19th
The Nobel Prize
Let me commence this response by averring that I will never “go all” or even a little Slate. So if you are going there, you will be going there alone.
Your questions:
1. What is Nobel’s greatest sin, if he may be said to have one? (And we can speak of sin in the absolute sense, or merely sin in the eyes of his now-many online haters.) Is it the leaving of the wife and kids? Or the lengthy defense of same in the pages of a glossy magazine? Does the Elle tell-all (the Elle-all?) represent a form of contrition? Or proud defiance of social mores?
Nobel happens to be an occasional drinking buddy of mine, and I proofread a magazine that deploys him as an architecture critic. His “sin” would be faithlessness. He would and does attribute this to becoming bored with his wife, whom he believes now he married too young. By this reasoning, the marriage was a failure and his choices were either to stick it out, suffering through self-censorship, boredom, what he seems to conceive of as the Park Slope version of the Gulag; or to end it. As it happened he ended it in what his “haters” must take to be the most distasteful way possible, betrayal with a younger woman in his employ—rather than, say, walking away politely and chastely, arranging for custody rights, sitting a few months shiva for the cracked union, then signing up on J-date to meet a girl his own age, perhaps redeeming himself by playing stepfather to a couple of other kids. For this—and for his self-pity in the process—is he hated, but in this he is a mere symbol of imbalances societal and, at the risk of sounding like Lawrence Summers, biological that people would prefer not to speak of, except that they love to express outrage when the topic is raised. As we know from the films and life of Woody Allen, the figure of the older man joined with the younger woman (and let us restrict ourselves to those of legal age and leave Humbert out of it) is a cliché, yet it retains a taboo. I would argue that it’s fine, that age is the least relevant aspect in a lover, but the subject is not amenable to rational argument. Thus the haters. As for the act of writing about it in Elle magazine, that seems a shrewd move on the part of all parties. Elle acquires in Philip a snappy prose stylist telling a story sure to arouse fiery indignation among its audience and likely even to reach beyond to the likes of us. Philip gets a fat Elle paycheck to spend on skateboards, kayaks, or rounds for me at the Brooklyn Social. It is neither an act of contrition, nor a particularly bold act of self-revelation. This is practically the guy’s favorite subject of conversation, and the areas of our expertise are limited. And it does no damage to his wider reputation: Who cares what the architecture critic did to his wife when you need copy about the latest Gehry atrocity?
2. When did these embarrassing displays of public self-abasement become a profitable sideline for intellectuals? (I blame James Atlas, who, without further research, I accuse of starting it all.)
I don’t think James Atlas ever invented anything, though he may be credited with the oxymoronic achievement of having perfected mediocrity. The self-abasing confessional has ancient roots. We can skip past Augustine coming to Carthage, burning, burning, burning, and mount The Golden Ass of Apuleius, which he apparently plagiarized from Lucius of Petrae. Though the tale ends in contrition—Apuleius is initiated to the cult of Isis—the pleasure is in the sinning. Thus the opening line: Lector, intende, laetaberis.
—Brown
