How Then Should We Live?

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund De Waal. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 418 pp. $40.00 (the illustrated edition) ****

Crazy Rich Asians a film by Jon M. Chu. With Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Awkwafina. ****

Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.”

Ernest Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”

Fitzgerald was getting at something with his statement that Hemingway didn’t understand, or at least wasn’t acknowledging. Most human beings live life the way they do because they have to. “I’m workin’ this shit job because I got a wife and kids. There ain’t nothin’ else I can do.” Fitzgerald is talking about people who don’t face that situation. Poor people have the suffering of poor people, as Larry Rosenberg once said in a lecture. Rich people have the suffering of rich people.

(Nobody suffers like the poor, Charles Bukowski retorted somewhere or other, and that may be true. But everybody suffers.)

I’ve known a few truly wealthy people in my life. I was close friends for a while with one. If you can literally do anything you want with your life, that isn’t necessarily a good thing. The guy I knew never found work that fulfilled him. He fumbled around from one thing to another.

The people I’m examining in these works of art had a kind of wealth that is literally unimaginable. In the first scene of Crazy Rich Asians (spoiler alert! But it’s just the first scene), a Chinese woman encounters discrimination at a posh London hotel—she has a reservation, but they not only deny it, they won’t even let her use the house telephone—so she goes out to a phone booth in the pouring rain and calls her husband from a booth, and he buys the hotel. She walks back in and owns the place. And in the Ephrussi family of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (as recounted in The Hare with Amber Eyes), the eldest two sons felt compelled to go into the world of finance with their father, though they didn’t need to be especially good at it, but the third son could do anything he wanted. Nobody cared what he did. He became an art collector. That’s what he did with his life.

Were these people fulfilled and happy? Did they lead worthwhile lives? That’s the question I’m asking.

The plot of Crazy Rich Asians couldn’t be more conventional. A guy falls in love with a girl and takes her back to meet his family. They don’t entirely approve, for various reasons about her background. (It’s the old Dawn, go away I’m no good for you situation. Except it’s Don, not Dawn.) All kinds of misunderstandings and hurt feelings emerge. And then, at the very last minute . . . I won’t say what happens. I don’t want to spoil the excruciating suspense. But I’m sure you can guess, and you probably already have. This story has been told a million times. The whole reason we’re interested in it is that the man’s family, back in Singapore, is extraordinarily, colossally, unimaginably rich. They’re so rich that even rich people envy them. They’re like Jeff Bezos.[1]

The other thing about the movie is that it’s extremely well done. Everything about it, the direction, the acting, the way it shows us Singapore. I was entranced the entire time. It’s often hilariously funny, and includes a number of performers I wasn’t familiar with, including Awkwafina, who’s hilarious. I’d love to see more of her. But mostly I credit director John C. Wu, whom I’d never heard of. He’s taken material that could have been pure crap and turned it into, pardon the expression, a jewel. It’s well worth seeing.

The Hare with Amber Eyes is a different thing altogether. Ostensibly it’s about a collection of netsuke, small works of art—or craft—that were created in Japan and collected all over the world. Author Edmund De Waal, who is himself a potter, inherited this collection (which turns out to be extremely valuable) from his family, and traces back its entire history, who bought it, who it went to, how it was passed on. In doing that, he traced the history of his ancestors. And the history is fascinating.[2]

It also paints a strong contrast between two different ways of life. Netsuke were small ornaments in Japan; they might be at the end of a sash, for instance. The craftsmen who created them certainly weren’t rich, but they might spend months on a piece that then wouldn’t sell for much. They wanted to create something unique and beautiful, not make money. In contrast to that is Charles Ephrussi, who in the whim of a moment, when japonisme was all the rage in Paris, bought a collection of 264 of them, in one fell swoop. He didn’t have to think about it. He could buy whatever he wanted.

Charles was a rough contemporary of Proust, apparently knew Proust, and like the young Proust devoted his life to appreciating art and hanging out in salons. What did such people do all day? is the question, and the answer is, not one hell of a lot. Charles did do some writing,[3] and of course was buying a lot of other art. Years later, when some family members were being married in Vienna, he very generously donated the whole collection of netsuke to them, and the bride in question, a beautiful woman twenty years her husband’s junior, who had a number of affairs and who changed clothes three times a day (to say nothing of the various occasions when she took her clothes off), kept the collection in her dressing room. So at least she was around it quite a bit. Her wardrobe changes could take as long as ninety minutes. That’s what she did with her life. She changed her clothes!

One thing that is very striking when you read anything about this period is how pervasive and blatant the anti-Semitism was. You almost can’t believe it. Knowing history as we do, seeing those netsuke move to Vienna in a Jewish family in the early twentieth century, a family who were the very bankers that much of the anti-Semitism was ranting about, we continue reading with more and more trepidation. To read about the moment when the Nazis actually invaded, and what happened to various principles, is difficult, and could have been a lot worse. The Nazis confiscated the possessions of most Jews, so all the Ephrussi art was in jeopardy. It would spoil the story to tell more about the netsuke.

This book is definitely a cautionary tale for all the crazy rich people out there. There was a time when the Ephrussis seemed to lead an ideal life, and their wealth was untouchable.

My autistic brother in law, who works in the local supermarket bringing in carts, handles his modest amount of money pretty well for the most part, but sometimes he goes off and spends too much on the various things he collects, an odd amalgamation of magazines, knives, toys (he has a robot collection that would rival the Ephrussi’s netsuke)[4], so he has an allowance of how much he can spend on personal items. He recently got the idea of not spending anything on them for six months, and then going out at Christmas time and having a huge spending spree, buying anything he wanted. He never seems to get as much as he wants at Christmas, or to get exactly the right things, so the idea of this spending spree has huge appeal to him. “I’ll finally be happy,” he said.

He’ll basically have the same crap he already has; he’ll just have a lot more of it. And he’ll get to buy it all at once. He thinks that will make him happy.

Ya gotta wonder.

I suspect that the happiest people in The Hare with Amber Eyes were the ones who labored endlessly over the netsuke.

[1] I recently saw a photo of this man and his wife in the Times, which described him as the richest man in the world. What a distinction. I shouldn’t judge too much from a photograph, but the two people in the photo looked rather self-conscious. Maybe they were trying to look wealthy.

[2] My friend Sally very generously gave me this book for my 70th birthday, and she sprung for the illustrated edition. It’s well worth springing for. It includes a number of wonderful photographs, including a sampling of the netsuke.

[3] So did Proust, eventually.

[4] The interesting thing about collections to me is that every collector thinks their own collection is the best one. I think my brother in law would enjoy and admire the netsuke. But he wouldn’t trade his robots for them.