Hard Work & The Chieftain
What J.D. Vance has in common with my late father
I watched the movie version of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy on Sunday night (it’s out on Tuesday on Netflix). It was a surprise to me, because it was much better than advance reviews had led me to believe. In fact, I had dreaded watching it, because I’m such a fan of the book, and J.D. is a personal friend. But it’s not a bad movie at all, though it cannot be other than disappointing to those who loved the 2016 book as much as I did. Ron Howard’s movie took all of the moral and political complexity out of the movie version, playing it as straight melodrama. The characters are fairly one-dimensional, which is not at all how they are in the book.
The movie avoids drawing one of the sharp points that J.D. Vance made in the book: that the working-class white culture from which he comes is often self-sabotaging. He wrote in that 2016 memoir:
Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During my junior year of high school, our neighbor Pattie called her landlord to report a leaky roof. The landlord arrived and found Pattie topless, stoned, and unconscious on her living room couch. Upstairs the bathtub was overflowing — hence, the leaking roof. Pattie had apparently drawn herself a bath, taken a few prescription painkillers, and passed out. The top floor of her home and many of her family’s possessions were ruined. This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.
This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears — when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity — there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.
Vance wasn’t sentimental about any of this because he had lived it, through his mother’s drug addiction and multiple husbands and boyfriends. Part of what made his book so memorable was his willingness to speak with bluntness about these ugly facts of life. Yet he also found a lot to admire, and to love, in his people and their culture. The tension in the book is also the tension within its author: that the people he loves, his people, have unusual strengths that are also fatal weaknesses. The book is painfully unsentimental, even though its author clearly loves the people from whom he came — and that gives the memoir such insight and power.
It’s interesting to compare Hillbilly Elegy to a similar mega-selling book of the era, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me, a memoir of growing up working-class and black in Baltimore. Coates had a difficult and violent childhood, like Vance, but it’s interesting to see how Coates avoids blaming his own people for having a part, however small, in perpetuating their own plight. His narrative denies his people something that Vance will not withhold from his people: moral agency, and moral responsibility. Interestingly, My Grandfather’s Son, the arresting memoir that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote about being raised by Myers Anderson, his hard-working, pitiless grandfather falls somewhere between the two, but definitely sides with the irreplaceable value of hard work and personal discipline.
To what extent we must bear responsibility for our condition, and for changing it, is something I think about a lot, and can never get settled in my mind. Longtime readers know that my folks grew up in rural Depression-era poverty. My late father, for example, used outhouses until he was a senior in high school, and installed plumbing in his family’s modest home in Starhill, the rural community in West Feliciana Parish. It is hard for me to overstate how much I admired my Dad. Though he had a chip on his shoulder about rich people — or people he thought were rich because they seemed fancy — my father treated work like the measure of a man’s character. He carried a grudge against rich people because he assumed that they didn’t do honest work for their money. (My late sister inherited this bad habit: after she died, someone — one of my parents, I think — let slip that she did not understand how I made good money by writing, instead of doing real work.) Though that distorted my father’s understanding, his belief in the dignity of labor made a huge impression on me. The greatest burden for him in his final years, when he was suffering from physical infirmity, was living with the knowledge that he had to depend on others to do what he used to be able to do for himself.
The worst thing a person could be, according to my father, was lazy. “No-count,” he called people like that. The kind of people that J.D. Vance wrote about were not at all hard to find around us. My dad, though college-educated (he hated every second of his four years in school), had a working man’s mistrust of the rich, and assumed that the world was set up to disfavor people like him. But more than that, he truly despised men who carried themselves without dignity, who wouldn’t take care of their children, and who lived in squalor. Note this distinction: for my dad, who grew up poor, there was a big difference between poverty and squalor. I didn’t appreciate until I was much older how fragile things must have been for my father and his family in the Depression. His dad was away from home most of the time doing work and sending his paycheck back to my grandmother, who was taking care of two small boys and her mother-in-law in a small cottage in the country. They had to develop moral discipline, because there was no choice.
