We
read fiction, expose ourselves to its magic, among
other reasons, to learn what we may not have noticed
about ourselves and others. --William Carlos Williams
John Tracy Ellis, the
noted historian, was a man I much admired. The harshest criticism I ever heard him level against anyone was simply
this: "He has stopped reading; he doesn't read anymore."
Job-seekers cannot
afford to stop reading. Nor can
they content themselves to read only the want-ads, or the business press, or the
journals that keep them up to date in their respective fields. They are human beings, and one of the
delights of being human is the ability to enjoy good literature. Even if the literary merit is less than
great, good biography, poetry, history, scholarly writings, and quality fiction
can feed the spirit and stimulate the mind. Job-seekers cannot afford to isolate
themselves from good books, but they can be wasting valuable time if they use
their light or heavy reading just "to escape." "I read fiction to escape," a Cleveland
executive told me. Her business
card, like those of numerous unemployed managers, said "consultant," but she was
still looking for permanent employment and the escape into fiction was
deflecting time and attention from the job-hunt.
When I asked a
displaced financial executive, president of a major New York bank, what reading
he was doing while in transition, he replied simply, "None." He literally did not know what he was
missing. An identical reply came
from another banker who offered the added explanation for not reading, "All I do
now is worry and work (at getting my next job)."
Another interviewee, a
displaced healthcare executive who was perhaps the most angry person I
encountered in the course of this study, told me he read Ironweed and Coming Home because "they are fairly depressing and they enabled me to
see people in worse straits than mine."
From reading, from the
reading habit, you can learn to read your life. Let Robert Scholes explain what I
mean. Here is an excerpt from his Protocols of Reading (Yale, 1989):
Learning to read books--or pictures, or films--is
not just a matter of acquiring information from texts, it is a matter of
learning to read and write the text of our lives. Reading, seen this way, is not merely an
academic experience but a way of accepting the fact that our lives are of
limited duration and whatever satisfaction we may achieve in life must come
through the strength of our engagement with what is around
us.
Explaining his approach
to the actor's art, Charles Laughton once remarked, "People don't know what
they're like, but I think I can show them."
Playwright Edward Albee
put the matter this way in an interview with The Washington Post (June
23, 1991): "People don't participate in their own lives enough.... They
drift. They end up at a certain
point in their lives, filled with failure and regret, of things done and things
not done. But to be a survivor, to
be able to survive everything that life gives you with a certain humanity, is
important. And all plays, all
serious plays, show more how we should not behave than how we should
behave. So you hold up a mirror to
people and say, 'Look, you're behaving like this. You don't have to.
Try to change.' So all art is
corrective, therefore all art is useful."
Another playwright,
Arthur Miller, held his own mirror, so to speak, up to himself in a May 9, 1984
interview in the New York Times. Then 68, he said he could now see himself in the famous character of his
own creation, Willy Lowman. But when Death of a Salesman opened on
Broadway in 1949, Miller tended to identify more with Willy's son Biff. "'When
Biff's yelling at Willy now,' he says, 'he's yelling at me. I understand Willy.
And I understand his longing for
immortality--I think that's inevitable when you get older. It's not in terms of work.
It's more a mystical sense. Willy's writing his name on a cake of
ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone. He wants to live on through
something--and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. I think all of us want that, and it gets
more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.'" Reflecting on the uneven course of
his own career, Mr. Miller spoke of the need for a national theater in America;
the experience of being "thrown back into the marketplace" whenever he brought a
new play to production, has been humiliating and unnecessary. Mid-career business managers who find
themselves "on the street," know the feeling.
Miller's seventeenth play, "The Last
Yankee," opened simultaneously in London and New York in 1993, when the
playwright was 77 years old and still focused on the failure theme. "You want me to say I'm a failure,"
Miller's character Leroy Hamilton, a
small-town carpenter and descendent of Alexander Hamilton, says to his wife;
"I'll get a bumper sticker printed up: 'The Driver of This Car is a
Failure!'" In a radio interview
when the play opened, Miller acknowledged a parallel with "Death of a Salesman,"
but without the confrontation. "Here's a man who is a failure by the world's count," Miller said, "but
he's got a grip on life."
