absentee rate over there is ridiculous. Seems like virtually every day they've got a sub over there. Penny Perez keeps using this guy named Jack Casey. You know him?"
Maria nods.
"Scum, as far as I'm concerned." Bernstein evidently reads the surprise on Maria's face. "You know his story?"
Maria shakes her head.
"He worked for Bear Stearns. You hear about that trial recently about the guys running that hedge fund over there?"
"I don't really know much about banking."
"Well, I don't either. But my husband works for JP Morgan Chase. He tells me that Casey was an unindicted conspirator in that case. They all got off anyway, so I suppose it doesn't matter. But the whole thing was unbelievable. When I was in the hospital having my daughter Gerri I read this book, House of Cards, about the fall of Bear Stearns. Enough to make your blood boil. Probably sped along my labor."
"Wow. I didn't know."
Bernstein is looking at her computer again. "Penny started using him after I went on leave, so I didn't know, and by the time I did, she said that Casey was too useful to give up. Which is okay, I guess. But the guy will never get a regular job here on my watch." She chuckles. "Not that he needs one. Teaching's penance, I guess. He's sure as hell not doing it for the money."
Maria sits stunned. Why is Bernstein telling her this? Does she know more about her than she realized? How could she?
"Anyway, again, Maria, you're doing good work. You're still technically on probation, but I'm recommending you for renewal. Assuming nothing goes wrong, you're squarely on the tenure track." She extends her hand across her desk. "Congratulations."
Maria shakes it and stands up. "Thank you."
"Jesus," Maria says aloud as she leaves the office. This is one hell of a place to work. She wishes she had a bottle of whiskey in her desk, the way Ed Asner's character did on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show. She looks over at the faculty lounge. A doughnut will have to do.
This week marks the first anniversary of this blog. To commemorate it, I'm running my first blog post of February 4, 2009. I'm very grateful for the hundreds of visits American History Now has received each week since its launch, and hope it will have many more. Thanks for coming!
--Jim Cullen
Outlaw Pete: Springsteen Makes a Western
Among the many virtues in Bruce Springsteen’s music is a rich sense of history. And like many of those virtues, that sense of history has emerged organically over the course of his career. Springsteen’s first albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, were marked by a powerful sense of immediacy; to a great extent, they’re records of the present tense. Beginning with the release of Born to Run, a consciousness of history – principally in the form of a growing awareness of past failure, and a desperate desire to avoid similar mistakes – begins to suffuse the consciousness of his characters. This consciousness is deeply personal, typically expressed, for example, in generational tensions between fathers and sons. That’s what I mean by “organic.”
By about 1980, Springsteen’s sense of history begins to get broader. It emerges in a series of forms, ranging from his decision to perform songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (reading 1980 Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie as the suggestion of his manager, Jon Landau, seems to have been a watershed experience) to recording original songs like “Wreck on the Highway,” avowedly patterned on the style of country & western singer Roy Acuff. His 1982 album Nebraska is saturated with a sense of the 1930s (his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad even more so), and even deeply personal songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” connect the private struggles of their protagonist to much larger historical ones. This trajectory is a striking, and impressive testament to an artist’s power to grow and integrate everyday life into a broader human drama.
One of the less remarked upon aspects of Springsteen’s body of work is his fascination with the West. This is, of course, counterintuitive – Springsteen is nothing if not the voice of New Jersey, an embodiment of urban, ethnic, working-class values and culture typically associated with the Northeast Corridor. But the western signposts are there, as early as “Rosalita,” which climaxes with a vision of triumphant lovers savoring their victory over paternal repression in a café near San Diego. That’s a fleeting reference. But beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town – think of the “rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert” of “The Promised Land” – the West becomes a vivid and indispensable setting for a number of songs. Springsteen being Springsteen, he’s not always content simply to invoke or use such settings in conventional ways. So, for example, the gorgeous yearning that marks his 1995 song “Across the Border,” redolent with music, instrumentation, and language of the Southwest, is purposely ambiguous which side of the border its protagonists long to go. Springsteen’s mythic tendencies are often marked by creative friction with the concrete details and ironic realities of everyday life.
“Outlaw Pete,” the leadoff track on Springsteen’s latest album, Working on a Dream, represents the next turn of the wheel in a way that’s somehow predictable, surprising, and inevitable all at once. Superficially, the song, like the album as a whole, is something of a throwback, a return to the dense, lush, melodic pop songs that were once Springsteen’s stock-in-trade. At eight minutes long, it’s also the first time in decades that’s he’s recorded a mini-epic on the scale of “Incident on 57th St.” or “Jungleland.” For thirty years now, the overall trend in Springsteen’s work has been toward more sparse, even minimalist songs that approach spoken-language records, though the approach here was first broached on Magic in 2007.
It’s almost jarring to hear his eager embrace of melodic hooks and multi-track harmonies.It’s also almost jarring in that “Outlaw Pete” so willfully introduces us to a protagonist who seems like a cartoon figure from an imitation John Ford movie, who “at six months old” had “done three months in jail” and “robbed a bank in his diapers and little baby feet.” Pete’s signature question, “Can you hear me?” seems like a childish insistence for attention. Some might be amused by such a description; others might dismayed, even irritated by its triviality. One could be forgiven for perceiving that Springsteen is slipping into superficiality in his advancing age, perhaps trying to recapture the sense of popular appeal that once seems so effortlessly his.
But appearances are deceiving. More specifically, our perception of Outlaw Pete is deceiving. After hearing the seemingly requisite description of a horse-stealing, heart-breaking scoundrel – rendered in an amused voice that suggests the narrator views him as a figure closer to a rakishly charming Jesse James than a hard, frightening, Liberty Valance – the story turns on a dime (the music, which shifts to a declining phrase of repeating notes, indicates this) as Pete gets a vision of his own death that prompts him to marry a Navajo and settle down with a newborn daughter on a reservation. Yet in some sense the story is only getting started. A vindictive lawman – another staple of western mythology – is determined to bring Pete down and precipitates a confrontation. “Pete you think you have changed but you have not,” Dan tells him, in so doing posing the existential question at the heart of the song, which is to what degree we have agency over our characters and thus our fate. In the showdown that follows Pete is nominally the victor, yet Dan literally gets the last word in observing before his death that “we cannot undo these things that we’ve done.” The question “Can you hear me?” is turned on its head, as Dan speaks to Pete instead of Pete speaking to the world.
Pete, now a fugitive from the law, makes an ambiguous disappearance from the story. Is it to be understood that his encounter with Dan demonstrates the fixed nature of his personality and the impossibility of any lasting mortal redemption? Or is it an act of abnegation that protects his wife and daughter from the wickedness that surrounds him? The final verses of the song depict Dan’s daughter braiding Pete’s buckskin chaps in her hair – original sin and grace at once – with the question “Can you hear me?” now completely reversed, as we listeners seek the vanished Pete. Like Alan Ladd in Shane or John Wayne in any number of westerns, Pete catalyzes action that leads to resolution, but pushes him beyond the frame.
Like a great many works of art, “Outlaw Pete” asks many more questions than it answers. But there are at least two things it does clarify. The first is the ongoing vitality of western mythology (now nicely updated with a multicultural accent) as a vehicle for exploring the complexities of American life. The second is the ongoing vitality of Springsteen himself, 37 years into an enormously broad and deep body of work, to reinvent himself through reviewing and revising our cultural traditions. He hears us, and we see ourselves.
