[Corrections done 11/27, 11/29, and 11/30/12.]
One of the mixed-feelings luxuries of being a writer over many years is that, after you have worked on something into which you’ve poured your present-day heart, well-crafted intellectual angles, long retrospect, and careful sorting out of old feelings, you still may wonder if you were a little harsh (on someone or something that is a part of the story), or a little precipitous….
One of the mixed-feelings luxuries of being a writer over many years is that, after you have worked on something into which you’ve poured your present-day heart, well-crafted intellectual angles, long retrospect, and careful sorting out of old feelings, you still may wonder if you were a little harsh (on someone or something that is a part of the story), or a little precipitous….
I am not an impulsive writer, and even among my blog entries that may seem to you like a rant, the important thing to remember is that any entry I do that is of real substance, not least on subjects that have aroused anger in me over years, has been crafted in a cauldron of trying to find a way to articulate a difficult matter where balance—intellectual and emotional—is crucial.
In particular, I wondered whether, with my Skoder entry on November 21, and with the associated entries on my “Mountain Bear” blog, I had been too harsh on NR, the boss I had at a newspaper job.
One important point: There is no way to talk about Skoder in particular without seeming to have the scorn knob turned up high, continuously. And I should add that this tone is far more suited to Skoder (due to her long-term behavior, among many other people) than to NR (due to her short-term behavior, with me).
Some food for thought at a cornucopia-like dinner table
On Thanksgiving day, I thought about the NR/tone issue a fair amount, and my emotions seemed inflamed enough that I knew I had to do (on my blog) some qualifying, reconsidering, etc. (I think that my drinking of wine that day, and more ongoing frayed nerves, helped condition this mood, artificially. And while the wine was screw-top, it wasn’t horsepiss!) A conversation with an elderly in-law relative at a dinner table in New York, while in general she evinced no obvious familiarity with my blog, led to her commenting on some old anecdote (from maybe 60 years ago) where an elder (relative to her) taught her the meaning (as she posed it) of respect for elders.
In a way, for me to hear this old story (about an old issue of manners), which seemed on its face like a “lesson from an old fogey” (i.e., as how the relative portrayed it--as her having heard it from what arguably she considered an old fogey 60 years before), and for me to (“accordingly”) feel bad about my rhetorical manner related to NR, seemed a little bit of short-circuiting of my mentality regarding writing on a difficult topic (while there might have been some suitable enough guilt mixed in). The short-circuiting, for its part, seemed like too much, simple-perspective guilt tied to a piece of work I had wrestled with, with care, for some time.
One option in my mind—which could have shaped a possible response I could have given if someone criticized my blog to my face, outright (and which I have not had cause to exercise, thank goodness)—was a sort of “aloof writer’s” self-justification, which would have been not terribly different from what you see here, but cruder, and due to the spontaneity of social circumstances, may have been not terribly well thought out. (You could call this the “New Yorker writer” sort of response: “Art stays above the fray,” etc.)
Another angle on this is that, for years (yes, years), I helped shaped my inner debate on how to present the 1998 NR/Skoder story amid occasionally picking up a copy of the Suburban Trends in a library and looking at NR’s column that always appeared in the Wednesday issue. Such a nice old woman, talking good-naturedly about trivial stuff; and we had good times, a recollection that was implicit in my “catching up.” (Her columns have long tended to seem with their offhand and tiny-scope style like blog entries, even if written by someone who obviously had developed as a journalist before there were blogs.)
That gets at part of the conundrum with NR: even when I worked with her in the office, she could be as nice as pie most of the time, but rather shockingly high-handed and mean at other times (and in highly isolated ways). If this meanness had happened only once or twice, it might have been something to brush off, but especially in 1999, it became a troubling habit of hers—with me, but also in a sense with others.
Today, she must be at least 80. (And she’s still working!) So, if she saw my November 21 blog entry on the Skoder stuff, how might she react? And do I care?—yes, I do.
But I also care to make clear why I present this story with as much vinegar as it has.
Hard tone inevitable in an account of violence
Yet another angle to consider this problem of tone is this: In recently editing the actual sections of First Love that appear in the “Mountain Bear” blog, I was sometimes struck by how much they seemed expressive of billowing indignation. They seemed to express so much of my raw emotions from 1998-2001 as tied to their content, not how I feel now (at least about many aspects of the experience I had at NJN as I might tend to review today).
But just as quickly, I realize that in talking about this matter of old violence, in being as succinct about a messy situation as the story would allow, it can’t help but sound indignant, even raging at times. That’s what violence means. You can’t pussyfoot around with a story of violence.
If you read Robert Conquest’s excellent account of the Stalinist purges, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990), or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, there is a lively emotion—a seeming florid rhetorical slant—that comes with these books’ accounts. A sort of bloody-minded or rich-spirited humor comes up, and/or a sense of indignation; some of what the books relate seem like a satire of awful behavior. The humor, or sense of outrage, is a human correlate of telling these stories as responsibly as possible.