Read Your Way Toward Clarity
The point of this
chapter is not necessarily to exhort, and certainly not to direct the reader to
become a patron of libraries and bookstores, although time there will certainly
be well spent. I want to "hold up
the mirror." George Bernard Shaw
once said, "You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use the arts to see
your soul." My purpose here is
interpretative. I'm convinced that
persons burdened with the stress of job loss can have their burdens lightened,
if not lifted, by "seeing" themselves in the literary portrayals of persons and
situation not unlike their own--descriptions and metaphors--crafted by fine
writers and poets whose insights on the human condition are available to anyone
willing to read. The return on the
time invested in this kind of reading is personal progress in getting "a grip on
life."
A helpful figure of
speech fashioned by Franz Kafka will help to make my point: "a book should serve
as the ax for the frozen sea within us."
You may not think of
poetry as the place to get help in tightening up your grip on life or cracking
the immobilizing ice of discouragement, but poetry, as well as fiction and
drama, can help. In his long poem, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William
Carlos Williams suggests that there is something in poetry that you might be
missing:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there.
To be thorough about
it, you might want to go back to Homer, the poet of "the mind's dear
clarity." Thomas D'Evelyn calls
Homer "the poet of responsibility" and explains, in a review-article in The
Christian Science Monitor (September 9, 1987), that the "moral theme" of the Iliad is the question of why Achilles wouldn't fight.
Unemployed managers, ready to give up
the fight and tempted not even to get out of bed in the morning, can profit from
the poet's words, as rendered in Christopher Logue's translation. Achilles wakes:
Those who have slept with sorrow in their hearts
Know all too well how short but sweet
The instant of their coming-to can be:
The heart is strong, as if it never sorrowed;
The mind's dear clarity intact; and then,
The vast, unhappy stone from yesterday
Rolls down these vital units to the bottom of
oneself.
One of the participants
in my study told me he found himself "falling back" on literary snippets he
retained in memory from humanities courses three decades earlier at Marquette
University. During his search for work, said this financial services executive,
"I kept coming back to a line from Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse."
He remembered it as, "They harden their hearts with hope." Here is the line as Chesterton wrote it:
"And Alfred, hiding in deep grass,/ Hardened his heart with hope." This executive explained that he
understood those words to mean, "Don't tell me it's not going to work. I can do it."
He had to fall back on that "hope" theme
twice in situations of job loss, he told me, and uses it often for the
encouragement of others in the executive search business he now owns. Another line, as he recalls it, refers
to "the giant laughter of Christian men." "Here were men," he recalled,
"ostensibly on the verge of being exterminated, and they were laughing! You can't afford to lose your sense of
humor."
Novelist Jonathan
Carroll says, "Any writer is organizing his chaos. My life has been sort of fevered in
certain ways.... Most people have these [same] experiences, but they're busy
trying to cope, whereas often the artist is taking notes." Because the writer not only had
experiences like your own, but also took "the notes," you can see yourself in
the literary mirror he or she holds up to you on the printed page. In seeing
yourself thus, from a fresh angle or in a new light, you can find clarity and illumination, understanding
and insight; these can assist you in making your personal
transition.
Hence, this is not a
bibliographic chapter offering you information on "how-to-do-it" or
"where-to-find-it" books. You will
find here an assortment of literary specimens, or a writer's personal
observations, capable of helping you get a clearer picture of yourself and your
portion of the human condition.
The novelist's
challenge, said Walker Percy in concluding a 1986 essay, on "Novel-Writing in an
Apocalyptic Time, "is somehow to humanize the life around him, to formulate it
for someone else, to render the interstates, to tell the truth, to show how life
is lived, and therefore to affirm life..." The good novelist, despite his or her own misgivings, is both acute and
reflective; otherwise they would neither be in print nor worth
reading.
"Everybody knows more
than the novelist," says Percy, "but what the novelist may be good for, despite
his shakiness and fecklessness, or perhaps because of it, is to record what
other people, absorbed as they are in their busy and useful lives, may not
see....[I]t is the novelist's business to look and see what is there for
everyone to see but is nonetheless not seen." And Walker Percy wisely observes,
"There is something worse than being deprived of life: it is being deprived of
life and not knowing it. The poet
and the novelist cannot bestow life but they can point to instances of its loss,
and then name and record them" (Signposts in a Strange Land, 1991). The
"naming" and "recording" can be a service rendered to the job-seeker, if the
person looking for work is willing to read along the way.
