Book Report: Having and Being Had

15. Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (2020) (3/16/21)

In this book, Biss explores the ways she internalizes, and also struggles against, capitalism, looking at her assumptions about class and property, money and time, art and sustenance, work, toil, and labor. She does so in four parts—"Consumption," "Work," "Investment," and "Accounting"—each containing very short chapters composed, generally, of discrete chunks of experience, thought, or anecdote. In that formal way, it reminded me of Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, though that book is fiction, this is non. (Offill wrote one of the jacket blurbs.) The book includes—as one of Biss's "rules" of composition—conversations with friends of hers and quotes from books she is reading. Each chapter begins in a present-tense moment, and very often the end of a chapter provides a supple segue into the next chapter. Chapter titles may be repeated: there are many called "Work," "Art," and "Capitalism." Biss examines her own conflicted feelings about being an artist—a comfortable artist; about ownership as she purchases and furnishes her first home ("My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts: the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after"); about how to balance time and money; about giving and the pleasures of exchange, in an economy that asks much and offers back very little freely—and much more. It's a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. 

As usual with such a book, I flagged many passages, and could easily have flagged more, for the diversity and depth, and occasionally for sweet silliness. But what I will quote here is from an appendix, titled "Notes," in which she writes on various aspects of this book: the title, the names, the rules, the middle class, etc. 

From "On the Comforts"

I began keeping a new kind of diary shortly after I moved into my house in 2014. I had very little time to write then. But I had a garage where I kept my bike, so I no longer had to carry it up and down stairs. And I had a new sense of security, a feeling of solidity. I wasn't particularly liquid, but I didn't have to worry about my mortgage as long as I kept my job. I was highly aware, in those first years, of my comfort. And I was uncomfortable with that comfort. I knew from past experience that the discomfort would fade and that my extraordinary new life would become ordinary with time. To stave off that loss, I kept a diary in which I recorded moments of discomfort from my life, usually moments in which I was also enjoying some sort of comfort or pleasure. I wanted to hold on to the discomfort and I wanted to hold on to the comfort, too. This book is what came of that contradiction.
     At first, every moment I recorded was excrutiating to me, but it was also beautiful. I was sure that my discomfort had something to teach me, and that I would lose some essential knowledge if I let go of the discomfort. I wanted to "stay with the trouble." But I knew that my trouble didn't look like trouble. It looked like what is commonly called "success." This success was the result of having played a particular game, with all the advantages my position afforded. So I regarded my own success and accomplishment with new suspicion.
     As I wrote, every word I touched seemed to crumble. I no longer knew what good meant, or art or work or investment or ownership or capitalism. At some point early in my work on this book, my son asked me what luxury meant. I told him that it was something you didn't need. No, not like garbage. Something you wanted, that was very nice, but that wasn't necessary to your life. I looked around the room at my houseplants and books. These weren't necessities, but they didn't seem like good examples of luxuries either. The piano was a luxury, but I didn't want to suggest that music wasn't a necessity. "It's like dessert," I told him. "You don't need dessert to live, but it's nice to have. It's a luxury." 
     Really, the question was a luxury. As was my inability to answer it. "In the affluent society," John Kenneth Galbraith writes, "no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities." All the small necessities of my life, my reading and my writing, were luxuries. And every moment I wrote about was a luxury, though the writing itself felt necessary. I could make no useful distinction between a necessity and a luxury, so I struggled with the word. Later, I looked it up: "The state of great comfort and extravagant living." Maybe I found it difficult to define luxury because I lived in a state of great comfort. This is the state that some people refer to as middle class. And a common euphemism for being upper-middle class or rich is comfortable.