Having and Being Had: Enmeshed in a capitalist world

Having and Being Had

Author: Eula Biss

ISBN-13: 9780571346424

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Guideline Price: £15.99

The most recent addition to my reading pile is Worked Over, in which sociologist Jamie K McCallum argues that Americans, in particular, have lost control of their work time, and that a reduction in working hours should now be a core tenet of social justice.

McCallum’s book was published in the US in September, the same month as Harvard philosopher Michael J Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, which contends that the mantra of individual striving, the notion that just rewards will come to those who, as Leo Varadkar might say, “get up early in the morning”, has taken a hammer to the idea of the common good.

The texts have a similar message. Driven as we have been by an American version of capitalism and individualism, where work is glorified (but not necessarily valued, especially monetarily) and leisure-time a self-indulgence, these writers suggest we have gone far astray. It is time for a reset.

Into this mix comes the latest work by US poet and essayist Eula Biss, best-known on this side of the ocean for On Immunity (2015), her book-length essay on the science and mythology of vaccination, a text still strikingly relevant in today’s pandemic-afflicted world. Having and Being Had, an account of the writer’s complicated and uncomfortable relationship with class, consumerism, art and capitalism, feels similarly timely, engaging with inequality, privilege, race and precarity, as well as a frank discussion about money – one of the “rules”, she explains in a kind of afterword, she laid down for herself in writing the book.

It’s a work that also feels as if it will outlast this moment. As with all of Biss’s books of prose (this is her third), Having and Being Had is not so much an analysis of a situation as a personal response to it. Her starting point is herself, and the interrogation moves out from there.

In On Immunity, her role as a new mother of a son born with allergies prompted a wide-ranging investigation that meshed history, literature and anecdote. Her first book of essays, Notes from No-Man’s Land, which won the prestigious Graywolf Press Non-Fiction Prize, probed the construct of whiteness, and her own place inside it. Here she uses her changed circumstances as a homeowner in Chicago, rather than the renter she has long been, to consider her situation as a newly signed-up member of America’s (white) middle class. It’s a position she will now have to work to retain, rather than giving her time to writing poetry, which she did in her 20s, and which she would still like to do now.

Although, when she stops to think about it, being poor did not automatically equal having more time. “Not having money is time consuming,” she writes, “There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake.”

These were also hours she spent not writing, hours spent in precarity and vulnerability, as her friend Bill reminds her. “Precarity,” he says, “has a price.” This price is why Biss ended up buying a house of her own.

Brevity and accuracy

As with writers such as Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso, Biss began her writing life as a poet (in this book, she still terms her writing poetry), and as her work has expanded into the capacious space of the essay, her sentences have retained a poet’s precision, if not the same wonder. Her writing, compressed here into short, brisk sections with titles such as Work, Art, Capitalism, is clean, taught, clarifying, satisfying for this reader in its brevity and accuracy, even if it didn’t quite make my heart ache.

In common, again, with Nelson, the author cites other works extensively throughout the book, operating in conversation with contemporary thinkers such as David Graeber, Silvia Federici, Elizabeth Chin and Lewis Hyde, as well as the writings of literary luminaries such as Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Her discussion, drawn from the scholarship of Alison Light, of Woolf’s testy relationship with her live-in cook Nellie, who she paid less than the average rate, is particularly fascinating. Could Woolf, our great feminist hero, have written A Room of One’s Own had she not been able to pay another woman (not enough) to cook for her and wash her dishes?

Woolf does not appear to have recognised the contradiction, but Biss does, likely because she is actively bumping up against her own contradictions at every turn.

Biss would, for example, gladly trade places with her friend Nami, who has just quit her job, except that she would then have to trade her house. She wins a Guggenheim grant and doesn’t try to find out where the money comes from (mining) until after she has spent it. She wants to leave her job as a creative writing lecturer so she can write, but she is afraid if she were paid a wage to make her art, then everything she does would be monetised, “subject to the logic of this economy”.

So what to do? Biss is hardly the type to come to any firm conclusions: her style has always been nuanced, musing, calling attention to social and economic inconsistencies while acknowledging how she remains enmeshed within them. But the book does arrive at a resolution of sorts, with Biss making the decision to sell her work into the economy she is so fearful of, in order to buy herself the time she so desires. “My time,” she writes, “already spent on writing, will pay for itself.”

It’s a trade-off but, given that Bliss has written the book she wanted to, not a sell-out. In fact, orchestrated as it is from within capitalism’s clench, her trade-off feels pretty close to having, rather than being had.