Confronted by good
poetry or prose, the reader can come to know the experience described in "Draft
of Shadows" by Nobel prize-winning poet Octavio Paz: "I hear the voices that I
think,/ the voices that think me as I think them." You can hear yourself in the dialogue of
the good novel; you can often see yourself in the situations the gifted writer
constructs. And you can lift
phrases from another's pen to express the situation in which you find
yourself. Substituting
"corporation" for "army," some will find Christopher Tietjen, a character in
Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End, speaking for them as he says, "The curse
of the army, as far as the organization is concerned, was our imbecile national
belief that the game is more than the player."
Dante's opening words
in "The Inferno" suggest to me the utility of a compass, which this book hopes
to be, for the mid-career executive suddenly faced with the challenge of a job
search. Reading these few lines may
help to convince the reader that the compass is more important than the roadmap
at the beginning of the journey to re-employment. "Midway life's journey/ I was
made aware/ That I had strayed into a dark forest,/ And the right path appeared
not anywhere." Some see this as the
first description of midlife crisis in Western literature. Anyone can imagine the "dark forest" as
the unwelcome enclosure known to those unable to locate the "right path." The words were written in 1300 by a
35-year-old who was frustrated over his inability to connect politically. As Robinson Jeffers once remarked, "In
our world where all things are beautiful, it is the poet's business to choose
what is abiding."
Writing in The
Washingtonian magazine (September, 1988) M.B. Howard asks: What is an
Adult? When do you become one? "Maybe to become an adult is to become
familiar with dread--with that gnawing, uneasy fear that everything that seems
to define you as an adult is in truth a house of cards, waiting for one hard
wind to blow it down." Howard
reinforces this point with lines from Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: "Like one that on a
lonesome road/ Doth walk in fear and dread, /And having once turned round walks
on,/ And turns no more his head." And then the author comments: "Maybe to become an adult is to learn not
to turn around."
Comfort and
encouragement, as well as clarity, are available to readers of Motherwit: An
Alabama Midwife's Story (Dutton, 1989), an account by Onnie Lee Logan of her
life in the South and her forty years practicing midwifery in Mobile and rural
Alabama.
I let
God work the plan of my life and I am satisfied at what has happened to me in my
life. The sun wasn't shinin every time and the moon wasn't either. I was in the snow and the rain at night
by my lonely self.... It was rough, but you know what? I taken it with a smile
and I enjoyed it.... I had my mind on where I was goin and what I was goin
for....
This
book was the last thing I had to do until God said well done. I consider
myself--in fact, if I leave tomorrow--I've lived my life and I've lived it
well.
To keep your mind on
where you are going and what
you are going for is one of the keys to success for
both midwives and mid-career executives.
A Fictional Life
John Updike says that
in fiction, "reality is--chemically, atomically, biologically--a fabric of
microscopic accuracies." The
penetration of his fictional descriptions and insights bears this out. Many executives will read their own
unpublished (and unexpressed, even to themselves) thoughts in the musings of
"Rabbit," the nickname John Updike's famous character Harry Angstrom carried
throughout a life that spanned four novels. The fourth, Rabbit at Rest, won
the National Book Critics Circle award with a citation noting that the book
"brings to a close a work which will stand as one of the major achievements of
American fiction in the 20th century."
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom appears to have learned most of what he knows
about life from high school basketball--so much so, that readers who follow him
through his fictional life are never sure that there was, for Rabbit, any
meaningful life after basketball.
"Give the boys the will to achieve," says
Rabbit's high school coach in explaining some years later his approach to the
game. "I've always liked that better than the will to win, for there can be
achievement even in defeat. Make
them feel the, yes, I think the word is good, sacredness of achievement,
in the form of giving our best." "A
boy who has had his heart enlarged by an inspiring coach," he concludes, "can
never become in the deepest sense, a failure in the greater game of life." This
is restaurant table-talk in the first novel, Rabbit, Run. Harry, then 26, had run away from wife
and job and sought out his old coach for reassurance and
advice.
Ten years later, in
Rabbit Redux, Harry is concerned about what the future holds for his own
young son. In a pensive mood, he "looks out the window and sees in dusk . . . a
basketball hoop on a far garage. How can he get the kid interested in sports?
If he's too short for basketball, then
baseball. Anything, just to put
something there, some bliss, to live on later for a while. If he goes empty now he won't last at
all, because we get emptier."
