Miranda July misunderstands Quakers
What are Quakers doing in a silly sex fantasy, anyway?
My two-man book club recently read All Fours, the best-selling novel by director/writer/Instagram dancer Miranda July, née Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, daughter of Richard Grossinger, né Richard Towers, about whom Wikipedia tells us:
As a child, a psychic told [Towers] that his biological father had actually been a member of the Grossinger family (of the Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel, where Grossinger had vacationed) and he eventually changed his last name to reflect this family connection. However, years later he learned that his biological father had been an entirely different person with no connection to the resort.
Somehow, this chain of events that has yielded, over time and with some copulation, the artist known as Miranda July, which makes perfect sense, insofar as it is a bit hard to follow and ultimately makes no sense at all, which is something that can be said of All Fours. I am not interested in writing a takedown of All Fours—Freddie deBoer has done that for us—but instead would like to point out one false note among many, which has to do with July’s/Grossinger’s/Towers’s treatment of the Friends, also known as Quakers.
But to get there, let me back up to my grandparents, Walter and Rebekah Kirschner.
Walter and Reba, as she was known, lifelong Philadelphians and lifelong leftists, traveled in a circle that was both exclusively Jewish and exceedingly hostile to organized religion. They and their friends had abjured the Jewish faith of their childhoods, and they took a dim view of the faiths of others. With one exception: Quakers, or Friends.
Philadelphia, of course, is the original home base for Quakerism in the United States, and the area was chockablock with Friends schools, Friends meetinghouses, and, well, Friends. For a communist like my grandmother, the Friends were complicated neighbors. They tended to have progressive politics, but in Philadelphia they were the standing order, the original bourgeoisie, the oldest of old money, which made them uneasy allies for the working classes.
But my grandparents’ friends had less nuanced views. Quakers were admirable, pure and simple. Their friend Mrs. Levy never got over her excitement that one of her daughters had become engaged to a Quaker—“and not just any Quaker,” she said, “but a real one.” She meant a Quaker with Quaker ancestry, rather than one of the many progressives, often ex-Jews, who peopled Friends meetings. For Mrs. Levy, Quakers were the true aristocrats, with both progressive politics and, to use the Yiddish word, yichus, or breeding.
I am, of course, dwelling in the land of stereotypes, which, good or bad, are always unfair. What’s interesting about Quaker stereotypes is who holds them: to this day, the idea of Quakers as the good kind of religious people, the ones who are reliably pacifist and progressive—and countercultural in the best ways, hippie, earthy, and folksy—persists. It’s a stereotype that is not just silly but also unfair to Quakers, who have a robust Christian heritage that deserves better than the fawning they get from the farmers-market crowd.
Which brings us to July’s All Fours. (I read the book because I had heard rumors of hot sex scenes, but the sex scenes are few, and not even lukewarm.) Late in the book, the narrator’s husband spices up their sex life by pretending to be a photographer who has taken dirty pictures of her; the narrator’s friend, hearing the story, remarks that the photographer is the couple’s “Third Thing.” The friend then explains that a Third Thing is “a topic of conversation that doesn’t belong to either party. The soul, usually so shy, can speak more easily through this Third Thing, at a slant.” The Third Thing is also, the narrator then explains, paraphrasing her friend, a “Quaker concept.”
The narrator is thrilled to hear that there is a Quaker term applicable to her husband’s fantasy character. With an air of amazement, she remarks that the Quakers “invented chocolate bars and maxipads and now this.”
I checked, and yes, Friends were involved in the early production of both chocolate bars and sanitary napkins. But beyond that, something didn’t sound right. It wasn’t just that the Quakers, a seventeenth-century dissenting Christian movement, which promoted the heretical, anti-hierarchical idea that God speaks to each of us through the Inner Light, would probably not have a word for the role-play character one assumes during kinky sex. It was also that I had read a lot about Quakerism and never encountered this term, the “third thing.”
As it happens, the Third Thing is not in Quaker theology. What seems to have happened is that July/Grossinger/Towers (who did not return my request for comment) encountered the idea in the writing of social critic and activist Parker J. Palmer, a Quaker. In his 2004 book A Hidden Wholeness, Palmer writes about how a “circle of trust” can confront difficult topics “at a slant”—he is borrowing from Emily Dickinson’s line, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” Begin a discussion of a controversial topic, Palmer suggests, by talking about a poem, or a piece of music. In talking about the poem or the song, the third thing, people will open up, building the trust to confront painful issues.
“I don’t know whether I originated the idea of the ‘third thing’ or drew it from the unconscious primordial soup of concepts and images that came from my liberal arts education,” Palmer told me. Indeed, the Third Thing can be found in other sources, most prominently a 2005 essay, “The Third Thing,” by the late poet Donald Hall. “Each member of a couple is separate,” Hall writes, and “the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing.”
Of course, Hall was writing a year after the publication of Palmer’s book, so he may have been borrowing from Hall, without attribution. (The passage also appears in Hall’s 2006 memoir, The Best Day the Worst Day.) Whatever the case, the term obviously gained currency about twenty years ago, principally in progressive and literary circles. And the only specifically Quaker connection was that one of the popularizers, Parker J. Palmer, is a Quaker.
