In an Aesthetic Realism class in 1988, Ellen Reiss asked me: “Do you think you are generous or grudging?” The question had my whole life in it—these opposites had battled in me.
For example, in 1973 I was cast in a play at a summer stock theatre. I had always wanted to be an actor, and this desire, I later learned from Aesthetic Realism, comes from a generous impulsion: to see meaning in the feelings of someone not yourself—the character—and try to be fair to him. But in rehearsals I began to feel a deep reluctance to give myself to the part. One way it showed was that people could barely hear my voice as I said my lines.
In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Eli Siegel explains, with deep comprehension of all humanity and some of the most beautiful prose I ever read, the two directions in people:
Man is selfish; but being, in his fashion, the oneness of opposites, he is also magnanimous, noble, altruistic, large. Man is a heel who can write of the stars. Man is a mean creature who can measure oceans. Man is an instance of cheapness who can be honestly moved by a Hallelujah of Handel. It is all trouble and opportunity.
Aesthetic Realism taught me that the most truly generous thing in men and women is equivalent to our deepest desire, to like the world—this desire has us see value in what is not ourselves. The most grudging thing in us is contempt, the hope to make less of people as a means of building ourselves up. Contempt makes us narrow and contracting, and it’s the biggest interference in a person’s life.
I’ll speak about what I learned about generosity and grudgingness, including the central, kind things Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, has taught me, about a young man having Aesthetic Realism consultations, and about a great novel of France—The Red and the Black—written by Stendhal in 1830. The main character, Julien Sorel, about whom Stendhal once said “Julien is myself,” comes to have a tragic life because he cannot make sense of himself as grudging and generous, both loving and fighting the world.
Does Generosity Pay?
People think if they’re generous they will be dopes who only give of themselves. Eli Siegel saw, with terrific logic, that real generosity is the one means of getting what we want most. In Self and World he writes:
We cannot be whole beings if we are not fair to what is not ourselves…To be selfish is to be the whole self; to be the whole self is to have a sense of otherness.
I learned that “to have a sense of otherness” is what we’re born for, to see meaning in the world. But most people decide early that what is “other” is against them, something one has to fight and have contempt for. This feeling most often begins in the family, as is the case with Julien Sorel, who is described at the beginning of The Red and the Black as handsome and intelligent:
A short lad, about eighteen or nineteen years of age…His…black eyes…revealed a thoughtful, fiery spirit.
Julien’s family lives in the small French town of Verrieres. They are poor and run a water saw-mill. Julien loves to read, and one day his father catches him reading his most cherished book, about his hero Napoleon, instead of minding the saw. He hits Julien gruffly, knocks the book into the river and swings him around. Stendhal writes:
Julien’s big, black eyes, brimming with tears, found themselves confronting the old carpenter’s little grey ones.
Poverty has encouraged anger and unkindness in Julien’s father, and Julien uses this to feel the whole world is against him, to have an early “grudge” against it.
A person fortunate to be learning about this near the beginning of his life is Billy Konrad. In his second consultation, when he was 6-1/2 years old, we were teaching him what it means to have a generous and exact way of seeing people: to have good will. Mr. Konrad was outwardly very cheerful, but when we asked where his father could do better with him, he became quiet and said sometimes his father yells at him. We knew he needed to try to see, from within, how his father feels: if he has a lot on his mind and loses his temper does he like himself? We asked Billy Konrad to imagine that he was Samuel Konrad, and we asked:
Consultants. Sam Konrad, do you think you can get too angry too fast?
Billy Konrad. (as Sam Konrad) Yeah.
Consultants. Angrier than maybe you should?
Billy Konrad. Yes.
We explained that to have good will, a person has to think as deeply as he can about another—even someone he feels hurt by. This includes thinking about where the person might be hurting his own life. We said: “The criterion is this: is it good for the person who is doing the yelling to do the yelling? If your father yells at you…ask “Is it good for him that he’s yelling at me, or is it not good for him?” And Billy Konrad said, “Not good for him.”
Billy Konrad is learning to be kinder. He is not making the choice Julien Sorel makes, beginning with his father to see the whole world as an enemy to beat.
In The Right Of Eli Siegel writes: “Julien Sorel is one of those figures in fiction that have a battle with the world they know.” A chief way Julien battles the world is through being fiercely ambitious. He decides, against his father’s wishes, to become a priest, and in this way to get ahead. A “magnificent” church is being built in Verrieres, and Stendhal writes:
All at once…[Julien] announced his plan of becoming a priest, and was constantly to be seen…committing to memory a Latin Bible which the cure had lent him…In [the cure’s] company Julien made show of none but pious sentiments. Who would have guessed that his…face, so…gentle, concealed an unshakable determination to undergo a thousand deaths rather than fail to achieve success?
Growing up, I was more financially fortunate than Julien Sorel. But what Eli Siegel writes in The Right Of was true of both of us: “Getting ahead is the purpose of every spry youth from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” I, too, could appear gentle while I was ambitious as hell. For example, in seventh grade I represented my class in the Miami science fair. But once I was there I was hardly thinking about science. I was wrapped up in how I could get the reporter from The Miami Herald to take my picture so I would be in the paper.