While watching a
minor-league baseball game, Rabbit reflects about "the players themselves. . .
each intent on a private dream of making it, making it into the big leagues and
the big money, the own-your-own-bowling alley money; they seem specialists like
any other, not men playing a game because all men are boys time is trying to
outsmart."
Caught in a troubled
marriage and a dead-end job, Rabbit describes himself in a candid conversation
with his mother: "Just yesterday I
was sitting over at the Blasts [minor-league baseball team] game thinking how
lousy I used to be at baseball. Let's face it. As a human
being I'm about a C minus. As a
husband I'm about zilch. When
Verity [the company that employs him] folds I'll fold with it and have to go on
welfare. Some life. Thanks,
Mom."
Autumn is walking time
for just about everyone, even in those parts of the country where leaves don't
change color and drop to the ground. Most job-seekers find themselves walking a lot.
One said to me, "You have to do
something to relax and compose yourself alone. I spend time birdwatching on long walks
through woods and parks." He could
easily relate to this picture of Rabbit walking through fallen leaves and a
mid-life crisis as well. "There is
that scent in the air, of going back to school, of beginning again and
reconfirming the order that exists. He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of
the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar:
but his adult life had proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and
the older he gets, the less weather interests him. How can the planet keep turning and
turning and not get so bored it explodes?"
Rabbit's young son has
discovered soccer. "Afternoons,
Harry comes home to find the child kicking the ball, sewn of black-and-white
pentagons, again and again against the garage door, beneath the unused
basketball backboard. The ball
bounces by Nelson, Harry picks it up, it feels bizarrely seamed in his
hands. He tries a shot at the
basket. It misses clean. 'The touch
is gone,' he says. 'It's a funny
feeling,' he tells his son, 'when you get old. The brain sends out the order and the
body looks the other way.'"
One of the executives I
interviewed for this study, a displaced CEO of a large bank, told me that his
son gave him needed encouragement by simply remarking, "Dad, you've just lost
your fast ball, that's all; now you've got to start working on your curve."
Sports metaphors crop up
repeatedly in explanations business executives offer by way of interpretation of
where they've been and where they are likely to wind up in their careers. A telecommunications executive, who had
successfully "rebounded," told me his involuntary departure from his previous
position left him with a sense of "loss of camaraderie;" he laughed as he added,
"you miss the smell of the locker-room." On his office wall was a photograph of himself, thirty years younger,
dribbling past a defender and driving in for a lay-up in a major college
basketball game. Another experienced manager in my study, himself an author,
advises those looking for new career opportunities: "Don't worry about home
runs; until you assess some very basic issues, you'll never get out of the
batter's box. Begin with an honest
assessment of yourself." And a
banker, who had been "looking" for nearly a year, told me he thought he was
"rounding third," but realized he could be "thrown out" before
scoring.
Sidelined managers--not
those who manage baseball teams, but those who know how to run complex
organizations--may want to look for the works of W.P. Kinsella on the public
library shelves. "After delivering
two fictional fast balls with 'The Iowa Baseball Confederacy' and 'Shoeless Joe
(the basis for the movie 'Field of Dreams'), W.P. Kinsella confounds his fans by
throwing a change-up in 'Box Socials,'" remarks New York Times book
reviewer Herbert Mitgang (March 25, 1992). "His new novel is more about small-town life than big-time baseball.
It's a story filled with nostalgia about
a time when the game was played on real grass and was called on account of
darkness. But even more, it's about
the everyday hopes of what it must be like for most people to play out their
lives in the minors." Many
displaced executives think of themselves that way; they are like Owen Browne,
the protagonist of Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach, who struggles with
"old rages and regrets" and finds himself "in rebellion against
things."
In Rabbit is
Rich, Harry Angstrom really begins to show signs that he is losing the
contest with middle age. "But a lot
of topics, he has noticed lately, in private conversation and even on television
where they're paid to talk it up, run dry, exhaust themselves, as if
everything's been said in this hemisphere. In his inner life too Rabbit dodges among more blanks than there used to
be, patches of burnt-out gray cells where there used to be lust and keen
dreaming and wide-eyed dread; he falls asleep, for instance, at the drop of a
hat. He never used to understand
the phrase. But then he never used
to wear a hat and now, at the first breath of cold weather, he does. His roof wearing thin, starlight showing
through."
