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My Many Selves Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 2006 My Many Selves Wayne C. Booth Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Cultural History Commons Recommended Citation Booth, W. C. (2006). My many selves: The quest for a plausible harmony. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. My Many Selves The Quest for a Plausible Harmony Wayne C. Booth My Many Selves My Many Selves The Quest for a Plausible Harmony Wayne C. Booth Utah State University Press Logan, Utah Copyright © 2006 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322–7800 www.usu.edu/usupreses Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Booth, Wayne C. My many selves : the quest for a plausible harmony / Wayne C. Booth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87421-633-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)-- ISBN 0-87421-631-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 0-87421-535-8 (e-book) 1. Booth, Wayne C. 2. Critics--United States--Biography. 3. Mormons--United States-- Biography. I. Title. PN75.B62A3 2006 809--dc22 2005031116 It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and for all that yield a plausible harmony.1 I have often asked myself how characteristics, seemingly irreconcilable, can exist in the same person. I have known crooks who were capable of self-sacrifi ce, sneak- thieves who were sweet-natured and harlots for whom it was a point of honour to give good value for money. —Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up [I would] portray myself entire and wholly naked. —Montaigne, Essays [Dorian Gray] used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very fl esh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray There are two minds with two distinct natures, one good, the other bad. They really are evil themselves when they entertain these evil doctrines. If there are as many contrary natures as there are wills in someone beset by indecision, there will be not two wills but many. —St. Augustine, Confessions I wonder if I will ever overcome my faults (lazyness, conceit, vague dishonesty, crudeness, etc.) to become a truly integrated individual. I fi nd myself very complex, psychologically, strange to say. —Wayne C., College Sophomore, April 1940 1. Emphasis added. Contents Preface ix Part I My Toughest “Self-Splits” and What Produced Them 1 1 A Devout Mormon Is Challenged by Rival Selves 3 2 A Pious Moralist Confronts a Cheater 33 3 The Cheerful Poser Comforts a Griever or, A Would-be Tough Guy Meets Grief and Conceals the Tears 49 4 My Many Selves Confront the Man Who Believes in LOVE 77 5 Ambition vs. Teaching for the Love of It 95 6 The Hypocritical Mormon Missionary Becomes a Skillful Masker, and Discovers “Hypocrisy-Upward” 11 7 7 The Puritan Preaches at the Luster While the Hypocrite Covers the Show 135 8 The Lover Becomes a Trapped Army Private 153 9 An Egalitarian Quarrels Scornfully with a Hypocritical Bourgeois 167 10 A College Dean Struggles to Escape 181 Part II The Splits Multiply—in Somewhat Less Torturous Form 197 11 The Quarrel between the Cheater and the Moralist Produces Gullible-Booth 199 12 A Wandering Generalist Longs to Be a True Scholar 209 13 A Would-be Novelist Mourns behind the Would-be Lover and Would-be Scholar 221 14 The Committed Father and Husband, as Lover, Shouts “For Shame!” at All the Other Selves 235 15 The Man of Peace Tries to Tame the Slugger 251 Interlude A Potpourri of Chapters I Refuse to Write (Let Alone Include) 263 Part III Aging, Religion, and—Surprise!— the Quest for a Plausible Harmony 269 16 The Old Fart Debates with a Bunch of Young Booths, While Posing as Younger Than 84 271 17 Harmony at Last? 289 Index 310 Preface Why, then, should I be concerned for human readers to hear my confes- sions? . What edifi cation do they hope to gain by this . ? They will take heart from my good traits, and sigh with sadness at my bad ones. —Bill Clinton, My Life Every autobiographer faces problems that no novelist faces: as I write, my actual story still runs on. How can any fi rst-person memoir present anything like a completed plot? It simply can’t, and I thus have chosen what might even be labeled an anthology format: a sequence of quarrels among my confl icting Selves. One major problem is that so much of what I fi nd interesting, even exciting, about my diverse, often warring Selves would leave many readers snoring. Even the “laundry-list” stuff that burdens my fi les reveals something interesting to me about my life. Why did I ever buy that expensive paper- weight (violating Skinfl int-Booth), or why did I save this lousy eleven-page draft of an essay (surrendering to my Vain Self)? Why on earth did I take X to dinner, when I’ve always been annoyed by him? (Well, Vain-Booth was hoping the nonfriend might do a review of my new book.) But why would anyone else ever want to read about that? Some critics do claim that even the driest records of “meaningless” facts—the sections I fi nd myself skipping when reading almost every other Life1—are meaningful. They even feel, as I sometimes do after reading Witt- genstein and other “ordinary-ists,” that the ordinary stuff is more important than the extraordinary. Here, however, I promise you that I will not record the list of the items my wife Phyllis handed me yesterday as I left for the grocery store. Nor the two items I forgot to purchase. Nor a list of my stack of unpublished, mostly uncompleted essays and books. But even as I reject the laundry lists, you and I will face throughout this book the fact that the actual life I’m reporting, if viewed as a mere chronology, is quite ordinary, uncolorful, undramatic—not quite the grabber that Hillary 1. By using the terms Life and Lives rather than autobiography or autobiographies, I have shortened this book by about twenty pages. ix x / My Many Selves and Bill Clinton’s stories have turned out to be. The boring fact is that I’ve never been physically abused, or awarded an Oscar, or had a spouse who cheated and was almost impeached. I’ve never been charged with rape or murder, or even with theft or cheating—fairly or unfairly. I lost no relatives in the Holocaust.2 Though I was in WWII as a “clerk-rifl eman,” I endured no combat and have only one cheap medal, for being an accurate rifl eman in training. I’ve never been president of anything, except the Modern Language Association for one year. Should I feel regret, as I absolutely do not, that (unlike what Gore Vidal boasts about in his Palimpsest) I’ve never screwed or been screwed by celebri- ties? Should I spend time lamenting that my only connection with prominent politicians was bumping into Jimmy Carter in an airport lounge, long after his presidency was over? Is there any way to turn fi fty-nine years of a happy marriage into a page-turner? Not on your life. Even the death of our son at age eighteen—for us the most shattering of all events—is of the “everyday” kind shared this minute by millions around the world: ordinary, though devastating. Besides, that was thirty-six years ago and provides no narrative climax. A recent ad for a new biography, The Scarlet Professor, tries to seduce readers with “Extraordinary Lives make great reading.” Right. But what’s extraordinary about mine? A straightforward chronological account would read like too many of my boyhood journal entries: August 25, 1935 (age 14½) Got up at 5:00 and delivered papers. Had breakfast, then went to Sunday School. Passed the Sacrement.3 Came home and had dinner. Great Grand- mother Hawkins ate with us. After dinner played with Kip [Young], Junior [Halliday,] and Curtis [Chipman—a cousin]. Had supper, then went to church. Just think of the difference between what I face here and what world- famous philosopher Bertrand Russell faced as he began his own three-volume Life. He and his publishers knew from word one that thousands, perhaps millions, of readers would welcome the books, even if, like me, they found themselves doing a lot of skipping. The work is full of his encounters with 2. I do have a son-in-law, David Izakowitz, whose parents experienced the horrors infl icted by Hitler and Stalin. His children, my grandchildren, would probably fi nd a Life about those lost ones more dramatic than mine. 3. I’ve abandoned using “sic” for the boy’s errors, though my computer keeps trying to cor- rect them without my approval. All bracketed entries are insertions; parentheses within the quotes are always the diarist’s.
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