Clever but cold: Review of Trust by Herman Diaz
What would Keynes have made of this puzzling novel about capitalism?
(Note: this is a hard novel to discuss without spoilers, and although I’ve tried not to give away too much, proceed with care if you are still to read the novel.)
“When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance there will be great changes in the code of morals … The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”
So wrote the twentieth century’s most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes, in a 1930 essay called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. It may seem surprising to read such a forthright denunciation from an economist, someone who has chosen a career studying what he apparently despised. Nor was Keynes personally indifferent to the lure of profit. He was a highly successful investor, who made a fortune playing the markets, though at times he came perilously close to bankruptcy. But to look at it the other way round, who was better placed to criticise the roots of modern capitalism, particularly in 1930 as it all came crashing down?
I thought about Keynes when reading Trust by Herman Diaz, a Pulitzer-winning novel that revolves around the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The first part of this four part novel shines a light on exactly the kind of love of money for its own sake that Keynes condemns, in its story of financier Benjamin Rast and his wife Helen. Born wealthy, the clever but curiously disengaged Benjamin becomes a spectacularly successful Wall Street speculator for whom money is neither a means nor an end: he is addicted purely to speculation. As his wealth multiplies, he constructs an elaborate facade behind which he can hide from the curious, including a mansion on Fifth Avenue and a social life choreographed by his secretary. But he does not really care about anything except acquiring more and more wealth.
Benjamin Rast epitomises what Keynes in his essay describes as “purposive man”: someone who is “more concerned with the remote future results of [his] actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on [his] own environment”. Referencing Alice in Wonderland, Keynes comments: “For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.”
Rast doesn’t really change even when, in a life previously devoid of intimate relationships, he marries Helen, a woman from an old money background who has been trailed around Europe by her increasingly unstable and racketty parents. Helen, like her husband, is remarkable for her talents (languages, a prodigious memory) but also her disengagement. The Rasts’ marriage is not so much about convenience, as a desire for shared solitude: on their honeymoon, Helen signifies that Benjamin should return to his telephone line to the markets, while she immerses herself in books, music and philanthropy.
A financial genius, Benjamin foresees, and even helps cause, the Wall Street Crash. He has erected a vast financial edifice, including a trust which lends to workers so that they, too, can join in the frenzy of consumption and speculation that precedes Black Thursday; as stock prices climb, he then liquidates his positions. In the financial wreckage, he is one of the few winners, but the impact on Helen is disastrous. She is shunned by the artists and musicians she patronised, and her philanthropic ventures can make little dent in the vast woes of the Great Depression; she lapses into mania and depression.
There’s a lot of chilling reflections on money and markets in this part of Trust. Vast wealth brings, without doubt, a terrifying alienation. “There was no need for him to touch a single bank note,” the novel observes of Benjamin Rast, “or engage with the things and people his transactions affected.” Wealth also brings power: when Helen’s preferred Swiss sanatorium won’t take her, he simply uses his ownership of a pharmaceuticals company to withhold drugs until they are forced to agree.
The problem with depicting alienation in a novel is that there is a real risk of alienating the reader. The coldness of the Rasts has an inevitable chilling effect. This is accentuated by the writing style. As Alice famously observes before she descends the rabbit hole to Wonderland, “What is the point of a book without pictures or conversations?” The first part of Trust has little dialogue and depicts few dramatic scenes; the only pictures are the Holbeins and Fragonards hanging on the Rasts’ mansion walls.
In a clever twist, however, it turns out this is entirely appropriate, for what we are reading is a polished but ultimately forgettable novel of the 1930s. Part two is a similar piece of ventriloquism: the unfinished memoir of self important Wall Street tycoon Andrew Bevel, the details of whose life with his wife Mildred bear curious similarities to those of the Rasts. It’s only when reading the third section of the novel, the much more lively memoir of Ida Partenza, that Andrew Bevel’s motivations for his own deeply inauthentic memoir, full of concealment and fabrication, becomes clearer.
After the chilly blandness of the Rasts and Bevels, Ida Partenza’s section is a joy to read. There’s dialogue! Adventure! Suspense! Some of this is surely because Partenza is not cushioned by wealth but living a hand-to-mouth existence with her Italian anarchist father in Brooklyn: she has to battle to escape and survive. This gives her dilemmas and adventures added zest: there is plenty at stake for Partenza. Lack of money makes her more of a person, perhaps; yet, as becomes clear, her father’s ideological contempt for money is almost as destructive of human relationships as Andrew Bevel’s pursuit of it. Partenza is caught between the father who would subject her to a life of domestic squalor, and the allure of Bevel’s wealth, which can whisk her off into New York in the safe anonymity of a limousine.
Then we have part four. A lot hangs on part four, because by this time the reader has worked out that Trust is all about tricks and subterfuge, and that the links between its different parts are as important as the fate of the characters. I had my own speculations about how the novel would resolve itself – and I was only partially satisfied. Diaz slowly brings into focus the women behind the male world of prestige, power and money, first with Partenza and then, in this final section, through Mildred, wife of Andrew Bevel. Mildred is an enjoyable character. But without giving away her story, it seems to take us away from the insights of Keynes. As Keynes portrays it, it is surely capitalism itself that is the issue, rather than the particular individuals operating within it. “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done,” Keynes observed, and a casino remains a casino, regardless of whether it is man or woman, genius or criminal or philanthropist, who is gambling there.
Late in life, Keynes had a disagreement with his good friend Virginia Woolf about her book Three Guineas. In the run up to World War II, she suggests that if only women had more power in the world, there would be less war. Keynes disagrees: he thought that it was largely irrelevant. This was not because he was not interested in women’s rights – he consistently supported them throughout his life. But as an economist and political theorist, he was more inclined to look at the framework than the individuals within it.
Marx thought a revolution was needed to overthrow capitalism; Keynes disagreed, and thought intervention by government could do a lot to humanise it. Diaz seems closer to Woolf’s view that individuals can somehow transcend the limitations of the framework, if they bring a different perspective. (This assumption also seems to lie behind the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion movement pushed by so many modern “progressives”.) Maybe it is not surprising that novelists should invest more hope than economists in the talents, outlook and personal attributes of individuals.
Keynes was hopeful too – maybe despite himself. In Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren he famously predicted a release from the domination of accumulation, and a more balanced, leisured society. Yet almost one hundred years on, the fifteen hour working week he foretold remains far out of sight. Nor do the fictional Roys of Succession seem great improvements, morally speaking, on their counterparts in Great Depression. Perhaps it is not surprising that the tricky, untrustworthy Trust also struggles to offer a solution.