Aesthetic Realism explains that every fight we have is based on either respect or contempt for the world. For example, when people fought the Nazis in World War II, they were fighting in behalf of respect—for justice. But most fights are based on the desire to have contempt, to be superior, and this desire causes hell in bedrooms, on city streets, and between nations. When we have contempt we hope for fights and this makes us cruel.
For much of my life I did just that. I remember a typical morning years ago. Getting ready for work, I was sure that later my boss was going to pounce on me and find a flaw with something I did. As I put on my tie and walked to the subway, I planned my counter-attack. But when I saw my boss he looked up and said in the friendliest way, “Oh hello, Bennett. Good morning.” I was shocked.
I am very grateful to Aesthetic Realism for showing me how to criticize my desire to fight with the world and people, and for teaching me that what I want most is to care for things in a large, accurate way. Because of what I’m learning, I have a happy life.
In this paper I’ll speak about my own life and about one of America’s most loved actors, Jimmy Cagney. I’ll show the two ways we fight—how one strengthens and the other weakens us—and how these were in both the life and the art of Jimmy Cagney.
A False Fight Begins Early
Growing up in Florida, the times I saw the world as most likable were through music and dancing. I remember when I first learned how to do a triple-time step in tap—it was so precise and so free! The step begins with a fight—you stamp the floor with your foot. Then you take a little jump, and what follows immediately is lightsome and pattering. Then another stamp, and the pattern begins again. When the dancer gets that rhythm of stamp and patter, something fighting and then almost delicately caressing the floor at once, it is beautiful.
But mostly I felt the world was a place to get, as Mr. Siegel writes in Self and World, “victories for just me.” I was a snob, and competitive with other children. My family had a nice home and cars, and I compared us to every other family in the neighborhood with us coming out on top. I could appear like the friendly boy next door; but inside I was calculating. I avoided fist fights, but in my mind I was constantly arguing with people, scoring points and trying to put them down.
I prided myself on being a sharp person and I couldn’t under-stand why, as time went on, I felt miserable and that something big was missing in my life. In an Aesthetic Realism class years later, Ellen Reiss described so truly my desire to fight the world and the kind of emotion it made me miss when she said, “You are a ‘nobody-is-going-to-pull-the-wool-over-my-eyes’ person. But you also want to see a sunrise.”
The Fight in Jimmy Cagney
In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #151, Eli Siegel writes:
To be born is to engage, willy-nilly and constantly, in the great fight between the seeing of the world as uncouth, unwelcome, painful; and as profound, subtle, engaging.
Jimmy Cagney had that fight. He was born July 17, 1899, the second child of James and Carolyn Cagney. They lived first on Avenue D and 8th Street, and then uptown, always struggling to get a decent meal on the table. Then a baby sister and brother died of childhood illnesses. With all this, there was an energy in the Cagney household of four boys and a girl that was admirable. Jimmy Cagney writes in his autobiography Cagney by Cagney, “We were a musical family, with the piano always on the go.”
One of the things that pained Jimmy Cagney was the way he saw his father. James Cagney, Sr. had a hard time holding down a job, and was often not home for long stretches at a time, suddenly reappearing. Cagney was bitter about his father, who was alcoholic. In his mother, however, he saw something steadier. She apparently had a mingling of sweetness and toughness he cared for. “We loved…the great staunchness of her,” Cagney writes. There was a great deal of pain between Cagney’s parents, and then, Carolyn Cagney made the decision to have her husband committed to jail to cure his alcoholism. At his mother’s instruction, Jimmy Cagney served the detention papers on his own father. He writes:
We stood there in the hallway…and he cried when I gave him the papers—we both did. I put my arms around him. ‘I’m sorry, Pop,’ I said…He never forgave us…
That memory haunted Jimmy Cagney all his life. He said years later that maybe this one time he should have disobeyed his mother. I think Cagney felt guilty because this stood for what he was too ready to do in his mind—get rid of a person who he did not understand, who seemed complicated and troubling, and this, I learned, is a way of fighting the world.
Growing up, Jimmy Cagney met the ill-will of the profit system which has made families have to fight just to live. When he was 15, he held down three jobs simultaneously to bring home money. To his credit he didn’t give in to self-pity or withdraw; in fact he often met tough situations with energy. But I believe there was also a terrific desire in Jimmy Cagney to fight, to swiftly and contemptuously put the world and people in their place. He tells of an incident concerning his little sister Jeanne:
I’ll never forget. She was crying and holding open the ice-box door. I gave her a…kick in the behind, and told her to close the door… She looked at me with those big eyes, tears streaming down her face. I wanted to cut my throat.
Cagney felt awful because he got a sight of how unkind and mean he could be. Like men today, he needed to hear Aesthetic Realism’s definitive criticism of contempt, how it worked in him and how it could change.
Do We Like to Fight?