Daddy could be a hard-ass, but that came from a childhood in which nobody was at liberty to indulge in self-pity. He told me that many a night, the only meat him, his brother, his mother and grandmother had to eat was the squirrels he and his brother had killed in the woods behind the house that day. This wasn’t some 19th-century childhood. This is how my dad grew up. This is how a lot of folks back then grew up. Not many years ago, I finally realized why we ate a lot of beef when I was a kid: because even though my mom was a school bus driver and my dad a civil servant, people at our income level could afford it. It wasn’t squirrel.
I was watching tonight the episode of The Crown (Season Four) in which a working-class Londoner breaks in to Buckingham Palace and laments to the Queen, in her bedroom, how hard Margaret Thatcher has made life for people like him. (In truth, there was no conversation between Fagan and the monarch, and he didn’t enter the palace for political reasons, but because he was mentally unstable.) Later, Mrs. Thatcher says — maybe it’s from a speech, or maybe it’s from her audience with the Queen — that her father, a shopkeeper and active Methodist, held old-fashioned Victorian values about the dignity of work and personal moral responsibility. I’ve been watching tonight old clips from Thatcher interviews, and most everything she says could have come out of the mouth of my father, who was raised Methodist.
In this space, I don’t want to get into the role of personal morality versus economic and social structures regarding generational poverty. I save this newsletter for more personal reflections. I will say, though, that I believe it is not possible to create a system so perfect that no one will ever have to be good. T.S. Eliot first phrased it something like that, but it captures the deep skepticism my father had towards schemes that he considered “taking the easy way out” — a killer phrase for him; if he deemed a proposed course of action to be that, it was as good as dead in his eyes. Daddy thought life was supposed to be hard, in the sense that it was filled with difficult choices, and the necessity to work. He was not against making work easier. He invented and then constructed by himself a hydraulic wood splitter to make it easier to bring in enough firewood for the winter. No more using an axe! He did that with his own ingenuity.
I helped him all the time as a little boy with that wood splitter, and he lived long enough for his grandson, my son Lucas, to split wood with him on the same device, which was still working nearly four decades later. But did that magical machine give my father more leisure time? No — and he wouldn’t have had it do so. He stored up more wood, and split more wood for people who needed it. You made yourself useful, if you had any character. My mom was telling me the other day, on what would have been his 86th birthday, how much she misses him. She said some of the best times they had was driving down country roads during hurricanes, before they had us kids, Daddy with a chainsaw on the seat between them, looking for trees downed over roads. The roads needed to be open, didn’t they? He was a strong man who had a chainsaw. Sitting at home while the storm raged seemed like a waste of time to my Dad. There was work to be done. My dad was never wealthy, but had he been a millionaire a hundred times over in his life, he would never have stopped working, nor would he have lived anywhere other than the little red brick house he helped build with his bare hands. That was him.
People like to remark to me that they don’t understand how I write so much. I like to joke that it’s because I have no life. The truth is — and I’ve only very recently realized this — I take after my dad. He never understood what I do as real work, but God knows I don’t hold that against him. But I do work at this constantly. I will only stop writing when I can no longer string sentences together. It’s what I do. I feel never more alive than when I’m writing. My wife developed the habit of noticing in social gatherings when I’m writing in my head, and coming over to whisper in my ear to stop it, to pay attention to where I am. Daddy and I were very different men, but we both share a profound devotion to our work, and see it as to a great extent defining who we are.
When I think of my dad these days, the primary emotion — the overwhelming emotion, to be honest — is one of gratitude. I feel the same way towards my mother, but there has never been much drama between her and me. Not so with Daddy, as my readers know. It is a wonder to my middle-aged eyes to look back at all the obstacles he faced, raising himself out of poverty, and give his kids a more stable life than he had as a boy. He did it with a tireless work ethic, and a profound sense of self-discipline as a requirement of living honorably. He gave me the same values. There’s a big difference between my dad and me, though — something that Daddy and J.D. Vance had in common (and how sorry I am that he didn’t live long enough to read Hillbilly Elegy). Let me explain.
I was raised in lower middle class stability. I only knew poverty because there were no small number of poor people in our parish. But it didn’t touch me like it touched both my parents in their childhoods. So for me, it’s not hard to allow a guilty conscience to sentimentalize poor people, of whatever race. This is something that I have observed manifest much more strongly in educated people the farther they get from actual lived poverty.
