Jane and I have been reading Titan, the monumental and mesmerizing biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow.
By reading I mean listening to. Reading is a solitary, exclusive, irregular, in my case contemplative activity I can only perform alone at my own pace: a meandering in the wilderness of my unknowing: the commencement of meditation. Where, in relation to these pages, do I find myself? I could never join a book club, reading assigned texts on a prescribed schedule, subordinating my interests to those of the collective: my ego would go on strike. My fixation is self-definition, not to exult or exonerate, but to explain. The biographer and autobiographer occupy the antipodes of egoism. The best biographers aspire to the invisibility of a plate-glass window, through which passersby gaze as if the window weren’t there. The autobiographer, like the obstreperous tot who keeps raising his hand in kindergarten, wants you to focus on him, him, to the exclusion of his classmates. “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well,” grinned Thoreau, that epitome of autobiographers. These opposites in approach may end up moral twins, both agog at the vastness of their ignorance, humbled by their imperception: think hard enough in any direction and you arrive at a repudiation of pride. The biographer looks outward, like a scientist, the autobiographer inward, like a penitent, each surprised.
Chernow is a great biographer, whether today’s greatest I couldn’t say, I know too little of the field. He has limned six oversized Americans so far (J.P. Morgan, the Warburg banking clan, George Washington, Ulysses Grant, Alexander Hamilton, and Rockefeller); may he live forever to vivify our national pantheon. One emerges from Chernow’s portrayals deeply familiar with their subject and clueless about their portraitist. How on earth, I gawk, who strives to arrest your interest with every sentence, every syllable even.
Listening to a book is a sociable activity, like watching a movie together. Jane and I do it in the car. Since we drive together intermittently, a fat book can cast its glow on an epoch. We are coming to the close of our Titan epoch, with a sigh.
John D. Rockefeller and I occupy the same extreme of the egoism spectrum. In Chernow’s telling, the world’s richest man was an obsessive self-fabulist, forcing his facts to fit his glowing vision of himself. Behind his unfailingly generous and modest demeanor schemed a ruthless tyrant, insistent on having his way. He reminds me of the Emperor Augustus, who likewise ruled absolutely without seeming to (“Who? Me?).
Perhaps the biggest surprise of Chernow’s compulsively readable account was Rockefeller’s antagonism to capitalism. The world’s foremost capitalist sought to replace capitalism with totalitarian control, a “trust” insulated from consumer or competitive complications, impossible to trust. The self-made man wanted to slam the door behind him, reducing his associates and relations to the condition of minions, imagining his fortune the result of his genius, never luck.
We see the same aw-shucks hubris among today’s plutocrats. Masquerading as people of the people, they seek to replace messy democracy with a “dictator for a day,” who will lower their taxes and reallocate wealth from the many to the few. Trust us, they insist – with fulminous sincerity – to do what is right for all (meaning, right for me). That any paycheck-dependent American could trust Trump dumbfounds me. Of course Elon Musk deserves his $56 billion pay package! Of course the obscenely rich should keep getting richer!
Such stupidity does not deserve democracy. But we’ve got to keep trying.