In Which We Simply Cannot Control Ourselves

Mission Control

by ALEX CARNEVALE

I am the person I'm most concerned with controlling.

1972

B.F. Skinner was used to looking out for things that could not manage for themselves. In his laboratory, rats and pigeons remained under his watchful eye.

When his wife Yvonne gave birth to his second daughter, Deborah Skinner, he thought of ways he might better care for the girl. In his basement his built a crib enclosed completely in safety glass, replete with a thermostat. In 1945 they would name it: the Heir Conditioner.

He had noticed how hard it was for the bundled Deborah to turn over. In the Heir Conditioner Deborah could always be in a diaper, allowing for total movement within the unit. Air that entered was moistened, sound was absorbed by the walls. Because the child was totally contained in the system, General Mills feared what would happen if the climate apparatus were to fail - an overheated or frozen child. After the company passed on the Heir Conditioner, Skinner decided to publicize his invention through an article in Ladies' Home Journal entitled "Baby in a Box."

Skinner himself was not responsible for the article's title. "The word box," he later admitted, "led to countless confusion, because I had used another box in a study of operant conditioning. [They] assumed I was experimenting on our daughter as if she were a rat or a pigeon." (Years afterwards, a rival faculty member started a rumor that Skinner's daughter had committed suicide, presumably as a result of the device.) Despite the poor word of mouth, Skinner got a manufacturer interested, but because of the device's high cost (over three hundred dollars to fabricate), it was never successfully produced on any real scale.

His next project was the utopian novel titled Walden Two. The book examined how behavioral conditioning could improve American life. There is one scene from the book I have never been able to get out of my mind. Skinner imagines children sitting around a table at meal time, preparing for their food. He suggests that one set of children be served while the other half of the group watches their peers eat. In this way he planned to eliminate the concept of impatience at an early age. It seemed then, and still does appear to be, a marvelous improvement on the world. At the same time it is absolutely terrifying.

with wife Yvonne

Luddites continue to haunt our world. They romanticize not even just the past, but the very recent past, like flip phones and AOL.com. Technology itself contains no content, and fear of it is understandable, since it may be used for good or ill. Skinner's changes to the established way of living, harshly received as they were, possessed great utility, perhaps even more so as part of today's culture than the one that received Walden Two. Even Skinner seemed to realize this in subsequent years.

Concluding that the realization of the intentional communities he described in Walden Two was a long way off, he turned his attention to improving the academic life around him. Writing to his colleagues in the Harvard psychology department in 1955, he told them, "We do not teach; we merely create a situation in which the student must learn or be damned." The problem, as he saw it, was that "the students were not being told at once whether their work is right or wrong... and they were all moving at the same pace regardless of preparation or ability."

as a boy

To remedy this, he invented a teaching machine. "There is no reason," he wrote, "why the school room should be any less mechanized than the kitchen." Harvard officials allowed Skinner to set up his machines in the basement of Sever Hall where he might test them on students. IBM became interested in producing the device, but backed out after researching the market.

Skinner's ideas never were fully embraced by companies because he had no grasp of the capitalist mentality. Whether something could reasonably be accomplished suffered in comparison to whether it should. Skinner tried to get his devices used in Harlem middle schools, but he despised the educational experts who saw the machines as a replacement for their way of life. As computers began their ascent, he saw they heralded the natural extension of his ideas. He never learned to use one.

His next book was Beyond Freedom and Dignity. In one sense the book could not have been timed better - it led him to the cover of Time magazine. But the ideas in Beyond Freedom and Dignity entered an evolving America obsessed with the concept of freedom of body and mind. The manuscript reads like a long lecture, rarely referring to any source outside itself. "I am not a historian," Skinner wrote in a later article, "I don't remember what I read, and I keep only sketchy notes."

When Skinner found out Noam Chomsky would review Beyond Freedom and Dignity for The New York Review of Books, he blanched and exploded with rage.

He was right to fear. He learned from a friend that Chomsky described his book as "beyond bed-wetting its bullshit." Other critics found even more to dislike. Stephen Spender termed it "fascism without tears," and Ayn Rand explained that "Beyond Freedom and Dignity is like Boris Karloff's embodiment of Frankenstein's monster: a corpse patterned with nuts, bolts and screws from the junkyard of philosophy, Darwinism, Positivism, Linguistic Analysis with some nails by Hume, threads by Russell and glue from The New York Post."

