THE PICKPOCKET AND THE GIGOLO

ON GRATITUDE

Antoine J. Polgar

Gratitude is a virtue and ingratitude is a vice. The failure to accept misfortune out of gratitude for one’s good fortune is a kind of thievery. Gratitude is illustrated in parallel consolation scenes of the Robert Bresson film The Pickpocket and Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo. Even a loser like Michel, the pickpocket behind bars in Robert Bresson’s film The Pickpocket (1959) had the presence of mind to recognize his good fortune when Jeanne visits him in jail and he says “Oh, Jeanne, what a strange road I had to take to meet you!”

Director Paul Schrader noticed. He borrowed the line as a homage to Bresson in American Gigolo because Bresson was telling us that someday soon, one should be grateful that there is going to be someone waiting when we get through our misfortune. Just as Jeanne would be waiting for Michel when he gets out of jail in The Pickpocket, and just as Michelle (Lauren Hutton) is trying to get Julian, (Richard Gere) the callboy out of jail in American Gigolo (1980), Bresson imparts the hope that we should be grateful for the future of contingency when someone miraculously appears to save us from misfortune.

Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between two kinds of ignorance - invincible ignorance – which is excusable if one does not have the capacity to know something - and “vincible ignorance” which can be overcome. I claim that ingratitude is evidence of “vincible ignorance” because it reflects ignorance of the principle that misfortune is the price one pays for good fortune and a refusal to pay that price. Why should one enjoy good fortune without paying for it with misfortune unless, in the words of Epictetus, the Greek Stoic, one is “an insatiable blockhead?”

A sense of futility and ingratitude for the cards fate dealt us may at first seem to be understandable. Fate has dictated that we should experience singular misfortunes we think no one else has ever endured. When by a concatenation of circumstances, we expect things could not be worse, they get worse. And ingratitude inexorably leads to resentment - according to Kierkegaard, “the constituent principle of want of character.”

Resentment and despair fuel ingratitude and become the “strange enjoyment” experienced by the unnamed narrator in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground.

“(T)hat cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld …, in that acutely recognized and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one’s position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined forever and repented of again a minute later.”

The resentment over writerly failure is one personal example that comes to mind. Yet one can find no greater companion in a writer’s misery than the 19^th century French symbolist poet and novelist Villiers de l’Isle Adam. The French Catholic mystic novelist Léon Bloy, the symbolist poet Mallarmé and novelist Huysmans were among his devoted friends and admirers. Bloy recalls l’Isle Adam was so poor that he had to complete one of his novels on the bare floor of his garret after the bailiff repossessed his furniture. Villiers de l’Isle Adam was determined to finish what he started. One should be grateful for the time not left to lose. Like Villiers de l’Isle Adam, one’s life may be about misbegotten loves and tragic blunders. But his writing consisted of riveting and pioneering dystopic speculative fictions he had to finish such as The Future Eve (1886).

Even if one is interrupted in mid-sentence by retrograde amnesia, a power outage caused by non-payment of the electricity bill or by a tree branch falling on a power line, before they repossess the computer and the chair you are sitting on, the desk you are working at, before your eyesight fails from reading and rereading too much porn, before daylight fades and there is no light bulb to replace an old one, no car or no gas in the car to go to the store to get a lightbulb, no money to buy one, no cigarettes and no loose change beneath the sofa cushions to buy any, no food in the refrigerator and even if you could get to a supermarket, no supermarket is left that will accept your bad checks.  

To the extent that we are unmindful of the importance of the imperative of counting one’s blessings and cultivating the virtue of gratitude, the mind becomes an irremediable catalogue raisonné of ingratitude in the light of personal, historical past and present calamities. Such a litany of personal misfortune is irrelevant because one should paradoxically also be grateful for misfortune and because it is the price one pays for good fortune.  