My own smaller story on smaller matters isn’t too different in this regard. As I said above, there is no way to talk about Skoder in particular without seeming to have the scorn button turned up high, continuously. And I should add that this tone is far more suited to Skoder (due to her long-term behavior, among many others) than to NR (due to her short-term behavior, with me).
Holding NR relatively blameless
Which helps us to mitigate any sense of how I speak about NR. I never meant to imply that NR was as bad as Skoder was in 1998. I knew NR as a coworker, and worked with her peaceably, much longer than I did the same with Skoder (which latter was only about six weeks in 1989, and while I have observed Skoder in action as a community figure for many more years than I had worked with NR). But a striking part of this story is how, in winter 1998, NR went right along with Skoder’s “conveyed sense of outrage”—which was at least as much untoward bluster as it was rooted in any sane sense of morality—in NR’s forbidding me to do very much regarding Skoder than I had already done in February 1998. And it wasn’t as if NR was acting one time on impulse with this; she reinforced the message with a number of versions, making sure I got her point.
And I’ve long thought—I am sure—she was completely wrong in this. And this wasn’t just with respect to acting on a board I was leaving anyway. It was in forbidding me even to feel as if I had the freedom to defend my reputation in town in 1998, via whatever means I was used to employing responsibly as a community member in the past. This meant a sort of harm to me that lasted for quite some time. On the one hand, I knew that many people in Vernon “politics” came to bad ends, whether deserved or not. But on the other hand, one always wants to leave a few years of honorable service on better terms than a half-hidden flogging in a grossly unprofessional free-for-all.
NR could be excused to the extent that she was thrown into some kind of illusion about what was going on with the Environmental Commission in early 1998 by the intensity and extent of Skoder’s bluster, which has been in evidence for years and with a range of people (and, of course, there is the element of how Skoder misused her role as a reporter, which, I should add, many people have been hoodwinked by: numerous people over years seemed to accept her as a valid reporter, with all her habitual ways of approaching local issues, when they didn’t [yet] have the solid wherewithal to see how she was so frequently unprofessional in this).
What has long remained with me as a lesson in this is actually something I’ve seen in far different circumstances at other employers: when one woman (in the Skoder role) employs a version of the “victim card,” even when she goes well over the top with her claims and tone, other people (almost in automatic hysterical accord) go right along with believing this, and accordingly turn on you (when you are the object of Skoder’s claims) with about as much ungrounded, headlong momentum as Skoder has created with her bluster.
If NR ever came to understand that this was part of the “mechanics” of what happened between me, Skoder, and her in February 1998, then I can willingly excuse her (NR). I don’t know if she ever did understand this. In fact, her behavior in early 1999 (which I have not yet addressed much) suggests not—and in its own right, as not directly linked to Skoder, it actually became an occasion for me to resign from that copy editing job of two and a half years.
Corroborating incidents
As I’ve also suggested (at the end of my November 21 entry), Skoder was even released from working for the NJN paper from which she posed her obstreperous issue in February 1998—but this didn’t happen until about 2001. And apparently it was a lieutenant who let her go. But all things considered, since I knew Skoder would eventually be the source of her own unmaking, this made all kinds of sense, and I knew it need not have been very much on the basis of my own “case I made” in 1998 that there were grounds for her to be let go in 2001; all I knew was that it was virtually inevitable, especially as the lieutenant who (as far as I know) did the releasing had a brain (which I definitely know) and would be able to see Skoder for what she was before long. I hope to look at this situation in more detail soon.
For now, I feel that my November 21 entry is probably as balanced as it needs to be—and the “Mountain Bear” entries probably are fair enough (especially as they were originally done in the “sanctum” of writing literature of a type that, far from cheeky or offhand blog entries, is generally meant for that kind of “airing grievances”—with an eye to some kind of reconciliation, or “edifying meaning”).
I will try to tweak the blog entries on this old 1998 mess in order to be fair, but will try not to overhaul things much in view of any sense of “untoward harsh tone” or the like. (By the way, I remember someone [pompously-in-retrospect] chiding me for my “tone” in reports or the like…this happened at the Marvin Center in the 1980s, but there was someone more recent, in publishing, maybe Cam at AAC [see my June 4 blog entry]…and I have to say that, today, I don’t recognize that sort of objection as valid, after all these years and all I’ve learned to deal with in the turbulent, occasionally-butting-heads work world. Consider me in general to present as appropriate a tone as is warranted, and assume that there could be a good bit more anger below the surface that I work in good faith to have the good graces not to treat you to.)
It’s tough enough trying to just get the basic facts of the 1998 story to be accessible. Whether I sound like I’m being tough on an elderly supervisor (NR), well,
(1) I’m trying to moderate the tone as reasonably as I can (given relevant facts), and
(2) NR’s downright abusive behaviors (of 1999 in particular) are something I have a hard time reconciling with her more usual “nice old woman” demeanor, other than to say that people who are given to be occasional bullies in pressured work situations do seem this contradictory way: sentimental softies a good part of the time, and a grossly invasive source of violence a tiny percentage of the time that nevertheless has serious consequences—in your work status, and in your emotions, sometimes for years to come.