I learned from Aesthetic Realism that we were born to like the world different from us, not to manipulate it and have contempt for it. If we’re not trying to be fair to the world, we’ll feel nervous and empty. That is what I felt, and in the class I quoted from, Ellen Reiss explained why, as she so accurately and kindly put into words what had been my way of life: “I don’t see myself as existing to treasure something, give myself to something. I exist to get things from people.”
Generosity and Grudgingness in Love
In Self and World Eli Siegel writes: “The purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole.” If a man has a battle about generosity and grudgingness as to the world, the battle will go in him as to a woman, too. That is what occurs with Julien Sorel.
Julien is hired by the rich mayor of Verrieres and his wife, Madame de Renal, to be a tutor for their children. Madame de Renal treats Julien—a peasant—with a kindness and respect he is unaccustomed to. At their very first meeting he is swept. Greeting him at the front door she says:
“What brings you here…?”
Julien turned around sharply and, struck by the very gracious look on Madame de Renal’s face, partly forgot his shyness. Very soon, astonished by her beauty, he forgot everything, even why he had come. Madame de Renal had to repeat her question.
…Julien had never met anyone so well-dressed, especially a woman with such a dazzlingly beautiful complexion, who had spoken to him gently.
“What, sir” she said at last, “so you know Latin?”
“Yes, madam,” he said.
Hearing himself…addressed as ‘sir’, quite seriously too…was far and away beyond all Julien’s expectations.
Through Madame de Renal, the world seems kinder to Julien, and he is very much affected. But right away he makes the mistake many men have made as to a woman—he thinks about what he can get for himself, and he is after conquest. Madame de Renal is married, but Julien does not care about this, he does not want to think about her life. Stendhal writes:
There and then the bold idea of kissing her hand came into his mind…he was saying to himself: It would be cowardly of me not to perform an action which may be of service to me.
And Julien does kiss her hand.
I learned from Aesthetic Realism that a woman stands for the world different from a man, and there is that in a man which does not want to be moved by anything—the grudging thing in him feels this takes away from who he is. That is what Julien feels, and so rather than simply being grateful to Madame de Renal for showing the world as kind to him, Julien is driven to either possess or dismiss her. His thoughts become turbulent, and he tells himself all these feelings will make for trouble in his job as tutor in her home:
Julien found Madame de Renal very beautiful, but he hated her for her beauty, seeing in it the first reef on which his career had nearly foundered. He spoke to her as little as possible, in the hope of forgetting the ecstasy that had moved him, on the very first day, to kiss her hand.
Julien Sorel is angry that Madame de Renal has affected him at all. I learned about this very same thing in an Aesthetic Realism class some years ago.
I was seeing a woman, and without being wholly conscious of this, didn’t like the fact that she affected me so much. I would feel swept and then cold, and didn’t understand why. Ellen Reiss asked me what I thought of having “depth of feeling” for someone, and I answered, “It’s a tremendous thing to feel about another person.” “Are you for it or against it?” she asked. I said, “I’m for it.” And Ellen Reiss then asked: “Only for it? Do you think in the height of passion a person can say inwardly ‘It is I whom I should be loving’? Do you think a person can feel, ‘I’m swept and it’s not by me? The hell with this!’?”
What I learned about myself in this discussion and others enabled me to care for a woman in a new, larger way—Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, who, I am so proud to say, I am married to. Knowing Meryl, her perceptions about the world and about me, has made me a stronger, wider man and I’m grateful to her. It makes me so happy to be studying together in classes taught by Ms. Reiss, learning about ourselves, humanity, art and happenings in the world today.
To Be Swept or to Calculate?
Two things which correspond to generosity and grudgingness in the self are being honestly moved by something, and being calculating and scheming. Julien often has large emotions–he bursts into tears at seeing injustice to someone, or at hearing a beautiful song at the opera. In TRO #74 Eli Siegel writes:
The great thing in Stendahl’s novel is that we can discern a hope in Julien Sorel to love the world without being deceived….what it means to like the world can be studied in Le rouge et le noir
One way this can be seen is in Julien Sorel’s fervent care for people at his time in French history who showed great courage and integrity–Napoleon, the revolutionary leader Danton, the poet and revolutionary Béranger. Julien’s feeling about them and the justice they fought for is intense and unarranged, and he is proud.
But then so often Julien is a schemer, and calculates: if I show this emotion, what will it get me? Stendhal uses the word “calcula-ting” about him often, and Madame de Rênal’s friend once says, “I feel very suspicious of that young tutor of yours…He seems…to be always turning things over in his mind.” Ms. Reiss has spoken to me about this very thing, asking me once in a class: “How much is there a calculation [in you]–will this feeling pay off?”
Julien decides he must have Madame de Rênal, and he calculates. Stendhal writes:
Julien looked at Madame de Rênal in a very curious way when he met her the next morning; he was taking stock of her as of an enemy he had to fight….Why can’t I devise some clever manouevre, he thought, and force Madame de Rênal to show me those unmistakable marks of affection?