My dad, despite his prejudices against wealthy people, never, ever sentimentalized the poor. Despite his college degree, and despite his insistence that my sister and I work hard and get good grades, my father was a man of the working class. All his life regretted having done his mother’s bidding and gone to college instead of into the paper mill or the chemical plant, like most of his friends, who made more money at that than he did working for the state as a health inspector. He came from the working poor, and in his job as the chief state health officer in a relatively poor parish, in a poor state, he dealt with the effects of poverty almost every day. What Daddy saw is that the line between good and evil does not pass between social classes, but, to steal a phrase from Solzhenitsyn, down the middle of every human heart. A working man who was trying to do right could have no better friend or champion than my father; a rich man who was trying to do wrong had no fiercer foe (I remember as a child hearing him rage telling my mom about a powerful man who tried to bribe him to pass inspection; the idea that a man would stoop so low as to do that, and to think that he, my father, was on the same moral level as a bribe-giver — well, it made him want to fight). I recall coming home from college, full of liberalism, and trying to lecture him about his political errors. He just laughed at me, which pissed me off; the memory of how small he made me feel then keeps me from reacting to my own college-age son the same way when I believe he has gotten out over his skis on politics.
But I now understand why my dad laughed at me. To me and my college set, poor people, especially poor black people, were little more than an abstraction. They were part of my dad’s life, every day, and always had been. He had come from them. He knew their strengths and their weaknesses — and he was not going to let anybody off the hook, no matter how much or how little money they had, if they didn’t want to work or behave honorably. He compelled me to go to work for him when I acquired a driver’s license at age 15, as a garbage man for Dreher’s Trailer Park. Twice a week I had to sling trash from the trailers into the back of my old blue Chevy pick-up, and putt-putt into town to unload it at the town dump. Imagine the affront to my fragile teenage dignity! He could see me turn my nose up at being a garbageman, and told me to suck it up, that any work done honestly, and that doesn’t harm people, is meaningful. “And I’m not about to let you sit in the house on your ass,” he said. Oh, I couldn’t stand him for that! Today, I honor his memory for it. Like I said, he gave me so much.
Daddy was no political economist, and he absolutely had his blind spots, on politics and other matters. But I feel confident saying that for him, a just world was one in which a man has both the opportunity to work, and to be paid fairly for it. From reading J.D. Vance — both his book and his journalism — I think he sees the world in the same way, and he believes that the globalized economy has made this much harder for Americans who make their livings with their backs. But I know from reading Hillbilly Elegy that J.D. knows what my dad knew: that there are people in this world who are no-count, and who will always be poor no matter what because, in my dad’s phrase to deride the lazy, “they don’t want to hit a lick at a snake.”
How I wish Daddy had lived, and had been able to read Hillbilly Elegy, and talk to me about its lessons, and how they compare with the things he had learned over the years. He hero-worshiped his mother, who kept the family together while his dad was on the road working, but I don’t know if he was fully conscious of how much the sense of moral purpose and structure he had came from her. He might well have been, but just. never talked about it that way. For my Dad, the dignity of work and the responsibility to behave honorably were like the natural law. He genuinely could not understand why anyone would be lazy, either physically or morally. He despised it. What you see in J.D. Vance’s work, though, is how very difficult it is to perceive the underlying order of the world when all around you is chaos.
I would have loved to have asked my dad why it was that he internalized moral structure and purpose, despite their material poverty, and despite the fact that there were poor people around him growing up who did not. I think it probably has to do with his mother’s Methodism. I’ll leave this topic with this funny story my dad told about his childhood.
Once my dad, as a little boy, fell and broke his arm. His mom and dad loaded him into the family sedan, and set off for St. Francisville, five miles away up Highway 61. Not far from their house, they saw a slatternly woman from a not-respectable family standing on the shoulder, trying to hitch a ride to town. My grandfather pulled over to offer her a ride, which she accepted. Grandfather dropped the woman off, then motored over to the doctor’s office.
According to my dad, from the moment the passenger exited the vehicle, my grandmother began ripping the hide off my grandfather.
“Murphy, how dare you pick up that whore and give her a ride to town when your own son is in the back seat with a broken arm?!”
