Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (11 page)

THE PSYCHOLOGISTS OF
the twentieth century got some of their inspiration not only from ancient myths but also from the artists of the nineteenth century. It was Freud’s opinion that “the poets”— by whom he meant not poets alone but narrative creators of all kinds —“in their knowledge of the mind, are far in advance of us everyday people.” Freud himself owed a lot to the Greek-language playwrights and to Biblical sagas, but also to Ibsen; Jung was steeped in Germanic folk tales, but also in anima-dramas such as the ballets
Giselle
and
Swan Lake
. For less ethereal or subterranean concerns — for Adlerian power dynamics, and for how who owes what to whom plays out in society — you could do worse than to consult a select batch of nineteenth-century quasi-realistic novels.

For instance, the most perfect illustration of Eric Berne’s devious version of “Debtor”— the version called “Try and Collect”— is to be found in Thackeray’s best-known work, the 1848 novel
Vanity Fair.
In it, we watch the grim business of poor Amelia Sedley’s family bankruptcy, but we also watch the brilliant but socially inferior adventuress and gold-digger, Becky Sharp, claw her way up the status ladder by marrying dashing younger-brother aristocrat but ne’er-do-well Rawdon Crawley. Crawley, having annoyed his family by marrying Becky, and having thus been cut off from family funds, makes his living as a card sharp and billiards expert. In the chapter called “How to Live Well on Nothing a Year,” Thackeray goes into considerable detail about the Crawley household’s financial arrangements. Essentially, Becky and Rawdon charm the tradesmen with their top-drawer manners and their social standing and, as a result, the tradesmen sell them things on credit — things for which they never get paid. Becky in particular is a consummate player of “Try and Collect.” Thackeray comments:

I wonder how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great practitioners in Crawley’s way? — how many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums and cheat for a few shillings? When we read that a noble nobleman has left for the Continent, or that another noble nobleman has an execution in his house — and that one or other owes six or seven millions, the defeat seems glorious even, and we respect the victim in the vastness of his ruin. But who pities a poor barber who can’t get his money for powdering the footmen’s heads; or a poor carpenter who has ruined himself by fixing up ornaments and pavilions for my lady’s
déjeuner
; or the poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronizes, and who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the liveries ready, which my lord has done him the honour to bespeak? When the great house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed: as they say in the old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither.

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it’s good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle down, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals. But everything in the human imagination and consequently in human life has both a positive and a negative version, and if the trickle-down theory of wealth is the positive, the negative is the trickle-down theory of debt. The debts that trickle down from large debtors may not in themselves be large, but they are large for those upon whom they trickle. Poor Mr. Raggles, from whom the Crawleys rent their house without ever paying for it, is utterly and completely ruined when the Crawley household falls apart and its members decamp.

Vanity Fair
is named after the city of that same name in John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, where it stands not only for the “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” of the Book of Ecclesiastes, but especially for the realm of worldly goods, both material and spiritual, as well as for the state of mind in which absolutely everything is for sale. Bunyan’s list of what’s on offer in Vanity Fair is inclusive: “houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.”

What not, indeed? Every human society sets a limit on what can be bought and sold, but in Bunyan’s Vanity Fair there are no limits. Nevertheless, all who travel must pass through it, says Bunyan. It’s a very sinister place, full of “jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues,” as well as “thefts, murders, adulteries, false-swearings, and that of a blood-red colour.” In fact it’s a suburb of Hell, and the journey through it ends with a horrific bout of torture and dismemberment. It’s a vision born of shock — the shock caused by the old world of faith hitting the new one in which commerce is poised to become not only a king but an absolute monarch. Those loyal to the old order — an order in which there were virtues and loyalties, such as faith, hope, and charity, that were held to be above money — must have felt despairingly that Mammon was about to triumph, and Bunyan’s dark strip-mall of a fair gives a shape to this feeling. The new world of money, in his eyes, is the City of Destruction, and the most important thing you can do is to make your way out of it as fast as possible.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, that transition was far in the past. There was a certain amount of piety and Mrs. Grundyism around — a piano did not have legs, it had limbs, because “legs” was too suggestive, and a well-bred young lady never sat on a chair that a young man had just vacated, for fear that a seductive body heat might linger in the seat cushion — but an established churchman who knew what was good for him kept away from any thundering denunciations of the wickedness of riches. Thackeray’s narrative voice is not that of the direct, urgent, outraged, and — some might say — naively trusting Bunyan, but the drawl of a bored and savvy worldling recording the way things are on this mundane social plane. His novel, he tells us, is a puppet show, and in a puppet show the characters are smaller than those observing them, and exist for our entertainment, not for our moral improvement. Thus Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
is a comic novel, or at least an ironic one: Rawdon Crawley and Becky Sharp get away with their acts of fraud and theft. In fact they get away literally, since each of them flees the field of their joint misdemeanours and ends up in a country that isn’t England.

The tale of Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley is the comic version of Berne’s “Try and Collect,” but most of the nineteenth-century fictional treatments of debt are a lot darker. The theme of debt is so pervasive that it’s difficult to choose examples. Shall we get born in a debtors’ prison, like Dickens’s Little Dorrit? Shall we follow the consequences of rashly contracted debts in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
when human beings are sold to settle the account? Shall we plunge into huge financial ruin through
Dombey and Son
? Shall we move ahead several decades in time and ponder the sad fates of the two aspiring but eventually bankrupt and consequently dead writers in George Gissing’s hard-edged novel of drudging scribery,
New Grub Street
?