He devises a plan and writes it down. The plan succeeds–Julien spends the night with Madame de Rênal, and with all his calculation he is, nonetheless, tremendously affected.
But Julien Sorel never resolves the battle between generosity and grudgingness in him. Reading about him makes me even more grateful for what I have learned from Aesthetic Realism, the ques-tions I’ve been so lucky to hear from Ms. Reiss, and for the pain I have been spared.
The Profit System Encourages Grudgingness
One of the biggest fields for trouble about generosity and grudgingness is economics. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that our economy, the profit system, is based on contempt, the use of one man by another for one’s own gain. In a chapter of Self and World titled “Psychiatry, Economics, Aesthetics,” Mr. Siegel writes:
The economics of the moment says: get yours. It is hard to see how a deeply tranquil attitude towards other people can arise and be maintained while a person is driven to be in constant economic combat with those people.
This is a blazing matter at the time in history of The Red and the Black—1830s France. The French Revolution had taken place and there was more justice to people. Yet still there were the excesses of the wealthy nobility and then peasants who struggled simply to eat. Julien Sorel was born a peasant, and in The Right Of Mr. Siegel writes, “Julien Sorel wanted to go high in the world and also to be happy.”
Being at the mayor’s home, Julien comes to know the rich people of Verrieres. He has new and fine clothes, and has learned the mannered ways of the wealthy. He is selfish, yet Stendhal shows he is fiercely against himself; he is out for himself, but often has passionate emotion for the suffering of others.
For example, one night Julien has dinner at the home of Monsieur Valenod, a rich man who runs the town prison, which is next door to his home. The meal is sumptuous and the guests are fancy, yet they begin to hear the prisoners next door singing a bawdy song. Many of these prisoners likely were forced to commit crimes simply to eat. M. Valenod has them stopped—”I’ve had the beggars reduced to silence,” he says. Stendhal writes:
These words were too much for Julien—he had the manners but not as yet the mentality of his present position…he felt a big tear stealing down his cheek.
…Julien’s conscience was telling him: There you see the filthy riches you’ll acquire…Possibly you’ll get a post worth twenty thousand francs, but then, while you are gorging yourself with meat, you’ll have to stop some wretched prisoner singing; you’ll give dinners with the money you’ve stolen from his miserable pittance—and while you dine he’ll be unhappier still! Oh, Napoleon; how sweet it was in your day to climb to fortune through the risks of battle!—but to add so meanly to some poor fellow’s misery!
There is in Julien deep generosity of mind, real feeling for those men. It is so different from Julien the social climber, the schemer.
Unlike Julien here, I once didn’t care a bit if I added to a person’s misery or happiness. The way I saw money was representative of many people: I was excessively generous to myself, buying expensive clothes and items, while I was grudging about what other people deserved.
Once, on a trip to Mexico, I haggled over the price of a wicker basket, priding myself on how I beat out the store-keeper, who was very poor, for a cheap price. I didn’t know that the state of mind that had me act that way also made me hate myself and feel I was a fraud who pretended to be a friendly guy. In a class, Ellen Reiss has asked me questions about money, such as: “Do you think money should be used to make you lordly?” and “Do you want to honor the value of things through money?” Thinking about this has enabled me to change—to feel I’m honestly trying to be kind.
In The Red and the Black there is a danger of Julien’s affair with Madame de Renal being found out, and he must leave Verrieres. She is greatly distressed at her infidelity to her husband, and turns to religion to try and gain some peace of mind. Julien comes to be the personal secretary to the immensely wealthy Marquis de la Mole at his home in Paris, and he feels he’s getting ahead.
There he meets the Marquis’ daughter, Mathilde, who is the toast of Paris, and he has the same purpose with her as he did with Madame de Renal. Julien is affected by Mathilde but he resents it. There is a turbulent relation, a contest about who will show more care than the other, and Julien has this grudging strategy—”Keep her mind occupied all the time with this grave doubt: Does he love me?” Yet his ill will makes him miserable; he is constantly gloomy and feels “despair.”
Mademoiselle de la Mole becomes pregnant. Her father, though furious, agrees she and Julien will be married and he gives Julien land, a title and a great deal of money. “Julien was intoxicated with ambition,” writes Stendhal. But just then, Madame de Renal, at the insistence of a priest to whom she confessed, writes a letter to the Marquis de la Mole saying Julien is merely a fortune hunter and the marriage should not take place. Furious, Julien wants to get revenge on Madame de Renal and almost succeeds, wounding her with a pistol.
Julien is imprisoned and will stand trial. He insists to the magistrate, “I am guilty,” and refuses to take any line of defense—he is determined to die. I believe that Stendhal has an important message in this—Julien Sorel feels guilty for having lived a largely selfish life and feels he should be punished. Before he dies, thoughts of regret insist in him: “[Am I] really unkind and heartless?” “Have I loved much?”
I want people every where to be able to study Aesthetic Realism, so they can have the honestly generous, proud emotions they were meant to have.