I learned from Aesthetic Realism that something in us likes and hopes to fight, to find the world an enemy we want to be victorious over. Cagney had this ferociously. In his autobiography he boasts about the many street fights he was in. He says, “I knew how to box from the age of six,” and that these fights were necessary for a boy to get by.
But one feels Cagney leapt to it and could be vicious. In the book Cagney, biographer Doug Warren tells of a three-day battle Cagney had with a neighborhood boy, Willie Carney. Each day the police broke it up:
Jimmy tore into him with fists ripping at his face and body…his…punches [were] venomous…The next afternoon Carney was waiting at the appointed time and place…By the time the police once more arrived, Jimmy’s clothes were crimson from Carney’s blood.
Writes Doug Warren, “By using his fists Jimmy could cut the big kids down to size.” I think it wasn’t just the “big kids” Cagney was trying to cut down to size—it was the whole world, and this contemptuous state of mind is not unlike that in young person who carry weapons in schools today. It is what makes for the fights between family members in ordinary homes across America.
In Aesthetic Realism consultations we have asked men questions such as these: “Which do you prefer—fighting with your father or learning from him, having him be useful to you? When do you feel tough, when you’re grateful or angry? What are you prouder of, intimidating someone or wanting to know them?”
Through consultations, men learn to criticize that dangerous hope to fight; and their deepest desire, to like the world, flourishes.
A Good Fight
Aesthetic Realism explains what Jimmy Cagney was desperate to know: that his acting came from an entirely different source in him than those street fights, including the many roles in which he played a tough guy.
In his great 1965 lecture “What Does a Fight Mean?” Eli Siegel explains a tremendous thing about the self, and, I believe, the reason people love to see Cagney on the screen:
We are looking for a good fight because if there isn’t a good fight which makes for a conclusion, things in us will be annoying each other perpetually. There are two phases of conflict. One is the possibility that conflict changes into a fight which shows something. The other is that conflict go on like a tired worm on a hot day, dragging itself across Fifth Avenue.
Jimmy Cagney was, in my opinion, a great artist. In many of his more than 60 films, Cagney’s acting illustrates Eli Siegel’s mighty principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
Cagney did something new in cinema’s portrayal of the “bad guy” who until then had been two-dimensional and flat—only sinister and dark. He put opposites together: good and evil, dark and light, toughness and something unsure. You heard his wisecracks and you felt his depth.
Said one critic:
He is all crust and speed and snap on the surface, a gutter-fighter with the grace of dancing, a boy who knows all the answers…But always this, always: if as a low type he is wrong, you are going to see why.
This audiences saw in the film that first made Cagney a national name, 1931’s The Public Enemy. Cagney plays Tom Powers, who “graduates from juvenile delinquency to gangland rum-running.” Never before had people seen such brutality on the screen. In one close-up, as he seeks revenge on his enemies, there is a look on Cagney’s face of the pleasure of contempt so sheer, it terrifies. He showed outwardly the savage thing in the self most people hide, and this showing was useful.
In Angels With Dirty Faces, as Rock Sullivan, Cagney is in a fight throughout—will he lead a good life, or will he be a gangster? He is tough, and all the while you feel a sense of depth.
In The Strawberry Blonde Cagney was not a criminal. He played someone very different—Biff Grimes, a dentist. Biff is pugnacious, but also has sweetness and wonder. For instance, when he gets his first kiss from The Strawberry Blonde—Rita Hayworth—he “turns ecstatically, vaults into a handspring and kisses a nearby horse.”
These opposites in Cagney’s roles, the “nobody’s going to make me a sucker” and honest wonder, I was so fortunate to learn about in an Aesthetic Realism class. Ms. Reiss saw they were fighting in me, and she asked:
Do you have a hard time putting the two together? Your toughness, street-wiseness and calculation is not at one with your sense of wonder, the grand feeling?
“No, it isn’t,” I said. I am so grateful for what Ms. Reiss explained as the discussion continued: this split in me between having honest wonder and also wanting to be a sharp, tough person interfered with my whole life—including how I saw love.
The False Fight That Ruins Love
Aesthetic Realism is definitive and so kind about love. It shows that we will be more by caring honestly for what is not ourselves. And in the class discussion I learned that much of what I saw as being “sharp” was really the hope to have contempt, and contempt makes us incapable of love.
Ellen Reiss spoke to me about a big interference with my loving truly the woman I cared for very much—and who now, I am very grateful to say, I am married to—Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, who is studying to teach Aesthetic Realism. She asked, “Do you like the idea of feeling wonder?” I answered, “I think I’m too suspicious.” And Ellen Reiss made this distinction, on which my happiness would depend: “You should be suspicious if it’s warranted. But have you hoped to be suspicious of Meryl Nietsch?” “Yes,” I said. And she continued: “Does that make you unsure of yourself? Are you more comfortable being affected by her—or finding things wrong with her?”
Then the Chairman of Education asked me this, about a grand emotion for a woman: “How would you do with the Marlowe line about Helen of Troy, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’?” I answered, “I think I’d like it.”
