The ecstasies of betrayal

Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza, and the literature of treachery.

My professional group chats have been a wreck since journalist Olivia Nuzzi published in Vanity Fair the first excerpt of “American Canto,” her written-in-a-flash literary memoir about an on-the-job affair with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The volume of private commentary forces a public question: How much does all this really matter? Like, in the real world? Digital frottage with a reporter may rate among the least controversial things the current Health and Human Services Secretary has ever done. (My doctor says I need a measles booster, by the way.) Nonetheless. Here is a perfect four-quadrant spectacle with a little something for everyone, 1. a famous politician, 2. media navel-gazing, 3. sex????, and 4. some truly unfortunate prose. It’s the last part, the packaging of all this as Serious Writing from Serious Journalists, that provokes me.

I’m stuck at this paragraph of the “Canto” excerpt:

It was the flag. When I close my eyes in search of the end or the start, the place at which before stopped and beyond which now began, that is what I see. The blur of colors, the flash of red, of blue, of white, stretched and folded, pulled apart, undefined yet unmistakable, the flag. There was no one day, one moment, one event, one decision, one word that marked the change. There was the flag as it mutated from metaphorical to literal weapon, as it was marred by a corruption of the American character that could not be understood or even fully observed through the prism of the partisan binary. Which is to say that it was the flag, but it was not about the flag, not about notions of patriotism or nationalism or idolatry. It was the flag that thrashed in psychedelic distress, suggested a bend in lanes of reason, a tear in the fabric of consensus reality.

The real sin in a passage like this is less the indulgent tenor than the lack of precision. For one thing, if there’s anything we could agree on about the American flag as a symbol, it’s that the 13 bars and 50 stars tend to present crisply and are never as narratively blurred or psychically fucked up as the American people. (Additionally, I know of flagpoles being used as a “literal weapon,” but I’ve never seen someone getting garroted by the actual Stars and Stripes.)

Only editors can stop writers from hurting themselves, so where was Condé Nast’s senior bench? Either blindly enabling or quietly snickering. “She flamed out and she faded away,” said the magazine’s teaser text to the book excerpt. “Vanity Fair’s West Coast Editor returns to the written word to survey scorched earth.” Any upmarket magazine packing that many cliches into two promo sentences has declared to the discerning reader that the fix is in for the author.

Nor does publisher Simon & Schuster escape liability. New York Times veteran Ginia Bellafante summarized Nuzzi’s book as “a grafting of her own crisis onto the current national maladies, one attempted in the spirit of Joan Didion, and so close to its apparent source of inspiration that the cruelties of the Santa Ana winds are invoked at least three times.” The responsibility of the California writer is to regard our dear Didion as a sheer rock face to be respected but also avoided. One literary evocation of the Santa Anas is a description of nature; three is a sign of negligence.

Notwithstanding every institution’s poor overall handling of this whole episode, I’m not one to dwell on people’s sex lives or their tawdry self-annihilations. (It’s a liberal disposition toward people’s personal decisions combined with a Midwestern semiprudishness about the things better kept private.) I don’t mention this to convey holier-than-thouness, god knows there’s enough of that going around. Faintness of the prurient instinct can be an occupational hazard for a journalist! In Christopher Hitchens’ old essays, I was humbled by how frequently Hitch homed in on the huge pervert stuff that was secretly reorganizing the public lives of powerful people. “There is at least a suggestive crossover between [John F.] Kennedy’s Mobbed-up sex-life and his thuggish foreign policy,” as he accused in one London Review of Books essay. Maybe this is why I’ve never had much personal curiosity about any Kennedys. Yet here we are.

Still, we are confronted by one unavoidable reality here: Sagas of hubris and treachery are universal literary genres, approachable by any reader. If you can hack through the regrettable prose and the intrusive metaphors about bamboo, we are presented with rich texts of the human condition. Who could resist Ryan Lizza publicly declaring that he’s just celebrated one year with somebody else, “the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever known, someone whose beauty, inside and out, takes my breath away,” then issuing a tabloid assault seemingly calculated to inflict maximum reputational and emotional damage against his ex? And to then keep piling on? Why does Keith Olbermann keep opening his mouth to remind everyone of his romantic entanglement with a then-teenager? These are characters so deeply addicted to their passions that they cannot stop choosing to destroy themselves. As Jean Genet once wrote, “Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.”

Amid all this muck, I was finishing Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” last week — a novel about past betrayals and karmic vengeance — and was frozen by two relevant passages. First, Pynchon’s description of two friends at the moment an unforgivable treachery is revealed: “They stayed up the rest of the night, crying separately and together, demanding, pleading, exchanging insults, repeating formulas, getting things wrong on purpose, and more and more wrong as it went on falling to pieces.” Writing can be incantatory and figurative and precise. Who among us hasn’t repeated formulas long after they’ve stopped making sense, in that last desperate clinging to what’s already gone.

Secondly, Pynchon slipped in a bit of Emerson:

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.

We don’t dwell much on karma as a literal concept anymore. But in a democracy — in theory — media does have a correctional function. I use that word in the penal sense. When egos get too big, the lies too great, the betrayals too much to bear, media does its Big Brother act and starts applying countervailing pressure to restore things to an equilibrium. It’s just that in the old days, media was magazines and newspapers; today, it’s all of us who make content. Lizza’s disgustingly detailed second chapter, paywalled, marked the first time I saw a lot of people maliciously infringing on an independent substacker’s copyright on a mass scale via samizdat Google docs and .pdfs to deny the author his expected dollars. The main characters here may be gripped incurably by mania and self-delusion and revenge, but the rest of us don’t have to be. Maybe some sort of balance is coming back to bear, via pulverizing recoil.