Naturally, somebody has
to be at fault. "It was his wife's
fault. The entire squeezed and
cut-down shape of his life is her fault; at every turn she has been a wall to
his freedom." Deep down, he knows
the fault is not really hers; he needs her. "What more can you ask of a wife in a
way than that she stick around and see with you what happens next?"
Rabbit recognizes that
"his own life closed in to a size his soul had not yet shrunk to fit." His son Nelson, now married, is old
enough to understand the situation: "Dad doesn't like to look bad anymore, that was one thing about him in
the old days you could admire, that he didn't care that much how he looked from
the outside, what the neighbors thought...for instance, he had this crazy dim
faith left in himself left over from basketball or growing up as everybody's pet
or whatever.... That spark is gone."
But Harry has his own
view of the matter, as he explains to Nelson later in Rabbit is
Rich. "The past is the past...
you've got to live in the present.... It's the only way to think. When you're my age you'll see it.
At my age if you carried all the misery
you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the
morning."
"Look, Nelson.
Maybe I haven't done everything right in
my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest
sin. I haven't laid down and
died."
"Who says that's the
greatest sin?"
"Everybody says
it. The church, the
government. It's against Nature, to
give up, you've got to keep moving."
Rabbit at Rest, the fourth and
last of these tightly-focused novels, opens with the self-absorbed protagonist
Harry in Florida, where he and his wife Janice now spend half the year. In the
airport, watching a "little guy, seventy if he's a day, breaking into a run,
hopping zigzag through the padded pedestal chairs so he won't be beaten out at
the arrival gate, Harry remorsefully feels the bulk, two hundred thirty pounds
the kindest scales say, that has enwrapped him at the age of fifty-five like a
set of blankets the decades have brought one by one."
Out
on the golf course, Harry misses a putt. "Not his day. Will he ever
have a day again? Fifty-five and
fading." One of his golfing
partners, Harry remarks to himself, is "at the other end of life's
rainbow."
One of the more
reflective participants in my study, a partner with executive responsibilities
in a major accounting firm, found himself involuntarily "retired" at age 53,
long before his career plan called for subsidized inactivity. He was, however, unenthusiastic about
returning to work, and there was no economic necessity to do so. "I was sick and tired of the
struggle. I wanted nothing more
than to pull up the drawbridge," he said, "move to Florida, buy a 'golf villa,'
and do absolutely nothing." So he
did. "Well, nothing worked the way
I wanted it to. My wife was not
ready to retire. She did not like
Florida for most of the same reasons that John Updike gives in his last Rabbit
book." She, he says, was
"determined" to get out of there; he was "intransigent." He "gave in."
"I would like to say I changed my mind,
but there is still a little resentment on my part from time to time. Perhaps it will dissipate in time.
The joke is that we couldn't even make
the six months residency requirement to qualify for Florida tax status."
They returned to their home in
Washington, D.C., where he is back in a business suit working as chief financial
officer for a major museum, she is getting an advanced degree, and both are
happily committed to a heavy schedule of voluntary service activities. Florida is not for everybody, even those
who can easily afford it.
Up north again, in his
home state of Pennsylvania, Rabbit thinks "everything has been paved solid by
memory and in any direction you go you've already been there." He takes a drive through the old parts
of his home town. "The city is
quicker than he remembers it, faster on the shuffle, as the blocks flicker by,
and buildings that he felt when a boy were widely spaced now appear
adjacent." Sight of the downtown
hotel where his high school class had its senior prom reminds him of Mary
Ann. When "he went off to do his
two years in the army," she "without a word of warning married somebody
else. Maybe she sensed something
about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a
winner... [and]... felt like a winner, offhand, calm, his life set at an
irresistible forward slant."
Eventually, however, he came to discover: "Life is a hill that gets
steeper the more you climb."
As Rabbit's story and
life are running out, the reader who has followed him for well over a thousand
pages can relate to this: "Just thinking about those old days lately depresses
him; it makes him face life's constant depreciation. Lying awake at night, afraid he will
never fall asleep or will fall asleep forever, he feels a stifling uselessness
in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns,
with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of
history."
John Krull's interview
with John Updike, "Hunting Rabbit," appeared in Universitas, the alumni
magazine of Saint Louis
University. "Few, if any, other
writers," says Krull who is an editorial writer and columnist for the Indianapolis
News, "have captured so well the twin demons of
middle-American life--the tremendous desire to get more out of life and the
suppressed but overwhelming realization that life isn't likely to offer much
more." It is helpful, I believe,
for dislocated mid-career managers to have someone like Updike hold up a mirror
in which they can see something of their own predicament.
"I was trying to write
about the human predicament," said John Updike in a Washington Post
interview (October 28, 1990), "rather than the American predicament, but
naturally being American you write in an American accent, as it were. Harry's continuing bind between wanting
to do what you want to do and what you ought to do. Between the inner appetitive self and
the social self, the self of obligations."
These snippets from
four novels of one author illustrate the refractory potential good writing has
in the hands of a reader seriously intent on sorting things out, searching for
meaning, clarifying choices, seeing him- or herself through the fictional lives
of others.
The job-seeker who
spends an inordinate number of daylight hours slumped before the television
screen might have to plead guilty to the charge leveled by a European
commentator: "People today watch television as a surrogate for the lives they
have ceased to live."
Keep on Running
"When You Stop, You Die" is the
headline Commonweal attached to Psychologist Thomas J. Cottle's June 19,
1992 article on "the human toll of male unemployment." The title is taken from comments made to
Cottle by a 47-year-old former manager of a small tool company: "There's only
two worlds: either you work every day in a normal nine-to-five job with a couple
of weeks vacation, or you're dead! There's no in-between.... Working is breathing.
It's something you don't think about;
you just do it and it keeps you alive. When you stop you die." There is, of course, a whole lot more to life than work.
But the absence of work can smother the
spirit, if inertia sets in. The
unemployed manager has to keep on moving, working the phones, developing the
network, making the contacts. I
like the image Flannery O'Connor uses in her short story "The Displaced
Person." It is applicable to the
job seeker whose sense of loss differs a lot in degree, but not altogether in
kind, from the despondency of a husband who has lost his spouse: "Whenever he
thought of Mrs. Shortley, he felt his heart go down like an old bucket into a
dry well." The job-seeker has to
fill that well with ideas, activity, and friends.
I admit to admiration
for, but cannot claim any competence to offer an interpretation of, the novels
of Walker Percy. I did, however,
have underlined in my copy of The Moviegoer (1961) the same sentence Phil
McCombs later quoted as an epigraph to his long profile, "Walker Percy & the
Assault on the Soul," in The Washington Post, May 14, 1987: "The search
is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his
own life." In the novel, Binx
Bolling is the moviegoer and narrator of his own story. To the words just quoted, he adds: "To
be aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in
despair."
Walker Percy did not
write about job-seeking, as far as I know, but he did write a lot about life,
and discouragement, and social malaise. He often made the point that because the world is insane, his characters,
typically at odds with the world, appear to be insane, precisely because they
see things as they really are.
In The
Moviegoer, Binx Bolling speaks of "my vertical search," which was completed
"one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called The Chemistry of Life.
When
I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or
were in principle reachable, whereupon I went out and saw a movie called It
Happened One Night which was itself very good. A memorable night. The only difficulty was that though the
universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over....[so] now I have
undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. As a consequence, what takes place in my
room is less important. What is
important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the
neighborhood. Before, I wandered as
a diversion. Now I wander seriously
and sit and read as a diversion."
The "search"--vertical and
horizontal--is an important part of being human and an indispensable part of
being a successful job-seeker. Writers like Percy can activate the search apparatus within the human
spirit. Percy had the power, as
Gregory Waldrop put it, "to bring readers to themselves in the dark wood of
their own everyday existence, whether on Manhattan's Upper East Side or in
'Feliciana Parish,' La." Good
writers can hold up the mirror, as Percy does in The Second Coming
(1980): "How did it happen that now for the first time in his life he could see
everything so clearly? Something
had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he
allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever
cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which
did not exist. Not once had he been
present for his life. So his life
had passed like a dream.
"Is it possible for
people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a
plane?"
When he died in 1990, a
few days short of his 75th birthday, Walker Percy was praised by The New York Times for having written
brilliantly "about modern man's search for faith and love in a chaotic world."
The obituary quoted Percy's own words to articulate the theme of his six novels:
"the dislocation of man in the modern age."
Sometimes a single line
of poetry is all it takes to set off a personal line of serious reflection.
In his poem "Zeroes," Philip Booth muses that we may have
"wired our lives to suicide bombs." That could prompt defense analysts to think about the applications of
high technology to the protection of national interest; it could also nudge a
job-seeker to think about the life-giving or death-dealing potential of the
personal priorities he or she is adopting and "wiring in" to career
goals.