Or shall we turn to debt as it impacts on women? We might start by investigating Flaubert’s 1857 novel,
Madame Bovary
, the story of a provincial wife who takes to romantic love, extramarital sex, and overspending as an escape from boredom, but then poisons herself when her double life catches up with her and her unpaid creditor threatens to expose her. This book was put on trial for obscenity, and Flaubert defended it by brandishing Emma’s hideous-looking corpse as an example of the book’s inherent morality — the wages of sexual sin is arsenic, and not only does it kill you, it wrecks your looks — but that’s a red herring. Emma isn’t really punished for sex but for shopaholicism. Had she but learned double-entry bookkeeping and drawn up a budget, she could easily have gone on with her hobby of adultery forever — or at least until she got saggy — though she’d have done it in a more frugal manner.

Or perhaps we should cross the Atlantic and trace the pitiful career of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s
House of Mirth
, who, had she known more about debt management, need not have ended up similarly self-poisoned. Rash Lily had not thought deeply enough about the principles of tit-for-tat: if a man lends you money and charges no interest, he’s going to want payment of some other kind. Lily refuses to come across, and she also refuses to cynically cash in on the compromising letters of a false friend, and so there is no place for her in the worldly world: Lily Bart is pure as a lily, as her first name implies, but she’s too pure to barter as her last name dictates. She’s briefly up for sale in the marriage market, but she has no money so her price is not high, and she doesn’t like the sleazy prospective bidders, and then her reputation gets unfairly besmirched, and who wants damaged goods?

Which leads us to reflect on the two nineteenth-century meanings of the word “ruin.” For a nineteenth-century man, ruin was financial ruin — running up more debts than you could pay and then having the bailiffs and the foreclosers move in and grab your possessions. This would cause you to become shabby, after which former acquaintances would avoid you on the street. But for a nineteenth-century woman, ruin meant primarily sexual ruin — having sex, unwillingly or not, before marriage, or even being thought to have had it, which need not mean financial ruin at all, if a girl could turn things to her own account. To quote Thomas Hardy’s wry poem “The Ruined Maid”:

“O ‘Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?”
“O didn’t you know I’d been ruined?” said she.

“You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three!”
“Yes: that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,” said she.

“Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I’m bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!”
“We never do work when we’re ruined,” said she.

[ . . . ]

“I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!”
“My dear, a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,” said she.

This poem points the way to the most exemplary novel for our purposes — a novel that combines debt with ruin of both kinds, the financial and the sexual. That novel is George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss
, and it goes like this:

Two children, Maggie and Tom Tulliver, live beside the River Floss, at Dorlecote Mill — a water-wheel mill that grinds wheat into flour — where their father is the miller . . .

But here I must make a detour. For Maggie Tulliver is a miller’s daughter, not a stationer’s daughter or a plumber’s daughter, and that makes a difference. So I’ll say a few words about mills, because being a miller’s daughter carries a heavy weight of mythic significance. As does being a miller. As, indeed, does being a mill.

Mills, millers, millers’ daughters. I’ll tackle them in that order.

Water-wheel mills are very old. In the West, they go back to Greek and Roman times, when, if anything was said about them, it tended to be good, since they replaced the labour of workers — slave workers, as a rule, like Samson with his eyes put out — and also that of animals. They were used by the Anglo-Saxons in England and were widespread in the Middle Ages. Somewhere along the line they began to pick up a dubious reputation. For one thing, they were a mechanical device, and for a superstitious peasant this made them objects not only of envy —
I wish I had one of those!
— but also of mistrust:
a thing that goes by itself must have some deviltry in it
. They might also inspire fear, of the what-if-it-goes-out-of-control or how-do-I-turn-it-off variety. For modern examples of this kind of fear, think about early robot movies, or else about your own first adventures with a Cuisinart.

There’s a widespread folk motif about magic mills and their habit of not stopping. A poor peasant acquires a hand mill that goes by itself and grinds out anything you ask it to, and so he becomes wealthy; but someone else gets hold of it, and starts it grinding some desired substance — in
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
it’s porridge — and then can’t turn it off, so the house and then the street fill up with porridge, dreadful thought. This plot is very close to the
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
motif that you may last have glimpsed in Walt Disney’s film
Fantasia
, with Mickey Mouse playing the apprentice and the unstoppable robot taking the form of a broom and a pail of water. Moral: beware of free lunches, because there aren’t any: there’s always a trick. Hermes is the god of tricks and lies and thieves and communication and commerce — everything that moves and flows — but he’s also the god of mechanical devices, such as mills.

In the Andrew Lang
Blue Fairy Book
version of the tricky grinding hand mill that I read as a child, the peasant acquires the mill by going to Dead Man’s Hall and doing a trade, whereby he gets the mill and the dead people get a ham. This makes sense in two ways: in folklore, the dead are always hungry, and newfangled mechanical devices — because of their uncanny natures — are likely to come from the other world, whatever that world may be called. The crafty peasant tells the mill to grind out gold, which it does — so much gold that his rich brother envies him. The rich brother manages to buy the mill and tells it to grind out some herrings; but he fails to ask how to turn it off, and is inundated with herrings. Finally, the mill is bought by a sea captain, who asks it to grind salt, because he trades in salt and this way he won’t have to sail around all the time. But he, too, fails to find the Off switch, so he takes the infernal thing far out to sea and throws it overboard. It’s down at the bottom of the ocean at this very moment, still grinding away, and that’s why the sea is salt.