But it is unsurprising that July would appropriate the concept for the Quakers, whom she apparently sees as simultaneously wise and capable, dreamy and practical. In 2011, a New York Times profile called July the “unwilling exemplar of an aggravating boho archetype: the dreamy, young hipster whose days are filled with coffee, curios and disposable enchantments.” To such a writer, whose latest book is being treated as a manifesto for divorce and open marriages, theology may be nothing more than a cool lifestyle accessory, less maxipads than handcrafted chocolate. But definitely very Quaker!
The Ivy League is as racy as a Miranda July novel
One of the books I am working on is called The Dirty Bicker: Princeton and the Antisemitism Scandal of 1958. I’ll leave it at that, except to say I came across this headline from The Yale Daily News from May 1958 (Ivy newspapers used to do a very good job covering the scandals and foibles of their rival Ivy League schools):
If you want more Ivy League sex scandal, check out my old piece “Suzi at Yale,” which begins:
In the New Haven Evening Register of Jan. 18, 1960, on a back page near the weather report, ran two nearly identical articles on the exact same topic, the kind of mistake made by an editor on very tight deadline, or by an editor shaken by a disturbing story. The story in the left-hand column has the bureaucratic headline “Officials Hold Conference on Probe at Yale.” The second story, five columns to the right, is titled “Conference Due for Discussion of Yale Probe.” In each case, there is that word “probe”—probe of what?
The left-hand article contains this lead: “City Attorney Vincent Villano and Assistant City Attorney Gilbert Winnick will confer this afternoon in order to reach a decision as to whether warrants will be issued for a dozen Yale students involved in a morals case with a 14-year-old Hamden girl.” A Yale spokesman had confirmed that 10 sophomores and two juniors had “resigned from school.” Yale’s campus police chief had resigned from his post. In the one paragraph given over to the 14-year-old girl from Hamden (a middle-class suburb north of New Haven), we learn that she “was arrested Friday and turned over to juvenile authorities for prosecution. She has since been placed in the custody of her parents, pending disposition of her case.”
Yes, we do need another podcast—mine!
I have a had a lot of new subscribers lately, and I fear I have not been offering up as much content as they—you—have every right to expect. There are a host of reasons: children’s vacations, children’s dentist appointments, minor ailments, deadlines for other things, the new season of White Lotus (which so far has been pretty boring, no?), etc., etc. But truth be told, I have spent a good bit of time, hours that otherwise might have been writing stuff, thinking about the podcast we’re starting for Arc, the magazine I edit.
As many of you know, I created and hosted Unorthodox, which we at Tablet, where I then worked, not-so-jokingly called “the universe’s leading podcast.” By the time I left in 2022—the podcast itself wound down about a year later—we had produced 360 episodes, which in total had about 7 million downloads (we used to joke that we were glad not to be stuck at 6 million downloads—an inauspicious number for the Jews). I also co-wrote and hosted Gatecrashers, a podcast about the history of Jews at Ivy League schools, and went on to host two other limited-run podcasts.
And then I retired my voice, the literal speaking voice, at least for a while. During the past year or so, my relationship to podcasts has been entirely as a listener. I don’t listen that much—I don’t have a lot of time in the car, and my exercise does not involve pod-friendly activities like Stairmaster—but I listen when I can. Since you asked, my pod diet comprises, mainly
• Song Exploder, still the single best use of the podcast form; start with the episodes featuring R.E.M.’s “Try Not to Breathe” and Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose”;
• Judge John Hodgman, consistently funny and the primary way to access genius John Hodgman, who was ubiquitous for ten years and now is too scarce (a fact that he writes about, with some acidity, in his book Medallion Status);
• Sound Opinions, the single best rock music podcast;
• The Ezra Klein Show, which is fascinating not just because Klein is a good host who gets good guests, but because it’s interesting to speculate on why and how Klein has become such a phenomenon (I don’t have a great answer);
• Conspirituality, recommended to me by my friend, legendary Substacker Jay Michaelson, which breaks down irrational and dangerous claims, and the world of religion crossing over with conspiracy theory. I just today was digging the ep on raw milk (and raw water, which you couldn’t think would be a thing).
But here’s the deal: I am working up a new podcast. You can’t keep a podcaster down, or silent, for long. Having resisted the temptation to call it Arc with Mark, it will be instead called Arc: The Podcast, and it will be hosted by me. We’ll offer highlights from the magazine, plus an interview of the week. Basic fare, with non-basic flair. If you have ideas for stuff I can do with the podcast, or ideas I can steal shamelessly from your favorite podcasts, drop me a line.
My mother’s people were Quakers in Pennsylvania and apparently even knew Ben Franklin (he mentioned one of them in a diary entry, upon his return from France). Maybe they were some of the group that convinced him to free the people he’d enslaved? Don’t know. They even had a home that was part of the Underground Railroad (they were named in a book!). I send my kids to Quaker summer camp in Maine, and it’s a good fit for our family though I’m not religious now. Didn’t you go to a clothing-optional camp?