She asked: “How about the line, ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss’—do you like that idea?” I said, “I do, but I’m a little afraid.” Then Ellen Reiss explained: “The purpose of life is to have a large, true feeling about the world. Bennett Cooperman wants to have those two things together: sweeping feeling, and simultaneously the feeling he has never been more accurate.”
I felt described, relieved, and tremendously grateful. I love Meryl Nietsch! I am very proud to need her.
Jimmy Cagney was married to Willard Vernon for 64 years, and I believe there was something kind in their relation. They met in the chorus of a Broadway show in 1920. She was 16, from Iowa, and Jimmy Cagney was affected by her prettiness and the freshness of her mid-west background, so different from his tough city life. He saw strength in her, too, and speaks with gratitude for her “rock solid honesty,” her encouragement. She believed early that Jimmy Cagney had true art in him, and when things were tough and work was scarce, she would not let him sink or give up.
I think it is possible that Cagney, as men have been, was uncomfortable with the more feminine and delicate aspect of woman. For all their married life he called his wife Bill. It is notable, too, that in his films his relations with women are mostly battling and sparring. In no film I saw did he have a deep, full and rich relation to a woman, and perhaps he wasn’t cast that way because the fighter in him seemed so predominant, rather than the grateful man, melting and strong at once.
Fighting Injustice Is a Fight for Kindness
Aesthetic Realism shows that when we fight injustice and want the goodness of the world to win, we are kind and strong. Cagney was contracted to Warner Brothers and though he was a star, felt he was being exploited financially. “It became apparent to me,” he writes:
that the studio was…interested in paying me only a very small percentage of the income dollar deriving from my work. Therefore I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I walked away [and] filed suit against Warner’s… [He said:] The major studios had a…very elemental point of view about their actors: anybody they paid a dollar to belonged to them, but body and soul.
Cagney would not schmooze the studio executives—Jack Warner called him the “professional against-er.” He joined the Screen Actors Guild in its first months of existence, even when the studios tried to frighten actors away. Jimmy Cagney was also angry at what other people endured economically. He said:
If you’ve never been poor, you’re automatically a stranger to more than half of the men and women in the world…
He made headlines when he gave money to striking cotton pickers in 1935, and to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys—black men unjustly accused of a crime—in 1936. With others, he donated ambulances to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, American young men fighting for the democratically elected government of Spain against the fascist dictator Franco in 1936.
For these activities Cagney was labeled “pink” and called before the Dies committee, a forerunner of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Cagney was cleared, and then when he made the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy—a choice partly and carefully made for this very reason—narrow-minded politicians never touched him again.
Yet because he didn’t know clearly what to fight for or against, over the decades Jimmy Cagney’s ethics changed tragically—he became increasingly selfish. Certainly he was frightened by the blacklisting of people in Hollywood, but he also changed his purpose. His kindness and feeling for people took a back seat as his salary skyrocketed to make him, year after year, the top money maker in America. Writes Doug Warren, “He did not become happier as his income increased,” and I believe the reason is he used that income to be colder.
Sadly, Jimmy Cagney sold out one of the best things in himself—he lost the fight. He said years later—and horribly—that he contributed those ambulances to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade because he had been a “soft touch.” Patrick McGillian, in Cagney, writes:
Once good friends, Cagney and Spencer Tracy ultimately almost stopped talking to each other—over Tracy’s disappointment at Cagney’s shifting…disposition. Spencer observed that the richer Jimmy became, the more right wing and intolerant he became.
In the latter part of his life Jimmy Cagney retired from the movies and lived a somewhat reclusive life with his wife for twenty years on his farm in upstate New York. After a brief comeback to the movies, he died in 1986. Had the press not boycotted Aesthetic Realism, he could have studied it and learned about that battle in him between the respect that made for art and the contempt that had him increasingly sad, lonely, and bitter.
Art: The Greatest Opponent of Contempt
In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #151, “The Fight,” Eli Siegel says that art is:
…the most successful agency of anti-contempt so far, is love of the world or reality, arising from its not being seen just personally or narrowly, but in terms of all space, time, and possibility.
“Space, time and possibility”—Jimmy Cagney did new things to these when he sang and danced. I love Cagney’s dancing—in his power and grace, the sturdiness and delicate precision of his movements, he gets to grandeur. Cagney had been in vaudeville in the early days, and felt his training there was a key part of who he was.
Time and again critics noted that Cagney—even in his non-musical roles—moved with grace and elegance, and more than other actors, directors shot him full frame, showing his entire body, because the way he moved said so much about his character. When he played a prizefighter in one film, a critic said Cagney’s believ-ability in the ring came from his background in dance; it “made the fight scenes so real. The footwork was flawless.” There again—fight with form.
Cagney’s singing and dancing as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy is great. He gives all of himself in that jaunty, beautifully awkward gait which he worked to get to be true to Cohan’s style, and the way he talk-sings the songs from his very soul.
I want people everywhere to know the greatest man and beauty that have ever been—Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism.