Trust

“He viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean.”

The language in this passage characterizes capital as a sterile, inhuman entity. Rask’s fascination with capital and with its cleanliness reflects on his personality: He, too, is somewhat inhuman, somewhat sterile. Rask’s only interest is the world of finance: everything else is dirty. The irony is that the superficial cleanliness of conducting financial transactions from a remove conceals the real-world ramifications of those transactions, such as the Great Depression. Capital may be clean, but Rask’s hands are dirty with the plight of the nation.

“She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.”

In Italy, as an adolescent, Helen Rask experiences for the first time the joy of being unsupervised, free from her parents’ wills. Her walk through Lucca is a formative moment in her character, solidifying her belief in the supremacy of self-reliance. This belief, formed under parents she couldn’t rely on, confines Helen to a life of loneliness.

“Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it. They doubt their right to hold someone else accountable for their happiness; they worry that their loved one may find their reverence tedious; they fear their yearning may have distorted their features in ways they cannot see. Thus, as the weight of all these questions and concerns bends them inward, their newfound joy in companionship turns into a deeper expression of the solitude they thought they had left behind.”

This passage describes Rask’s reaction to getting married; however, it also describes the mutual fear of loss that defines his marriage. This dynamic also alludes to the Bevels’ marriage because Vanner models the Rasks on them. Fear of loss defines Rask/Bevel and Helen/Mildred’s characters. Both sets of characters suffer losses at a young age: Rask/Bevel of his entire family by 20, Helen/Mildred of her father (and the nonexistence of her mother’s love). Each character turns in on themselves, isolating themselves for fear of loss.

“Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control.”

Outcome affects our philosophy of self-determination. The hundreds of thousands of speculators who help inflate the economic bubble by investing with borrowed money don’t want to take responsibility for their failures. They aren’t entirely responsible, but they bear some responsibility. Such dichotomous thinking—“I have everything to do with my success, I have nothing to do with my failure”—is flawed because it takes the self as either an omnipotent or powerless thing. The truth is somewhere in the middle: The small-time speculators are the victims of a crash larger than any one of them; Rask and the banks happily lent them money they knew they didn’t have; and still the speculators (along with Rask and the banks) are responsible for their actions. If they aren’t, who is?

“In some occasions numbers and statistics have no meaning: each loss is absolute and can never be mitigated by past or future triumphs.”

Dr. Aftus delivers these lines after accidentally killing Helen with his experimental chemical convulsive therapy. Rask chooses Dr. Aftus over Helen’s former doctor, Dr. Frahm because Rask understands Dr. Aftus’s scientific approach; Dr. Frahm’s holistic approach is alien to him. Numbers give Rask a sense that he has a precise understanding and control over reality. However, as Dr. Aftus says, statistics are generalizations that fall to the reality of the singular. Helen pays the price for her husband’s obsession with control.

“My name is known to many, my deeds to some, my life to few. This has never concerned me much. What matters is the tally of our accomplishments, not the tales about us.”

Dramatic irony suffuses Andrew Bevel’s statement at the beginning of his autobiography: The reader sees through his faux humility. The very fact of writing an autobiography belies the content of this opening statement: Bevel clearly cares about the “tales” about him because he’s writing one.

“Denial is always a form of confirmation. Yet I confess that the urge to address and refute some of these fictions has become pressing, especially since the passing of my beloved wife, Mildred.”

Bevel again contradicts the content of his statement: He’s implicitly acknowledging that he’s confirming the rumors. The additional subtext is that Bevel believes his story will be more compelling and will dispel the rumors. There is no hierarchy of truth and libel operating here, only competition between narratives.

“Business is the common denominator of all activities and enterprises. This, in turn, means there is no affair that does not pertain to the businessman. To him everything is relevant. He is the true Renaissance man.”

Bevel’s life philosophy indicates his single-minded nature: All he cares about is investing, therefore he sees investment as the core of life. Despite his obsession with money, Bevel is anxious not to be seen as a bore, self-conscious as he is of the chilly reception businessmen receive in early-20th-century New York society. He’s eager, then, to frame himself as a Renaissance man who understands every field of life.

“Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, whether they be epic or tragic.”

Bevel portrays himself as a man who’s good under pressure, someone who recognizes and capitalizes on these decisive moments. The description of his life is dramatic: As in a drama, there are defining moments (scenes) that affect people (actors) irrevocably, resulting in success or failure (epic or tragic fates). This conventional narrative structure dominates the way in which Bevel thinks about his life.

“After staring at the façade for a while, I realize it is not the building I am looking at but my memories that, like tracing paper, cover it.”

When Partenza returns to the Bevel mansion, since converted to an art museum, 50 years after she worked for Bevel, the past covers the present. Memories are a sort of fiction in that they are selective, edited reels of the past, not uncut, perfectly preserved tapes. The emergence of these memories attests to the way in which fictions can become more real than reality itself.

“You can’t eat or wear money, but it represents all the food and clothes in the world. This is why it’s a fiction.”

Partenza’s father describes the basic Marxist concept of money as an imaginary commodity—a universal measure of value. This concept challenges the assumption that money is a real, concrete thing. In fact, there is an emptiness to money, a contentlessness that defines it.

“Stocks, shares and all that garbage are just claims to future value. So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions.”