When the great furor surrounding the book had died down, Skinner remained as he was before: with relatively few friends inside or outside academia. He retired and was presented with a special copy of Walden by Harvard. He focused on writing his autobiography. Split into three parts, it would span over 1300 pages, with the main goal being that he wanted "people to like me." I recommend them in their entirety; engineers have always been the best writers.

Skinner's ideas would have been received far better in this time. At his moment one could live independently from a set of common stimuli. Now we all share so many of the same experiences that we are conditioned behaviorally, but not by the altruistic benefactor that Skinner imagines in Walden Two.

Instead our enslavement is unknowing. We are devoted to the idea of freedom, not actual freedom itself. We shame individuals who do not share our views. We do not require conditioning now to become more alike; as Skinner put it, "A person is not only exposed to the contingencies that constitute a culture, he helps to maintain them, and to the extent that the contingencies induce him to do so the culture is self-perpetuating."

Skinner, and only Skinner, prepared to save us from this fate. To break this cycle we must be trained by some intelligence in the philosophy of freedom, which, as Karl Jaspers noted all those years ago, consists of knowing that a choice made now, today, projects itself backwards and changes our past actions.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about the Chagalls. He tumbls here and twitters here.

in retirement

"Strawberry Bubblegum" - Justin Timberlake (mp3)

"Let The Groove Get In" - Justin Timberlake (mp3)

yvonne checking on the baby

In Which It Was Something We Cannot Explain

My Chagall Memwah

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Chagalls planned to return to Paris after the Second World War. They waited in New York, Marc and his wife Bella did, exhausted by its crowds and pollution, for their home in France to be free. Occasionally they stayed in a hotel in the Adirondacks to get away from the bustle. "Here the only Jews are God himself and us," wrote Bella Chagall.

To pass the time Bella penned her memoirs. (At this point in time they were not yet better known as memwahs.) Put down in her glorious Yiddish, she described her life in Russia before her family had been splintered apart and taken from her. She wrote for hours at her desk in her characteristic black dress. She had been afraid to tell her story before, despite encouragement from friends and family, because of her shyness. The Russia she reimagined then no longer existed.

Marc described his wife during their last months together.

All calm and deep presentiment. I can see her again from our hotel window, sitting by the lake before going to the water. Waiting for me. Her whole being was waiting, listening to something, just as she had listened to the forest when she was a little girl.

Bella died of strep throat six days after the American army liberated Paris.

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"I don't recognize the world," Marc Chagall wrote after her death. In her biography of the artist, Jackie Wullschlager describes him turning his canvases to the wall. He wept uncontrollably during his wife's funeral, she tells us, shocking onlookers. As he dealt with her passing, news flowed in of relatives alive and dead in the war. Joy and grief intermingled freely. In his confusion he even addressed a letter to Joseph Stalin.

"Bella and Ida" 1916

In tandem with his daughter Ida, Marc worked through his wife's papers. His daughter's many friends flowed through the apartment; on any given day as many as six languages were spoken there. Family members returned to the Chagall's Paris home, and there was naturally celebration for those who had survived. He wrote his friend Jean Grenier to say "I am very miserable at this time. I have lost the one who was everything to me - my eyes and my soul. If I continue to create and live it is because I hope to see France and the people of France again very soon." And to another: "I must cure myself of myself."

Ida and Marc, 1945

Spring reinvigorated Marc Chagall's creative drive. He had grown accustomed to working with his wife - he considered her opinion on his work invaluable. Bella's favorite color was green; sometimes when she sat for him she read passages aloud from the Old Testament in Yiddish. His many paintings of his wife are not simply portraits, they show Bella Chagall in the act: of gardening, of drinking, of existing as if her husband were only moments away from entering the scene. The empathy they display - albeit for an extension of himself and his love for her - nearly screams.

detail of "Bella with White Collar", 1917

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Ida Chagall met Virginia McNeil through a friend. Roughly the same age, Virginia required work: her husband was an insane, depressive drunk poet, and their five-year old daughter could not count on her father. The Englishwoman became the family's new housekeeper after repairing some socks, moving into the house with young Jean. Marc called the girl Genia because it sounded more Jewish.

Virginia McNeil could not help but be attracted to the older widower. Watching him paint, she took every opportunity to flirt, observing his shirtless attire during working hours. They hid the relationship from their daughters at first. When they vacationed in Sag Harbor, Virginia slipped in and out of Marc's room at night. This new, illicit relationship came out in his brush. "You must be in love!" his friend told him after seeing one particular painting.

Chagall did not get along with young Jean/Genia McNeil - he had never been fond of any children while they were children, not knowing how to relate to them. When his relationship with Virginia became more obvious and official, he demanded the girl be sent to boarding school in New Jersey. A month later, Virginia told him that she was pregnant.

in New York, 1942Their relationship recollected his marriage when it could. Marc suggested Virginia convert to Judaism, but that never came to pass. He settled for having her attempt to make Russian food. Before the birth of David Chagall, Marc preemptively left for Paris, enlisting a friend to circumcize the baby. The day he sailed for Paris on the SS Brazil, Virginia sent for Jean to come home from boarding school exile. Chagall had not even left her enough money to pay the bills.

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He had planned to only visit Paris, staying in the rooms his daughter rented for him. Instead he remained apart from his child for two years. Ida tried to explain to Virginia, with whom she continued to consummate an uneasy friendship, that her father had purpose in Paris: "People are waiting for him. Their expectation is something to be treasured, not despised. He owes Paris at least a semblance of return. It's like a gift; it must be given at the right time. Paris is Paris, beautiful, decaying, full of sweetness and bitterness."

at the window of his apartment, 1958

Eventually, he did miss Virginia. Maybe he had from the start, but between gallery events and lectures, there had been too much to occupy his attention. He brought her to Europe instead. The happy family:

Her essential non-Jewishness haunted their life. As a replacement for his wife the goy remained inadequate. His paintings continued to be concerned with Bella alone: they were constantly surrounded by the woman in heart and in mind. When he talked to Ida, they spoke in Russian, excluding Virginia from their conversations. This use of language replaced any lingering respect he could have had for Soviet Russia after seeing what the country had done to his friends and relatives.

Jean was constantly envious of her new brother; they sent the girl to live with her grandparents in England. Marc and Virginia attempted to live together in France, but Marc had lost the sexual desire which tied them so closely before. As Virginia flirted with their hippie neighbors and entertained ideas of other men, Marc spent most of his time with the famous artists he counted as friends.

In June of 1951 they went together to Israel. Both were uncomfortable in this foreign place; they barely touched each other. The distance was obvious. Virginia wrote, "I longed for some of the passionate tenderness that filled Marc's paintings, and it was something I couldn't explain to him. By nature, Marc was shy and undemonstrative in love. He talked a lot about love in general, he painted love, but he didn't practice it."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about W.H. Auden coming to America.

with Bella in Marseilles, 1941

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"Sad And Lonesome Day Blues" - Mathis Haug (mp3)

Is It More Important To Be A Great Artist Or A Great Person?

Ellen Copperfield & Frida Kahlo

Damian Weber & Andy Warhol

Isabella Yeager & Auguste Rodin

Timothy Stanley & Louise Bourgeois

Brittany Julious & Lorna Simpson

Sarah Wambold & Grant Wood

Alex Carnevale & Lee Krasner

Ellen Copperfield & Dorothea Lange

Elaine de Kooning & Mark Rothko

Alexandra Malmed & La Monte Young

Barbara Galletly & Willem de Kooning

Alex Carnevale & Fairfield Porter

drawing of Marc and Bella as a young couple

In Which We Imitate Our Loves

Nearer Everything

by ALEX CARNEVALE

What the American male really wants is two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper, he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he's drunk. Everything else is society.

Wystan Hugh Auden arrived in New York City in January of 1939. His friends in New York shared the attitude of his friends in England: they were as unhappy to see him arrive as the English were to see him leave. "Just a note to ask you not to bring Auden and Isherwood to see me," wrote Louise Bogan to Edmund Wilson. "I can't say I want to spend an evening being examined by two visiting Englishmen as a queer specimen."

Impressions of Auden and his friends Christopher Isherwood did not noticeably improve by the spring. "He's pretty eccentric and does strange things like picking his nose and eating what he finds," observed Paul Bowles.

with his one time sexual partner and friend Isherwood

Auden was unsurprised at the vastness of American wealth. That he was used to. It was this country's waste that deeply bothered and disturbed him. "The great vice of Americans is not materialism," he wrote, "but a lack of respect for matter."

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In between trying to get New York's monied elite to give him and Isherwood money of their own volition, Auden reviewed only the books he liked. (He had no stomach for rendering negative notices.) Despite his relative poverty - he and Isherwood shared a shabby Yorkville apartment - he prioritized taking Benzedrine in the mornings and Seconal at night. The upper intiated his writing for the day, and the downer allowed him to sleep after all that had happened.

When he finally quit amphetamines twenty years later, his social charm - what was left of it - disappeared as well.

Wystan and Chester

At the beginning of April, Auden met Chester Kallman at a poetry reading he was giving in Brooklyn. A few weeks later he wrote his brother John

Just a line to tell you that it's really happened at last after all these years. Mr Right has come into my life. He is a Roumanian-Latvian-American Jew called Chester Kallman, eighteen, extremely intelligent and I think, about to become a good poet. His father who knows all and approves is a communist dentist who would be rich if he didn't have to pay two sets of alimony. This time, my dear, I really believe it's marriage.

After the two had sex for the first time, Auden gifted his new partner a volume of William Blake.

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Auden's focus on Kallman arose out of his own loneliness in his new country. The next year he would be able to summarize his plight better: "The person you really need will arrive at the proper moment to save you."

The couple was temporarily separated while Auden taught for a short time at St. Mark's School in Massachusetts. He disliked the buttoned-up place as soon as he arrived, finding the faculty and administration closed-minded and anti-Semitic. When he returned to Kallman, the two planned a bus trip to New Orleans. The entire way down Chester attempted to seduce every hot young thing he came across. Auden called it their honeymoon.

The book he came back to again and again during this time was Pascal's Pensées.

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The pair moved on. About 130 miles north of Albuquerque, Taos represented the home of D.H. Lawrence's widow Frieda. They did not care for these new surroundings either, with Auden quipping that "it's curious how beautiful scenery tends to attract the second rate." The diverse community of writers in the area only emphasized how much it would never be as engaging as New York.

Auden refused to shower during this period: he would only bathe himself in a proper bathtub. (As Stravinsky would put it, "He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked.") They were driven out of New Mexico, to the Grand Canyon. Auden concluded he could only stay for a moment or forever. With the kind of bizarre sincerity he became known for, he wrote that "the Boulder Dam gives one hope for the human race."

God returned to Auden's life around the time that Hitler entered it. In response, he began reading Kierkegard almost exclusively. Publicly he remained quiet about the war, admitted later that "All that could be said, had been said. There was no point in my saying it again, a little more hysterically." He registered for the draft, applied for U.S. citizenship and moved to Brooklyn.

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Chester Kallman could always bring out Wystan's jealous side. It was not a great look for the older man. The lack of sexual chemistry between the two became a sticking point; Kallman wanted to fuck and be fucked as intensely as possible, and Auden could not begin to service his needs. "I don't think," Auden once said, "Browning was very good in bed."

It was equally destructive that Kallman seemed to delight in the jealousy his behavior inspired. This drove them apart for a time. Whenever Kallman quoted Hart Crane, Auden reacted like he had been slapped in the face. Auden took a teaching position at a small college in Michigan and then in Ann Arbor.

from a course on romanticism he taught at Swarthmore

After a miserable time at the puritanical Swarthmore, Auden returned briefly to Europe for the first time in six years in spring of 1945. Upon setting foot on English soil, he said, "My dear, I'm the first major poet to fly the Atlantic." He visited Italy and Germany, finding them both inadequate in different ways. He now felt the only place he could learn to improve as an artist was New York City.

He returned there later that year, moving into a studio apartment in Greenwich Village. This constituted his first time ever living alone, and there was never a moment when the place was anything but an absolute mess. There he composed his new book.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Jack Reacher.

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