In the past, present and future of contingency, one awakens to the poetry of life grateful for life itself in childhood or old age and for the realization of how vulnerable we are in our dependence on the lives of others, as well as to the terror of time’s expenditure in the abyss between loss, and the revelation of foundness and experiences to come. I recall waking up at the age of ten in Jackson Heights, Queens to a dawn vision of happiness and the pleasure of infinity in the sight and smell of the morning when as I open my eyes to a timeless realm of euphoria, a street kid in postwar suburbia among friends, reliving the promise of childhood past more than a half-century later in boxes of old letters from relatives in France asking how are the boys? The sailings to France in the summer on the steamships of the French Line, the girls I fell in love with and sadly left behind. One afternoon at the age of eleven after we moved from Jackson Heights in Queens to Manhattan, I took a subway alone back to the old neighborhood where I had spent childhood years and walked alone until dark humming a top forty song about missing my hometown I had memorized along with the names of my sixth-grade classmates at P.S. 149. Jackson Heights was the place where on Saturday mornings my brother and I lined up on Northern Boulevard and 82^nd Street with quarters in our pockets outside the now demolished Boulevard Theater for the children’s double feature preceded by cartoons, I’m grateful for Cuban left fielder Sandy Amoros’ catch for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the final game of the World Series in 1955,  I’m grateful for the sailings to France in the summer on the steamships of the French Line, the girls I fell in love with and sadly left behind. Where there is loss, times of childhood euphoria are islands of nostalgia in an archipelago of absences. for the guy I was writing poetry and chasing girls, for weekends when I made a run for it to hang out in with Jean-Jacques in midtown Manhattan and Greenwich Village on Saturday nights and late into early next mornings, for the midnight jazz concerts at Carnegie Hall, for Billie Holliday’s last concert in Central Park, for the performances of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis at the Apollo, for the weekend when I sailed out of the Connecticut harbor on a rowboat with an outboard motor to one of the Thimble Islands in the Long Island Sound to visit Judy, her brother Jimmy Weil and their parents, and Jimmy fished me out of the water after a dinner of lobster and wine, for the weekend at Provincetown with Jane at the onset of a hurricane, speeding across the old Triboro Bridge in my old Plymouth to see Marty on a Saturday morning in Astoria, for the new girls of summer to be loved until all summers came to an end, for inspiration’s beginning in The Golden Afternoon, for Lewis Carroll and the three Liddell girls on a punt gliding down the river Thames from Oxford to Godstow, and the song for Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland by Sammy Cain and Bob Hilliard, for the meetings with Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens’ 75^th birthday party, the sightings of celebrities and Ambassadors, cosmopolitan recognitions of being in the same place as a nobody, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett walking arm in arm down my street, Noel Coward rushing on a summer day across 42^nd Street to Grand Central, David Niven on East 57^th Street and Blossom Dearie at Danny’s Skylight Room, for the dead poets and writers I could never hang with except on the printed page, the working stiffs, Harvey, his whole life a file clerk at the VA in Cleveland, Charles, the sorter at the LA Postal Annex, Philip on a Detroit Assembly Line at the Cadillac Transmission factory, Lennox, the Trinidadian, now in Denmark who gave me free tickets to Che, his play at the Free Store Theater on Cooper Square for which he was tried for obscenity, for the remembrance of cigarettes and Jim Beam on the rocks and coffee laced with Jamison’s whiskey, for my cousin with her family in New Caledonia and the cousin with two daughters and partner thinking the pandemic a conspiracy, for my adult online students, the Correctional Officer in Staten Island who contaminated her family with Covid because she had to keep working, for the Moroccan family living on Queens Boulevard over a Stop n Shop across the street from a clinic, the couple on Highland Avenue next to a True Value and an ice cream shop, for the lady living with a boyfriend in an apartment near a public library in Saratoga Springs, for my wife Robin who flew sixteen hours not knowing if I was dead or alive and the Algerian-born doctor in France who saved my life, for the woman in Middlebury who gave me a hug and kept asking me who is the mysterious stranger who braids her horse’s mane every day, for the weekends half asleep contemplating the Vermont foliage changing colors in the rain, fictions lurking in the ambiguity of desire, for the Maryknoll Sister I once knew who held my soul in her warm hand and holds my hand in her soul.

Author’s Note – References in this essay include the Robert Bresson film The Pickpocket (1959), Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980), Saint Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologiae, (First Part of the Second Part, Question 76.); Epictetus (Enchiridion XXV); Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground.