Purgatory Mates
My one true culture hero, the poet W. H. Auden, invented something that he called a “parlor game,” though it strikes me as something more like a moral exercise. He called it Purgatory Mates, and it works like this.
First, you think of two people who despise each other, or, if they’re dead, despised each other, or, if they never met, would have utterly loathed each other had they been given the chance. The last category is the most fun. Auden preferred historical figures — artists, poets, philosophers — but the game works with all sorts of folks. The key thing is that the Mates need to have something in common, some shared passion or profession. After all, we’re more likely to hate people who care about the same things we do than people whose lives don’t really overlap ours. Thus Auden’s favorite Purgatory Mates were Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde: each of them a greatly gifted writer, but with radically different ideas about what writing is for and what the vocation of author is all about.
So, once you’ve chosen two people, you plop them in Purgatory. Now, as every reader of Dante knows, the purpose of Purgatory is to train people in love: once people learn to what they should in the way that they should, they may ascend to Paradise. And every Christian knows that we are commanded to love our neighbors. So: each of these Purgatory Mates has a new neighbor, a neighbor he loathes, but the only way that they’re going to get out of Purgatory is by learning to love each other.
Now we get to your chief task, as a player of this game: You have to figure out how this could happen. What would these two figures have to correct in their thinking and their affections? What impulses would they have to resist, and what counter-impulses would they need to cultivate? Where can we find the seed of charity that can be tended and cultivated until it becomes what it should be, so that these two former enemies can walk hand-in-hand into Paradise?
I commend this game — to myself as well as to others — as an excellent diversion in this presidential campaign season.
In college, we played a version of this filling out the various dorm rooms. I remember that Theodor W. Adorno and Leo Buscaglia, Ph. D. were to share a suite.
— Wrongshore · Sep 8, 01:48 AM · #
Malcolm X and Margaret Sanger. I got the idea from the fact that they’re on posters right next to each other in the library where I work.
— Ethan C. · Sep 8, 05:03 AM · #
Hmm. This game is harder than it looks. The triple temptations of easy opposition (Russell Kirk and Alvin Toffler), imbalanced matches (Moses and Rowan Williams), and cheap political point-scoring (Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Palin) loom large.
Some quick thoughts:
Simone Weil and George Eliot
Larry Kramer and Quentin Crisp
Winston Churchill and Calvin Coolidge
John Brown and Zora Neale Hurston
Marshall Petain and Menachem Begin
Isaac Asimov and William S. Burroughs
Chrisopher Hitchens and Peter Hitchens
— Noah Millman · Sep 8, 01:35 PM · #
Noah, inasmuch as I get it, that’s not the game. It’s finding the point of transcendence. E.g., “Dmitri Shostakovich and Billy Strayhorn. They move past it by discovering a shared irrational adoration of the music of Billy Idol.” Which seems not implausible.
— Sanjay · Sep 8, 02:09 PM · #
I thought I was playing that game.
Petain and Begin both were leaders of their countries and thought of themselves as ultra-patriotic, but probably would have detested each other not only for reasons of history but for reasons of basic political style.
Burroughs and Asimov are writers of the same generation who wrote “experimental” fiction of one sort or another, but with utterly opposed notions of what constitutes an interesting experiment, and who would have viewed each other with complete contempt.
Simone Weil and George Eliot both were oddball women drawn to the example of St. Teresa of Avila, but took pretty much opposite lessons from her example and, I suspect, would have considered each other to be both appalling and ridiculous.
Hitchens and Hitchens . . .
I’m not sure I buy the “seed of charity” being something relatively random they turn out to have in common. Would Wilde and Tolstoy discover they both favor sensible women’s clothing and loathe the British Empire? So what? The tough question is not how you can learn to accept as a person someone you loathe as a symbol, but how you can come to recognize that what you love is bound up with what you hate. But I guess Wilde already knew that lesson . . .
Why do you think Shostakovich and Strayhorn would hate each other? I don’t know enough about either to know the reason.
— Noah Millman · Sep 8, 02:34 PM · #
Oooh! William Gaddis and Kurt Vonnegut. Bond over discussions of player pianos.
— Sanjay · Sep 8, 02:41 PM · #
Noah, I think the hatred would be largely one-sided from DS. Think of how hard he fought against “program” music, versus something like say “Isfahan.” I also suspect there’d be issues with a somewhat fastidious, self-critical dark humor, and, well, the guy who’s pouring martinis directly in through his stomach port in the end of Lush Life. Then again the whole thing might develop a lovely sort of “Felix and Oscar” vibe.
— Sanjay · Sep 8, 02:45 PM · #
Most of these ‘big men of history’ have huge egos and the game is just waiting around for that ego to wane.
More fun – one person who loves the other person unilaterally, where the game is figuring out what the desired has to do to try to admire something in the desirer, for whom they don’t really have any admiration at all.
Chris Martin, Thom Yorke
Dennis Leary, Bill Hicks
Me, Leslie Travajo of my 12th grade class
— bcg · Sep 8, 03:11 PM · #
I’ll play – Joe DiMaggio & Frank Sinatra – quite a lot in common, but they hated each other – partly for obvious reasons but also because of some more subtle ones. They came out of similar circumstances and rose to comparable heights but seemed to take different lessons from their upbringings and lives.
Savonarola and Machiavelli – don’t think they hated each other, exactly, but certainly didn’t like one another (Machiavelli was a follower until he couldn’t convince Savonarola that he needed military power behind him and ended up somewhat gleefully writing about his execution) and they obviously had vastly different ideas about power, where it came from and how to use it.
For one more, as a scientist by training, I want to say E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould, but I think that, as good faithful non-believers, they achieved the purposes of this exercise without the need for an afterlife.
— hugo · Sep 8, 04:29 PM · #
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Palin would have to spend much time in Purgatory at all. As long as there weren’t an election there as well (and maybe there would be…our current election seasons seem to be the definition of Purgatory, if not the hotter place), I think that emotionally and philosophically Sully and Sarah would reconcile very quickly and actually enjoy each other’s company. Differences of opinion would swiftly become enjoyable sources of banter, and their basic ethics would prove to be a much stronger point of contact. It’s only the specifics of this campaign that has put them (well, Sully) in such a lather.
Which, to my mind, (and assuming I’m right,) says something about the campaign…that it’s about personalities and timing. Not that they aren’t consequential, in this case; I agree with Sully that she’s enormously underqualified, and manifestly unprepared for the job. But I wish the debate could start to focus again on the relative merits of the two parties’ plans for America’s future.
— saxon conrad · Sep 8, 05:18 PM · #