podcast
My Thoughts:
So many layers, so many interpretations. I may be completely wrong about this but the anti-Semitic aspect that Doctorow sees seems to me to arise from his own Jewish sense of exclusion. You would need to be very ‘pushy’ indeed to want to join a club whose totemic animal was chosen to exclude the ‘chosen’. Another thing that was missed is the matter of loyalty. The hinge of the story is the recognition of the jerk in the blue suit who had been to Browning’s house in his father’s time. That connects to the Pocellian fraudster who commanded automatic loyalty. What would Browning’s father think of him, pork in pocket, if not cap in hand, going to Under mensch Secretary, one of the short assed ‘you fellows’. It is an unconscious reflex that causes Browning to throw the job back in in Joe’s face and win both ways firstly in the using of the under-secretary’s need to show dominance, a small man’s triumph, and secondly in saying just the wrong thing. One can imagine Browning talking to his fellow club members afterwards, saying –
- When it came to the point I just couldn’t go through with it.
2 comments:
excellent comment. Browning is much too suave and smart to have inadvertently insulted the Undersecretary! I've read and re-read the story and had thought it was a characterization mistake by O'Hara. Nos I get it. Thanks!
Thank you. O’Hara was himself a terrific snob and acutely aware of the gradations of class and exclusion and was bitter to the end about losing the chance to go to Yale due to his father’s poor money management. He was an expert on College clubs apparently.
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