I received an e-mail from reader Donna Raskin about how D. H Lawrence’s harrowing short story “the Rocking Horse Winner” reminds her of Donald Trump, and I instantly saw the connection. The story seems even more relevant with the recent publication of Vicky Ward’s Kushner, Inc.: Greed Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, which reveals the staggering extent to which the the presidency is being monetized.
And I’m not just thinking of the president, his family, and his gang of grifters. In our increasingly unequal society, politicians and their billionaire friends (more Republican than Democrat) are plundering the public coffers for their own selfish ends. To cite a small but telling recent example, billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose family and friends made huge sums from the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts, now claims the government has not enough money to fund the Special Olympics.
I’m sure you know the famous illustration of chutzpah: a boy kills his two parents and then asks the court for leniency on the grounds that he’s an orphan.
“Rocking House Winner” is about a family that, while it has money, never has enough. In other words, it is like virtually any family that defines its worth by money:
There were a boy and two little girls. They lived in a pleasant house, with a garden, and they had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighborhood.
Although they lived in style, they felt always an anxiety in the house. There was never enough money. The mother had a small income, and the father had a small income, but not nearly enough for the social position which they had to keep up. The father went into town to some office. But though he had good prospects, these prospects never materialized. There was always the grinding sense of the shortage of money, though the style was always kept up.
Studies say that very few people feel they have enough money, regardless of how much money they in fact have. Millionaires believe they must be multimillionaires and multimillionaires are dissatisfied unless they are billionaires. Their greed contaminates society as a whole, just as, in the story, the parents’ obsession pervades the entire house:
And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time though nobody said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking-horse, behind the smart doll’s house, a voice would start whispering: “There must be more money! There must be more money!” And the children would stop playing, to listen for a moment. They would look into each other’s eyes, to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard. “There must be more money! There must be more money!”
It came whispering from the springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse, and even the horse, bending his wooden, champing head, heard it. The big doll, sitting so pink and smirking in her new pram, could hear it quite plainly, and seemed to be smirking all the more self-consciously because of it. The foolish puppy, too, that took the place of the teddy-bear, he was looking so extraordinarily foolish for no other reason but that he heard the secret whisper all over the house: “There must be more money!”
Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it. Just as no one ever says: “We are breathing!” in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.
Paul, who should have a childhood, internalizes his parents’ obsession. Thinking the problem is lack of luck, he starts riding his rocking horse in order to intuit racetrack winners. Lawrence’s story is an early instance of magical realism as Paul begins guessing right. Working with the gardener and then his uncle, he builds up a tidy sum, which is then doled out to his mother in installments.
Instead of being grateful, however, she wants to have the whole sum at once. When she does, “something very curious happened”:
The voices in the house suddenly went mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening. There were certain new furnishings, and Paul had a tutor. He was really going to Eton, his father’s school, in the following autumn. There were flowers in the winter, and a blossoming of the luxury Paul’s mother had been used to. And yet the voices in the house, behind the sprays of mimosa and almond-blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions, simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: “There must be more money! Oh-h-h; there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w – there must be more money! – more than ever! More than ever!”
Returning from a party, his mother comes upon Paul riding his horse harder and harder. He succeeds at intuiting the winner of the Derby, but it comes at a cost:
Then suddenly she switched on the light, and saw her son, in his green pyjamas, madly surging on the rocking-horse. The blaze of light suddenly lit him up, as he urged the wooden horse, and lit her up, as she stood, blonde, in her dress of pale green and crystal, in the doorway.
“Paul!” she cried. “Whatever are you doing?”
“It’s Malabar!” he screamed in a powerful, strange voice. “It’s Malabar!”
His eyes blazed at her for one strange and senseless second, as he ceased urging his wooden horse. Then he fell with a crash to the ground…
The story has a parable structure to it, complete with a moral. After the boy dies, the uncle delivers it:
And even as he lay dead, his mother heard her brother’s voice saying to her, “My God, Hester, you’re eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.”
We the American public must find our moral center if we are not to be sucked into the black hole of our venal leaders. Those who don’t resist will find themselves hollowed out at the core.
Further thought: As I think about it, Donald Trump had a childhood not unlike Paul’s and so did his children. From what I have read about both Trump’s parents and the way he raised Don, Jr., Ivanka and Eric, there was a coldness there (not to mention an obsession with money) such as we find in Paul’s mother:
She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew. Nevertheless, when her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard….Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody.
I would feel sorry for the emotionally-damaged Trump and his emotionally-damaged children were they not doing such damage to others. This week alone we saw the president propose taking health care away from millions, slashing funds for a Puerto Rico that is still reeling from Hurricane Maria, and zeroing out support for the Special Olympics. At the center of his heart is a hard little place that cannot feel empathy. No, not for anybody.