Why I read fiction

Why I read fiction
by David Benjamin

“The alarming flaw in his psychological equipment — although in the American history he would write with his life nothing would appear to be flawed — was that the terrain he viewed and judged and acted upon could have been that of another planet. It had no connection with what was really there, with what needed to be coped with in other people’s reality…”
— Richard Condon, Mile High

MADISON, Wis.— Piety, especially of the false variety, is perhaps the most time-honored tradition of American politics. On the other hand, real piety — genuine and humble religious faith — tends to trigger squeamishness amongst the congregation.

William Jennings Bryan, for example, was an evangelist of conviction so preachingly devout that, finally, he gave folks the creeps. Our only truly faithful president, Jimmy Carter, confessed — without shame — his heartfelt faith, his hope and charity, plus a few sins. This performance got him laughed out of office.

The public was far more comfortable with his successor, a darling of the “religious right” despite a barely elliptical acquaintance with the inside of a church, whose best impersonation of a God-fearing Christian required a microphone and a makeup girl.

Our current Oval Office occupant has never in his life been remotely God-fearing nor is he demonstrably Christian. A thrice-married satyr who doesn’t know the Song of Solomon from The Story of O, he boasts about his sexual predation, cheats serially on all his wives and joshes on TV about committing incest with his daughter. If he were to encounter Jesus on the street, he would avoid a handshake and then order his bodyguards to spray the Son of God with Lysol. And yet, the religious right loves Trump even more than they adored the Gipper.

Pundits and sociologists have struggled to plumb the raging paradox of a Moral Majority blindly devoted to the most indecent, amoral pagan to ever pursue public office in America. I’ve tried to understand. But I found expert analyses of this Trump conundrum pretty much frustrating ’til I read, last month, Mile High, by Richard Condon — one of the 20th century’s more underappreciated novelists.

Condon’s protagonist is a heartless oligarch, Edward Courance West. He masterminds the pious political movement to pass the 18th Amendment, banning booze in America. In a mid-book monolog, Eddie West explains this diabolical scheme. Americans, he says, see themselves as originating in a sort of immigrant martyrdom. We all descend from destitute refugees, outcast paupers whose only defense against bigotry, squalor and oppression was a sustaining faith in God. In a ruthlessly capitalist society, which measures success almost exclusively by wealth, this peasant faith clung stubbornly to the America subconscious. But it required a metamorphosis that re-defined Christianity in a way that consoles the prosperous and exalts the filthy-rich. West says:

“Poverty may bring faith, but riches bring things. We must have faith, so Americans have achieved a faith in things. Therefore, what the American people are faced with is a craving for reassurance that they have kept the true faith, the universal faith, the faith of loss and deprivation —which is prohibition. Simultaneously the other half is a quivering maw of national sensuality — sensation, tactilities, gluttony, satiety — the essence of total self — all making us dependent upon our riches, faith’s opposite…”

Donald Trump emerged almost organically, from our American midst, as the transubstantiation of piety into cupidity, and of greed into virtue. He embodies our faith in things and he symbolizes, in the word become flesh, the purifying power of wealth. He is the prophet of excess, and Mar-A-Lago is the new Jerusalem.

Since Trump announced his candidacy, political historians have kept busy proposing historical forebears. Most often suggested, and hastily retracted, is Adolf Hitler. Obviously, this shoe don’t fit, if only because Hitler could read and write and he demonstrated a vocabulary well in excess of 100 words.

Others have suggested Huey Long and Joe McCarthy, both professional politicians — which Trump is not. Trump prefers comparisons to Andrew Jackson, another stretch, if only because Old Hickory deplored debt and never went begging for a note from the doctor when Uncle Sam said “I Want You.” The most popular contemporary analog is Silvio Berlusconi, an Italian prime minister arguably more vulgar than Trump. But the similarities are superficial, especially given the vast political differences between Italy and the U.S.A.

Which is why I read fiction. As he crafts a novel, the writer remembers people he has known intimately. He studies figures in both reality and fantasy who embody certain qualities and ideas. He mines his own experience and examines the quirks and corners of his own mind. He builds a set of ideas and attitudes that he can fit into a character who blends all of the above, a character palpable, believable and alive to the reader — although the character is unique to this one, new story.

Above all, the well-drawn character is inexplicably familiar. We’ve seen him, or her, before. He — or she — was in school with us, or in the office. He’s an uncle or she’s an aunt. We’ve listened to him, or her, speak in church or in the assembly hall, on the radio or on TV. Somehow, we know this person, who is no person at all, but merely a figment of some storyteller’s fevered fancy.

Pretense has an uncanny power to reveal us to ourselves. No social scientist has ever explained teenage angst as truly and engagingly as Holden Caulfield. No real woman trapped in marriage and driven to adultery is as vivid and sympathetic as Anna Karenina. No clinical analysis of paranoia depicts this disorder as chillingly as does Dostoyevsky in Notes from the Underground, or Kafka in The Burrow. No biography has limned the magic and terror of childhood as lovingly and credibly as did Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine. Each of these stories — and thousands more — perform the everyday miracle of truth through fabrication.

So, if we read made-up stories instead of just sticking to the history books or watching cable TV as pundit after pundit tries to justify Trump’s ways to men, we recognize this guy.

To a far greater degree than he is Hitler or Huey Long, Trump is Edward Courance West (God help us). Sinclair Lewis — in Elmer Gantry’s counterfeit piety and sexual hunger, and in the cynical bombast of Senator Berzelius Windrip (It Can’t Happen Here) — gave us a clearer foreshadowing of Trump than Joe McCarthy’s erratic antics ever could. Put together a composite of Shakespeare’s characters — a little Lear, a touch of Falstaff, a pinch of Richard, a dash of Othello, and a whining soliloquy from a self-piteous Hamlet — and you have Trump all over again.

So, we’ve been warned. Trump, by any other name, would smell as foul — or fair. He was thought of long ago and he’s been with us ever since, lurking in the library, or strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage.