Bruce Boyer’s Comfort Rearranged

“Interestingly, the insanity of the moment is guys who wear their tailored clothes much too tight. All those constricting little shiny suits that the Italian fashion herd has been pushing. Most of these guys look like they were poured into their clothes and forgot to say when. They look uncomfortable and make those of us who have to look at them uncomfortable. I think tailored clothes should have good shape, but be comfortable. I would never sacrifice comfort for fashion. But that’s what fashion is, isn’t it? Something so ridiculous, it’s got to be changed every season.””

---G. Bruce Boyer, cited on The Articles of Style blogspot

 

 

Jeremy over at Blamo! just reran his interview with the great Bruce Boyer.  This is easily my favorite episode of his downright wonderful podcast: Jeremy’s ingenuous admiration is complemented by Boyer’s unaffected manners and inveterate decency. Both are easy to like.

 

I too admire Boyer’s work on so many levels: his integrity matches his insight, his wit and personal story convey the ease with which the man lives in his own skin.  And no matter what we are wearing on the outside, there’s nothing harder than living in your own skin.  If you’re lucky to live long enough you find out that no matter how well the exterior vestment is worn, it may be sheltering lifetimes of interior discomfiture.  This is no mere academic point.  We are complicated beings no matter how simply, even elegantly, we wear our story.

 

I like when Boyer talked about his academic past, his love of learning and of teaching and how he realized he was not cut out for the isolation and tedium of research. In the humanities (and unlike in the sciences where such research is invariably collaborative and collective), research is almost always solitary, even lonesome.  While you don’t have to like that to be successful (I hung around for tenure and then some…), you do have to lack the gene of free will for choosing otherwise.

I wanted the solitude without wanting the profession but short of monastic vocation or retreat to a cabin without running water or electricity somewhere near Lincoln, Montana, it was plain to me that I could not make a living selling my ideas in writing.  I had no means, so I needed the job.  I would spent the majority of my working life not writing for Town and Country or other estimable publications but rather for unreadable academic journals, publish with vanity University presses that idealize scholarship for its intrinsic worth.

Teaching is more honest, as Boyer understood, at least insofar as literacy invites shared humanity.  What Boyer chose for himself I not only applaud but obviously envy.  Even when you know your style, fit is no simple matter.  As a misfit academic, I have had the kind of success one would expect from a profession that rarely proffers much commendable style.

 

Now back to the other kind of fit.

 

I share Boyer’s disdain for things too tight, as if the suit wears the man.  But in truth the suit often does wear the man.  The all too tight, too slim, too short hems may tell us little about an individual’s story---men who care about their appearance will attend to the statement made but are just as likely to conform to current expectations.  But these fits are surely a sign of the times.

It may be nearly 20 years since Craig’s Bond made his statement, but we are now suited to a world so taut around the soul that recent trends to wide or looser are more projection than representation.  Easier fits now current are statements of hope.  More about that soon.

 

Outside high fashion, always more intent on the sale than the statement’s truth, and the immoveable, one might say obdurate-in-a-good way but insensate traditions of Ivy and Savile Row, we are witness to a world inside out: those who are paying attention to their choices are dressed in flexed (with a touch of stretch) uncertainty about its prospects, invariably too tight but claiming otherwise, offering up statements attempting reconciliation with a world that burns and refuses truce.  Sometimes we must, as Havel put it, live as if because reality is just too hard. Is that even disputable?

 

Boyer is right that we become more uncomfortable looking at the uncomfortable.  He disapproves in both form and content.  But perhaps that’s the good news being made awkwardly palpable.  I would love a life more tailored to ease but at present that doesn’t seem to be on offer---not socially, politically, or internally.  I’m just a few years younger than Boyer, and doing my erstwhile best to avoid cynical, grumpy old man-ness with the obvious verism that Boyer makes every day apparent.

 

But when I see the historical icons of style wearing it well, I’m inclined to think this a façade, not of insincerity or pretension but as a garment concealing painful, baffling truths, most as unsolvable as they are legitimate.

 

I don’t presume to know the inner life of Astaire or whether Gene Kelly was as happy as he always seemed to be, but if their inner life was as secure in ease as their appearance then I can only revere, I feel no sympatico.  None of my projection of askance diminishes Boyer’s unaffected elegance much less suggests he is dissimulating either in his advocacy for comfort or in the ample measures of self-evident aplomb he exhibits. But I would suggest he is more the Plationist, albeit with pragmatic and genuine values, an example of the style maven who wants and wishes to make the world a better place by sheer dint of bearing and carriage.  I have no doubt he knows life is hard, gets harder, then worse, all the while demanding cheerful disposition because the alternative is rueful.

 

Boyer isn’t so much concealing his pain with his effortless groove as he is shaping an archetype and attaining the unattainable.  His is a hope for when there still is hope, which is more realistically not the meaning of hope at all.  Hope is what we need when possibility has run out, when hope is all that is left.  Chesterton made this point brilliantly. This is the true faith of true believers, it requires assent to supernaturalism, with or without the claim, and once again I find myself on the outs.

What I think I share with Bruce is that he still believes in possibilities.  I might suggest his quest for comfort is achievable without sacrificing the whole of truth but that I am personally skeptical, perhaps incapable of locating such optimism inside myself.  The better we know ourselves, the more likely we are to remember what remains unfinished and non-negotiable.

 

Thus, I remain suspicious of any man who prearranges for comfort or prioritizes contentment.  Boyer makes my case suspect of itself, of course, since he is so very good at building the paradigm of vindicated ease, but I’ve built my mesa on disquiet, albeit an equally fictitious perspective apposing order and entropy.  I need a personal demilitarized zone to address the conflicts I deem irreconcilable: what we can repair or fix about ourselves is a worthy task, but it does not diminish the residuum.

 

What I wear on the outside both armors me from the world and disguises inner experiences so as not to burden or annoy my friends with maddening profusions of odious indulgence.  The inner leavings that cannot be consumed or digested Sanskrit calls ucchista and can be offered only to the ruminate soul for further assimilation and excretion.

 

To think the undertaking of self-reflection resolves is a failure to recognize that resolution is method, not fulfilled unravelment.  Since nirvana, which literally means “windless,” is not a state known to any breathing, at least by definition, the promise of enlightened relief as ultimacy is but another externalizing reverie.  That may be something we want or claim but that’s also as far as it may go.  I’m not calling the Buddha a liar so much as calling dibs on his soothing ulitimacy for the consolation it suggests to face the inevitable.

 

As we learn to withstand the maze of this earthly affair, the obvious point---no gets out alive---reminds us only to live.  I persist in the pursuit of style not because I want a comfortable life but because I will never have one.  (How does one share a world with those who can nominate the likes of Trump for the presidency of the United States? Is that who we are?  Well, at least half of us.  How is that not pathetic, to say nothing of utterly vulgar style?)

 

The point of honest style, at least in my rearrangement, is to wear the truth of discomfort as if, to stave off the worst sardonic and caustic effects of embitterment and acerbic complaint.  It is to play seriously with a serious desire to play, to do things that replace the hard work of living with the resolve that there is more than work. I don’t want to work that hard, at least not anymore: not at marriage nor career, or for that matter anything.  I still  have to work but I want something playful (sure as well as sober, pragmatic, easy) that just makes me feel better.

 

Style does that, it makes you feel better: in clothes, in words, in music, wherever play makes the difference we need.  We don’t solve work problems at a funeral, we call for poetry with style.  What appears if that process of style-filled play is successful can be serious and funny because both are needed and both are true (and because only true things are funny and while all serious things are true, not all serious things are funny.  Got that?)  

 

Of course, it is best to concede to gloom privately lest we bore. But that doesn’t make happiness less overrated nor comfort less is its balm.  We lotion ourselves with emotional sunscreen because the shadow burns until age deprives us the capacities of self-reflection.  And that’s if we are lucky to live so long.

 

Don’t mistake me: comfort is an ointment that well-applied reconditions the soul as if it were hungry leather. It’s good to horse bristle brush vigorously enough to bring out what’s packed inside but it is patina we must seek, not restoration.  Life doesn’t let us tear down to the welt to resole without dealing with original materials.  The soul takes all the consequences of wear, no matter how well we resole over time.

 

Crystallized wisdom that comes with age is no longer as fluid as our youthful creativities and neither is it necessarily buoyant, much less weightless.  The Japanese mono no aware makes the point: there is a pathos of things that demands empathy, eschews pathetic self-indulgence, tastes of the mujō, the impermanence of things, and insists that our transience can eventuate in something more wistful, mournful but not nostalgic---there is no going back and what lies ahead is the redolent fuse of mortality.

 

David Brooks and Arthur C. Brooks have both been writing on these themes for the past few years in different ways: David with a wearying moralism, which may well reflect his own need to make amends for years of genuflecting at the altar of the contemptible William F. Buckley.  Arthur is a Catholic neo-Buddhist, at least in ethos, since he is determined to align the values of anitya (impermanence), duhkha (suffering), and anatman (selflessness) with that irritating certainty that “happiness” is life’s true purpose.  He may rejoice that his reward will be great in heaven, but I doubt he knows that any more than the rest of us.  What we know is often not what we claim to know.

 

To their relative credit, I think both Brooks’ see the moral vacuity and reductive transactionalism of our time; they see the value of truth when “alternative facts” and conspiracy are the salve half the electorate uses to inflict their cruel, religiously-authorized, vile dictates on the majority.  They desperately pursue the graceful determination to live with shared humanity, believing in that possibility without the slightest doubt it could happen.  That’s their mistake.  Too much certainty.  It’s fascinating to see former right-wingers attempt their penance with literary aplomb while owning up to so little of their past.  But who would be surprised by their need for certainty.

 

All this somehow brings me back to Bruce Boyer’s philosophy of style, Jeremy’s jaunty and good-natured interview, and the possibility that there is an alternative, a rearrangement that does not deny good style but reframes its purpose.  For my part, style’s purpose is to animate the soul not to comfort but to the shape of truth.

When you wear things well, it suits your shape, literally.  There is a you emerging that successfully conceals the contradictions and discrepancies that lie within.  Concealment becomes revelation because good style does not tell all.  All is too much and more than can be said, while having no style proves inadequate and a denial of possibilities.  There may be no hope for there to be hope but living in further possibilities is worth the trouble.