The discouraged job
seeker might be nudged toward action by a line in John Ciardi's poem "In Place
of a Curse," where the poet speaks of "the meek, who gambled nothing, gave
nothing, and could never receive enough."
Remarkably, a student
poet, Joelle Lamboley of Georgetown University, caught in a poem called "Love
Song" much of what I tried to say in Chapter Two about a job-seeker's need for
spousal support. Her poem,
expressed in the woman's voice, focuses on the general relationship between man
and woman, not on the special support a wife can give her unemployed
husband. I present it here to
illustrate how a sensitive young woman has full possession of an insight--"I
cannot help it; I am a woman/ Who is constantly healing, understanding,/
searching, and letting go./ I know men like you"--that any woman needs who wants
to shore up the spirits of a man in search of work.
I know men like you.
The injured bird who never
Regains his ability to fly.
Shrouded in uncertainty.
The pain is a seduction technique:
A means of provoking the nurse
Or mother in every woman.
Women do not shy away from instability.
We try to milk it, to cure it,
And once you are healed, another
Bird comes in the window
With broken wings, unable to
Fly against the currents
Of the lonely winter wind.
And you fly away, feigning
Injury, revitalizing the
Claims that your father had
Broken the ego inside your
Red breast.
I know men like you.
The lonely hunter in the woods,
Perhaps exiled from the court:
Shooting arrows at birds and
Sleeping hungry because your
Aim is off.
No one understands you.
Your secrets dancing in your
Eyes like a dirty limerick.
I know men like you.
The world has done you
Wrong, the gods are not in
Your favor and libations are
Irrelevant.
You were born under the wrong
Sign, like Orpheus, and you
Sing your song to the delight
Of us all.
And I listen, intently, for
Clues to the key that unlocks
Your secrets.
I cannot help it; I am a woman
Who is constantly healing, understanding,
Searching, and letting go.
I know men like you.
Maybe I should move.
The thought that "maybe
[she will] move," whether expressed or not, weighs upon the already burdened
job-seeker. The suggestion of a threat at the end of the poetic reassurance that
she is there to listen, heal, and cure, echoes the cynical saying that "next to the wound,
woman makes the bandage best." Spouses should be talking to one another about wounds and bandages in the
context of lost employment; poetry can open up the conversation. Reading aloud to one another is a
pleasant way to pass the evening hours, or to shorten the time of long-distance
drives.
Just Let the Phrase Sink In
Often, a phrase will
come off the page that doesn't have to be shared with anyone, just pondered for
purposes of a reality check on how you are dealing with life in your own
particular job-seeking circumstances. Novelist John Gregory Dunne once described himself as "one of life's
neutrals, a human Switzerland." Phrases like that can serve as wake-up calls for self-pitying job
seekers.
And passages like the
following from Edwin O'Connor's Edge of Sadness (Little Brown,
1961) are remarkably helpful in providing perspective on the tendency to let the
realization of aging pull one's spirits down into a swamp of
discouragement. The narrator has
just caught sight of a longtime friend.
...I realized that she was a
grandmother
and...this brought home to me the blunt truth that she and John and all of us
who had been young together were young no longer, and that we moved steadily,
day by day, to the once distant world of the old....
Which, as I say, is a foolish way to feel; obviously, no one ever grows closer to the cradle.
But getting old is a strange business.
It's happening to you every minute of
the day, and you almost never give it a thought; then, one day, you catch a
glimpse of an old friend, or you hear a phrase from an old song, or your eye
falls on a solitary sentence in the daily paper, and suddenly, without being
able to do a thing in the world about it, you seem to be for a moment outside
your own skin, taking one good long look
at yourself, exactly as you stand, exactly as you
are. And at this point, no matter who you are, or what you believe, or who you
may be, it sometimes becomes a little hard
to give three cheers for the inevitable.
Referring to another
writer, Graham Greene, and another novel, The Power and the Glory, one of
the participants in my study--a financial services executive who went through
outplacement twice ("It was the pits!") recalled drawing strength from this
book. He read it, in fact, three
times. "Here's this man that maybe shouldn't have been a priest in the first
place. He was very weak, clearly
has a drinking problem, sired illegitimate children. A 'whiskey priest,' I think they call
him. And yet when this final call
comes about the person back in Mexico that wants to confess--he's reasonably
sure its a trap, but he goes back. His physical courage is so thin that he really has to get himself almost
intoxicated to overcome his fear. He certainly is among the weakest links in the chain.
