Feel Free

Do you like Joni Mitchell? I like her, but I don’t love her. That puts me in a small and exclusive group of people. Among people who know Joni Mitchell and her music, there are two pretty large groups: People who really really love her and people who really really really can’t stand her. My group, which consists of people who can take her or leave her, is quite small.  

I’ve been reading a lot of Meghan Daum lately. Meghan Daum wrote an essay about how much she loves Joni Mitchell. Meghan Daum is what I think of as the typical lover of Joni Mitchell: a white, Generation X, East Coast-raised, Vassar-educated woman who discovered Joni when she was young, and then loved her for her entire adult life. 

*****

Anyway, I love Meghan Daum’s essays, and now I’ve finished reading all of her published essay collections, so I had to find another essayist to read, and that is how I stumbled across Zadie Smith’s essay collection Feel Free. Before I found this book, I didn’t know that Zadie Smith wrote essays but she certainly does and they are very very good. Smith writes about everything; about art and music and books and family life and race and politics and truth and lies. Like all great essayists, she makes me take notes and highlight passages and write down lists of things that I need to learn more about. She is very good company, funny and sharp and interesting, occasionally whiny but always truthful, much better read than I am or ever will be. 

Like Meghan Daum, Zadie Smith also loves Joni Mitchell. Unlike Meghan Daum, she started by hating Joni. She hated her so much that whenever a Joni Mitchell song played, she would fling herself at the radio to stop the sound of Joni’s voice. Zadie Smith hated Joni Mitchell's music until suddenly and inexplicably, she loved it. This is probably what I love best about reading Zadie Smith. She is capable of completely changing her mind and falling in love with a thing that she once found intolerable. 

She is also fearless. It takes courage to change your mind after taking a public stand about something, even if “public” just means among your friends and family; and even if the thing that you took a stand about is something relatively unimportant, like taste in music. (Note that I did not say that music is unimportant; only that an individual person’s taste in music is unimportant. Music is very important. A single person’s opinion about Joni Mitchell or Kanye West or Vampire Weekend is not.) 

I too have taken outspoken public stands about controversial issues. I’m on record as a right-thinking person who knows that pumpkin spice latte, though widely beloved, is vile, revolting swill. And I promise you that if I ever develop a taste for PSL, I’m not going to admit that to anyone. I’m not going to plaster my social media with reversals of my prior declarations that pumpkin spice is a hate crime against coffee (it is) and that people who take an objective good like coffee and add to it an unnecessary and disgusting element (pumpkin spice) that makes it unfit for humanity are under the devil’s influence (they are). I’m going to wear a disguise when I line up at Starbucks for my (ghastly) PSL. I’m never going to climb down. But Zadie Smith is not afraid to climb down. She’s not afraid to lose face before her friends, her family, and the reading public. She is fearless. 

Take Martin Buber and Justin Bieber, for example. You have to be utterly fearless to write a whole essay about Martin Buber’s idea of human relationships as either I-It relationships or I-Thou relationships, using Justin Bieber as an extended metaphor. 

A person who looks for a way to write about Martin Buber and Justin Bieber in the same essay just because “Buber and Bieber” sound funny together is a person after my own heart. But Smith also makes a brilliant connection between Buber's thought and the objectification of celebrities by those who “love” them, who turn the adored celebrity into an “It” rather than a “Thou.” She also does not fail to acknowledge the irony here, which is that she herself is also treating Bieber as an It rather than a Thou by virtue of his metaphorical role in this essay. The whole essay is like watching a high-wire act, and you read it with proverbial bated breath to see if she can pull this crazy stunt off and damn if she doesn’t. Fearless. And brilliant. 

*****

That’s not to say that she’s right about everything. Writing about her time living in Rome, she mentions “the Roman fetish for that British sartorial horror, the Barbour jacket…” 

Horror? HORROR? WHAAAAAT? I love Barbour jackets. I love Barbour jackets and Orvis jackets and Burberry jackets. They’re beautiful. 

OK, maybe they’re not beautiful in the strictly beautiful sense of beauty. But they’re practical and classic and they never go out of style and they look amazing with a Longchamp Le Pliage bag or a Coach crossbody, and OK, I guess I see her point. I mean, who am I, the Duchess of fucking Cambridge? Never mind. I’m going to keep wearing my Barbour jacket, with my Le Pliage slung over my shoulder; and if someone thinks that I’m a Kate Middleton fashion stan, then what about it? There are, I suppose, worse things to be. 