Partenza’s father’s point is that investment is gambling. A myth of investment as a sober assessment of concrete value obscures this true nature. Consequently, people are oblivious to possible consequences of speculation, mystified by the fictions of Wall Street.

“Like Victor Frankenstein’s creature, my Bevel would be made up of limbs from all these different men.”

Like a novelist’s character, Partenza’s Bevel is a fictional composite of many people. Partenza constructs her Bevel for his autobiography from the voices of American titans of industry. Like a novelist, Partenza embellishes her character, stripping it of the unremarkability that tethers it to obscurity. Bevel’s autobiography reminds the reader that even nonfiction tells a story.

“I am writing this book to stop the proliferation of versions of my life, not to multiply them. I most emphatically do not want more perspectives, more opinions. This is to be my story.”

Bevel exerts a sort of narrative hegemony; he wants there to be one story when there are multiple. This statement of his self-centered intent is remarkably candid, contradicting his professed goal to combat rumors about his wife. The whole of Trust is dedicated to subverting this outlook.

“The sole idea that anyone could sway or penetrate every company trading on the New York Stock Exchange is laughable.”

The revelation that Bevel did in fact manipulate every company on the Stock Exchange by bribing one of the ticker operators casts this dismissal in an ironic light. Without the revelation in Futures, this idea is ridiculous. However, Mildred reveals the criminal factor in Bevel’s outsize success. Bevel evades suspicion by relying on the widespread disbelief that one person could rig the market.

“‘There is a better world,’ a man said. ‘But it’s more expensive.’”

Wealth is a world apart, a domain reserved for the exclusive few. Money buys a life insulated from harshness—“a better world.” This unnamed man’s statement, overheard by Ida, suggests that while a better world exists, it only exists for a select few who are unwilling to share.

“A nation’s prosperity is based on nothing but a multitude of egoisms aligning until they resemble what is known as the common good.”

Bevel sees the world through an individualistic lens, believing that every person is a discrete, self-interested entity. In his view the common good is an illusion: Collective self-interest, not collective morality, is to credit for the common good. This statement fits into Bevel’s portrayal of himself and his forefathers as patriotic do-gooders who always align their self-interest with the best interest of the nation. Bevel wants to be lauded for his overriding drive for profit.

“Kitsch. Can’t think of Engl. trans. for this word. A copy that’s so proud of how close it comes to the original that it believes there’s more worth in this closeness than in originality itself. ‘It looks just like…!’ Imposture of feeling over actual emotion; sentimentality over sentiment. Kitsch can also be in the eye: ‘The sunset looks like a painting!’ Because artifice is now the ultimate standard, the original (sunset) has to be turned into a fake (painting), so that the latter may provide the measure of the former’s beauty.”

Mildred’s definition of kitsch is a conceptual key to Trust. In Trust, fictions dominate reality at the expense of truths; people have lost the ability to distinguish between imitation and original. Bevel is the paragon of this blindness in both his taste for kitsch and in his faux persona. Imitations proliferate in part because they are more familiar, thus more readily digested, than the original. Imitations require neither thought nor depth of feeling.

“He’d merely replicated what I’d done but at a much larger scale. He’d accounted for market impact, yes, but it had all been done with a lifeless, artificial sense of symmetry. The right notes without any sense of rhythm. Like a player-piano.”

Again, Bevel imitates rather than originates. A chasm separates Bevel’s rote strategy from Mildred’s dynamic one. The musical metaphor connotes a certain animation, even beauty, to Mildred’s strategy, as if it were an art. Her strategy is sublime while Bevel’s is uninspired.

“He understood he’d never be able to uphold the myth forming around him without my help. I understood I’d never be allowed to operate at such heights if it wasn’t through him. For a while, we both enjoyed this alliance.”

The tenuous collaboration between the Bevels is ill-fated. Each wants something the other has that they can never have: Mildred has the investing genius Bevel lacks, and he is a man who can take credit for such successes, whereas she is a woman who cannot.

“What he could teach me (nature of instruments, procedures, balance sheet analysis, etc.) was finite, while my domain was inexhaustible. Rules + defs. are fixed; conditions + our reactions to them change hourly.”

The dichotomy of the finite and the infinite contrasts Mildred to Bevel. As the person who can successfully react to an infinity of possible situations, Mildred is like a god or a computer. She weaves in and out of the rules of investing whereas Bevel remains constrained in his thinking by his adherence to traditional strategies.

“I called him a criminal. He said I couldn’t suffer his success. We barely spoke to each other for about 2 years.”

The marital fallout of Bevel’s bribery of the New York Stock Exchange ticker operator exposes the issues underlying the Bevels’ tenuous collaboration. Needing a success of his own, Bevel is forced to resort to overt criminality. However, even this plan originated with Mildred in her offhand comment about the vulnerability of the Stock Exchange. In private, Bevel cannot escape his wife’s shadow; in public, she cannot escape his.

“Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future.”

Mildred indulges in her own bit of philosophizing about investment, usually the purview of her husband. At the scale at which Mildred operates, shorting affects the very drop it banks on. In this way, it is “the past making itself present in the future.” However, on a smaller scale one person’s short would not have this future-altering effect; instead, it would be a mere speculation of a drop.