Yet, when all was said and done, he did
what he had to do. And I think when
you're hurting, an image like that isn't all bad."
That's the point of
holding up the literary mirror--you can better understand and accept yourself in
the images good authors place before you.
Graham Greene once
remarked, "The writer and the priest never have a sense of success, because the
priest feels he hasn't been a saint, and the writer knows he hasn't been another
Dickens." Success and failure
preoccupied Greene as a writer; that is one reason he is worth reading during a
job search campaign. He once raised
the rhetorical questions: "Isn't it the story-teller's task to act as a devil's
advocate, to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie
outside the boundaries of...approval? [The writer] stands for the victims and
the victims change." One literary
critic called Greene "a true magician in the words and spells of authentic
drama...who has found an instrument for probing the temper and tragedy of his
age, the perversions and fears that have betrayed it, and the stricken weathers
of the soul."
In teaching "Business
and Society" or "The Social Responsibility of Business" to college students
enroute to business careers, I invite them to select a novel set in the business
context, read it carefully, and then from the perspective of the narrator or
protagonist, write a short essay under the title: "On the Possibility of a Full
Human Life in the American Business System." The assignment enables the student to
"see" the business world he or she will soon inhabit, through the eyes of the
protagonist or narrator whose biases for or against "the system" will be
clear. The point of it all is
encourage a vicarious experience by way of preparation for what might lie
ahead.
This is an exercise
that might be useful to the job-seeker. Consider, for instance, the premise Louis Edwards lays out at the opening
of his Washington Post (February 10, 1992) review of Company Man a
novel by Brent Wade (Algonquin): "What any would-be company man must acquiesce
to is the submergence of some part of his identity (and probably the loss
thereof). He must stand in his
employer's shadow.... To commit blindly is to initiate a form of metaphysical
(or is it merely, here, metaphorical?) suicide."
Your local librarian (with whom you should become
friendly when you are in transition) can provide you with a list of good novels
whose characters live their lives in corporate settings. Try to "climb inside the skin" of one or
more of these characters and view the world from their perspective. You will see things you haven't noticed
before--about business and also about yourself.
The Bible is, of
course, literature. As literature
it deserves at least brief mention here because the Book of Job provides the
archetypical example of the literary character with whom the discouraged,
perhaps unjustly treated, job seeker can relate.
Shakespeare also has
something to contribute to the literary mirror. In The Tempest, for example, you
will meet Prospero, who was a failure as Duke of Milan when his daughter was
just a child. When she is a young
adult, Prospero has trouble telling her about this, and fears she will esteem
him less on account of it. "It is a
humiliating moment--a trial which at some time or other comes to all parents
when for the first time their children look at them frankly and critically,"
notes the Introduction to this play in G. B. Harrison's edited volume of Shakespeare: The Complete Works.
Early in the play, Prospero explains to his daughter Miranda, now a young
adult, that he was betrayed by his own brother who promised to pay both tribute
and homage to the King of Milan on condition that the King "Should presently
extirpate me and mine/ Out of the dukedom...." Prospero was ousted "in the dead of
darkness/...Me and thy crying self. " [T]hey hurried us aboard a bark,/ Bore us
some leagues to sea, where they prepared/ A rotten carcass of a butt [a tub],
not rigged,/ Nor tackle, sail, nor mast. The very rats/ Instinctively have quit
it. There they hoist us,/ To cry to
the sea that roared to us, to sigh/ To the winds, whose pity, sighing back
again,/ Did us but loving wrong." Miranda has no memory of this but presumes, "Alack, what trouble/ Was I
then to you!" Quite the contrary,
relates her father in language not unlike that used by several men I met in the
course of this study, men whose daughters gave them affection and encouragement
to ease the initial shock of job loss. Prospero replies to Miranda, "Oh, a cherubin/ Thou wast that did preserve
me. Thou didst smile,/ Infused with
a fortitude from Heaven,/ When I have decked the sea with drops full salt./
Under my burden groaned, which raised in me/ an undergoing stomach to bear up/
Against what should ensue."
The point of directing
your attention to the literary mirror is simply to suggest that what you see
there may help you get the "stomach to bear up against" whatever difficulties
you may encounter in a job campaign of unpredictable duration.