“Now Lorena, you know she’s our neighbor, and —”
“Don’t you ‘now, Lorena’ me! That child’s arm is broken, but you found it in you to give that so-and-so a ride into town!”
“But honey…”
Daddy, despite his broken arm, let himself out of the car and padded into the doctor’s office, his mother and father still squabbling in the car.
Here’s me, my dad, and my mom, Christmas 2013:
My son Lucas reminds me so much of my father. That boy loves to work — hard physical work. He comes alive when he’s sweating. And he loves to help people. If he weren’t paid, he would still work, as long as someone deserving was benefiting. Lucas recently landed a weekend part-time job working at a restaurant. After two weekends on the job, the owners gave Lucas a raise because he was hustling so hard, and they sent word to his mother and me that they wanted to shake our hands for raising such a fine, hard-working young man. You’d better believe our hearts were bursting to hear that. I like to think that my dad can see him, and delights in his grandson’s love of labor.
This past Sunday, when Lucas went to church, he picked up a pledge card to commit to tithing in 2021. This surprised his mother and me. We tithe to the church out of our income, as a family offering, but it never occurred to us that our kids would tithe. But Lucas insisted that if he’s making money, then he has a duty to tithe from it to support his parish. This was his own idea. He inspired his brother, who makes money from a student job at college, to commit to doing the same. I am so proud!
A reader e-mails:
Your recent newsletters have been covering topics that I've been thinking about for many years and particularly for the last several months, so that reading them feels like experiencing a long series of Jungian synchronicities.
My husband and I are interested in archaeology and have watched many videos on the subject, and read stacks of books. We were always surprised to find people so knowledgeable about some aspects of the past but who were clueless about the way in which people had actually experienced it, to the extent of being unaware that there could be any difference between their perceptions and ours. They invariably seemed to think our fairly remote ancestors thought as we did and saw through our eyes, except that they were ignorant about science and weighed down with superstition. I heard and read many variations of "they didn't understand geology so they attributed volcanic activity to imaginary gods, but if we could explain the science to them, they would accept it and cast off their nonsensical beliefs."
Since the first time I ever saw ancient art, I've instinctively felt that the people who made it saw the world in ways that were fundamentally different from ours, not just different in terms of knowledge or apparent sophistication. Years ago, I read the famous paper by Thomas Nagel, "What is it Like to be a Bat?" and felt that, in trying to understand the worldview of people in the remote past, we were in the same position as when we try to understand a bat's view of the world. Nagel argued that we could imagine what it is like to eat insects, fly, hang upside down, but we couldn't enter into the mindset of a bat. It seems to me that we've reached a point where we are so different from earlier humans that we run into the same problem as trying to adopt the view of a bat without the brain, experience, and physiology of a bat; we might actually be that different from our ancestors.
The only place I've ever seen this acknowledged was in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, a book that made a great impression on me at the time. I didn't think it was the final word by any means, just perhaps the first word and the beginning of a realization. I haven't seen his argument addressed in any meaningful way since then (except for scornful, dismissive, materialist mockeries), but it's a conversation I've hoped other, smarter people, would have. Your recent conversations have decidedly been traversing this territory.
Has God given us a mental door to Him that we've papered over, nailed shut, forgotten — except for a few for whom it is opened? Was everyone, in Biblical times, like Reuben?
Thanks for tackling a subject most are leery of, and giving me fresh material for thought.
Definitely pick up The Master And His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. I will have more to post from his great book in tomorrow night’s newsletter. I intended to get into it in tonight’s, but went down the rabbit hole of Hillbilly Elegy and my father. It’s so, so easy for me to prattle on when the subject is my dad. I’m just about at the end of Kristin Lavransdatter, set in medieval Norway. The characters in the novel talk of certain men of the time as of having the bearing of a “chieftain.” That was my dad: a chieftain. Hard work, physical courage, and wise counsel: respecting those qualities in him was why other men gathered around my father all the time. I wish he were still here today. I talk to him sometimes, asking him to pray for me, and to help me figure out what to do. I knew it would be like this when he died. If God, in His mercy, grants us both to meet again in heaven, what a glorious reunion that will be, with all the brokenness within us and between us made whole.