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Sunday, January 09, 2005
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SONTAG AND DAVENPORT..
…two great essayists and individualists who died recently, were both what Paul Fussell, in his book Class, call “X’s,” and this is one reason people are having a bit of trouble categorizing them and summarizing their lives. Here are some excerpts from Fussell’s final chapter, “The X Way Out” : “You become an X person, or to put it more bluntly, you earn X-personhood by a strenuous effort of discovery in which curiosity and originality are indispensable. And in discovering that you can become an X person, you find the only escape from class. Entering X often requires flight from parents and forebears. The young flocking to the cities to devote themselves to ‘art,’ ‘writing, ‘creative work’ - anything, virtually, that liberates them from the presence of a boss or supervisor - are aspirant X people, and if they succeed in capitalizing on their talents, they may end as fully fledged X types. …What kind of people are Xs? The old-fashioned term bohemians gives some idea; so does the term the talented. Some X’s are intellectuals, but a lot are not: they are actors, musicians, artists, sports stars, ’celebrities,’ well-to-do former hippies, confirmed residents abroad, and the more gifted journalists, those whose by-lines intelligent readers recognize with pleasant anticipation. … X people can be described as (to use C. Wright Mills’s term) ’self-cultivated.’ They tend to be self-employed, doing what social scientists call autonomous work. If, as Mills has said, the middle-class person is ’always somebody’s man,’ the X person is nobody‘s, and his freedom from supervision is one of his most obvious characteristics. X people are independent-minded, free of anxious regard for popular shibboleths, loose in carriage and demeanor. They adore the work they do, and they do it until they are finally carried out, ’retirement’ being a concept meaningful only to hired personnel or wage slaves who despise their work. …When an X person, male or female, meets a member of an identifiable class, the costume, no matter what it is, conveys the message ‘I am freer and less terrified than you are,’ or - in extreme circumstances - ‘I am more intelligent and interesting than you are: please do not bore me.’ …The question of whether to select a black or a beige raincoat never troubles X people, for they don’t use raincoats at all: they either get wet and pay no attention or wait under cover - they are not the slaves of time clocks - until the rain stops. …Instinctively unprovincial, X people tend to be unostentatiously familiar with the street layouts and landmarks of London, Paris, and Rome - and sometimes Istanbul and Karachi. This is in accord with their habit of knowing a lot for the pleasure of it, as well as their more specific curiosity about people, no matter where or when they live. Hence the X interest in history, literature, architecture, and aesthetic style. …Regardless of the work they do, the Xs read a great deal, and they regard reading as a normal part of experience, as vital as ‘experience,’ and often more interesting. They never belong to book clubs.” From Francis Morrone, at 2Blowhards, UD discovers a peculiarity she shares with Sontag and Davenport: 'Neither ever learned how to drive a car. [Well, UD learned how to drive a car, and even drove one - badly - for some years. But she hasn’t driven in over a decade.] But for a Manhattanite, that's no big deal. No one ever notices. For a Lexingtonite (Lexingtonian?), it's the stuff of high eccentricity. Some years ago in an essay in the Hudson Review Davenport wrote about a visit to the Lexington post office: "When I tried to renew my passport there a few years ago, a passport kept functional for thirty years, I was told that if I couldn't show a driver's license I couldn't renew my passport. (I will not spin out the Gogolian scene that ensued, though it featured my being told that I didn't deserve to live in this country, my pointing out that I could scarcely leave it without a passport, and on around in circles that left the art of Gogol for that of Ionesco, until I got the State Department on the phone, and had my new passport, together with an apology, in three days.) The point of the anecdote is that the pedestrian is officially a second-rate citizen and definitely an obsolete species." ' |