Fashion disagreements aside (really, that is a big one), when Smith is right, she’s really right, and she’s right most of the time. Writing about the then-current (2016) state of politics in the UK and US, she quotes Tony Judt (hey! An author I’ve actually read!) 

We have freed ourselves of the mid-20th-century assumption--never universal but certainly widespread--that the state is likely to be the best solution to any given problem. We now need to liberate ourselves from the opposite notion: that the state is -- by definition and always -- the worst available option. 

Tony Judt is right, of course, but Zadie Smith knows exactly why he’s right. The tension between private interests and the public good has been the central debate of politics for my entire life. Foreign policy and education and health policy and even to a certain extent racial justice are just window dressing for the never-ending human struggle between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. Every political position answers the question: Do we want a world in which the strong consistently and relentlessly crush the weak? More and more it seems that people in power are prepared to answer: “Yes, and fuck all of you.” 

According to Zadie Smith, the politicians are also just window dressing, and if you want to know who really runs the world, it's not Biden or Trump or Boris Johnson or even Vladimir Putin. “My life and the lives of my fellow Britons are at all times at least partially governed by a permanent, unelected billionaire class, who own the newspapers and much of the TV, and through which absurd figures like (Nigel) Farage are easily puffed up, thus swinging elections and shaping policy.” Oh yes. Substitute Trump or any of his Trumpity Trumpster wannabes like DeSantis or Abbott or Noem or Marjorie Taylor Greene for Nigel Farage, and we’re in the same boat in the United States. 

*****

Zadie Smith grew up in what she describes as the British lower middle class, which was once a good place to be. Sometime before Thatcherism really took hold, a middle class Briton (lower middle or middle middle or upper middle) could count on a reasonably secure life and future for herself and her family. That’s not to say that it was easy to become middle class if you weren’t born into that status. Smith’s parents, a white English father and a black Jamaican mother, grew up poor enough that their entry into the middle class with its attendant privileges (a modest home in the suburbs, annual holidays, a good education for their children) was a real achievement. But it was a possible achievement. It was an achievement that put you on pretty solid ground from the standpoint of long-term economic and social stability and security. Now it’s even harder to move up from poverty into the working or middle class. And it’s much much easier to fall from the working class or even the middle class into poverty. 

Writing about a fire that destroyed her apartment in Rome, Smith marvels at her own position of privilege. For her grandparents and even her parents, a fire that destroyed all of their worldly possessions would have been a disaster beyond recovery. Poor people don’t have savings or insurance or the promise of future earnings or any of the economic security mechanisms that make it possible to replace your home and its contents if they’re destroyed in a fire. Smith and her family (including her dog, whom she’d taken with her before leaving the apartment, thus saving his life), although traumatized and heartbroken at the loss of their home and possessions, had access to all of the necessary means of recovery. They could stay in a hotel for a few days, maybe wait for an insurance company to assess the damage and offer compensation, and then rebuild their material lives with relatively little struggle. 

It’s sad and infuriating that this capacity to recover from disaster is a privilege reserved to an ever-smaller group of people; and that more and more working people can be pushed right over the financial brink by just one big unexpected bill, let alone a fire. 

*****

The best thing about reading a great essayist is learning about new ideas, new authors, new artists; that is to say, new to me. Reading Zadie Smith is like reading a young British Nora Ephron/Joan Didion hybrid. She starts with a high-level bird’s eye view of pretty much everything in the social and political and artistic and cultural landscape, and then she zooms in and picks and chooses where to really dig in and get to the root of something. She gets to the root of Joni Mitchell in a way that even Meghan Daum didn’t manage to do. Thanks to Zadie Smith, I’m going to see some movies that I haven’t seen before and look at some paintings that I’ve never looked at before. I’m going to listen to some new music and I’m going to read some new and old books. 

I started, predictably, with the books. Having never read Philip Roth (having in fact assiduously avoided him), I am now reading Goodbye, Columbus, and it’s pretty good in a mid-century NY/NJ time capsule kind of way. The title story encapsulates the entire history of the sexual revolution and its connection to World War II, all in about 100 very sad pages. After shaking my head at Neil Klugman for 100 pages, I don’t think I have the patience for Mr. Portnoy and his Complaint, but who knows? Maybe I’ll read Portnoy, too. Zadie Smith is a Joni Mitchell fan now. Maybe I’ll come to love Philip Roth. Anything is possible. Anything can happen. That’s the takeaway, really. A few hours with Zadie Smith, and you feel that anything can happen.