I’ve just returned from a Maine family reunion, and amongst the many joys of the trip were long conversations with my entrepreneurial son Darien, who we picked up (along with wife Betsy, son Alban, and beagles Becket and Kipling) in Manhattan in a van we had rented. Some of my recent reading helps me understand Darien better, especially Steven Millhauser’s wonderful 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dream.
Darien and Betsy started the marketing company Discovering Oz in 2008, and so far it has successfully managed to balance dreaming with solid economic realism. As I read Millhauser’s novel, I recognized Darien in the protagonist.
Dressler grows up as the son of the immigrant owner of a tobacco shop in the latter decades of the 19th century. He is fascinated by every system in which he finds himself, first his father’s shop, then the hotel where he is a bellboy and clerk, then (when he becomes a secretary to the manager) the larger operations of the hotel. Here’s a passage that gets at his curiosity:
If, out at the desk, he had seemed to be in the lively center of things, it was true only in a special and limited sense, for in fact, he had been a minor employee in one department of a vast and complex organization that he had scarcely bothered to imagine. . . . [B]ewildered but deeply curious, exasperated by his ignorance, vowing to sort things out, to bring disparate details into relation, [Martin] gradually began to see his way. One thing he saw was that the work of running the hotel was divided far more carefully and precisely than he had imagined, all the way down to the seamstresses and linen-room attendants of the the housekeeping department.
As Martin moves up the hierarchy and then leaves the hotel to start a lunchroom and then a chain of lunchrooms, he is less interested in money than in the chance to orchestrate bigger and bigger systems, bringing disparate elements together in unexpected ways. He doesn’t hesitate to sell the financial security of the lunchrooms when the challenge of building new hotels beckons. There is something almost hallucinatory about how he works, something that Karl Marx understood when he talked about how capitalism has an intangible quality. “All that is solid melts into air,” he wrote in The Communist Manifesto, borrowing from Shakespeare’s Tempest to describe the way that capitalistic systems form and break apart and reform into new entities.
And this is how Darien operates as well. He and Betsy left Baltimore, where Darien had a well-paying advertising job, with a few thousand dollars in their pockets and considerably more in school debt. They were spurred by a dream of revitalizing theater, and at first they spent $8 a day on food (for the two of them) and lived in the upper reaches of Manhattan. Like Dressler, Darien is fascinated by how systems work and loves to problem solve, whether it involves helping an Off-Off Broadway group fill an auditorium, finding the nationwide niche audience for an independent film, or helping his father publish a book. They have done well enough that they have moved down to the Upper East Side (89th Street near the East River), which is much more accessible to their office in the East Village.
Darien, of course, has to think about money, but it’s never money that is the subject of his conversations with me. Rather, he talks about vision and new challenges. The following passage about Dressler also gets at Darien’s restless energy:
”Was there then something wrong with him, that he couldn’t just rest content? Must he always be dreaming up improvements? And it seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile.”
This drive prompts Dressler, as it is prompting Darien, to become ever more creative. Nick Carraway also sees it as the desire that spurs Jay Gatsby:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
But where Dressler and Darien differ from Gatsby is in their ability to accept the world as it is and take as much pleasure in its concreteness as they do in their abstractions. After creating a hotel/amusement park/fantasy labyrinth which is a spectacular failure because he forgets that people have living needs as well as fantasy needs, Dressler doesn’t despair but walks out and reconnects with a New York spring day. Darien hasn’t had reversals yet, but I’ve been watching him find a powerful grounding in the sensual immediacy of his six-month-old son.
Here’s from the ending of Millhauser’s novel. Dressler’s fantasies have been intoxicating but a commonplace day in Manhattan is no less powerful:
He walked through the lobby to the heavy glass entrance doors, and when he pushed one open he stopped: the light was so bright that he had to shut his eyes, even though at this early hour he stood in the building’s shade. Suns danced in the red of his closed eyes. He hadn’t left the Grand Cosmo for a long time. . . .
One of these days he might find something to do in a cigar store, after all he still knew his tobacco, you never forgot a thing like that. But not just yet. Boats moved on the river, somewhere a car horn sounded, on the path a piece of broken glass glowed in a patch of sun as if at any second it would burst into flame. Everything stood out sharply; the red stem of a green leaf, horse clops and the distant clatter of a pneumatic drill, a smell of riverwater and asphalt. Martin felt hungry: chops and beer in a little place he remembered on Columbus Avenue. But not yet. For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry.
The ability to balance the dream with the reality strikes me as the key to happiness.