Anger’s a slippery subject. A bit like one of those banned words we’re not supposed to say but about which our silence doesn’t seem to exonerate us. Anger’s inside us. Like a bacillus.
Anger certainly gets a bad press. Think of Billy Budd and how things turned out for him. Think of Mr. Hyde and the stain he leaves on poor Dr. Jekyll. Mythical giants are always angry. I wonder if they know why. “Make no friendship with a man given to anger,” Proverbs says. Make that double for women. The ancients—Seneca and Aristotle—saw anger as a concern, but scarcely agreed about it. One (Seneca the safe) thought anger was the road to ruin. The other (Aristotle the score-keeper) believed anger to be a virtue one was foolish to abjure if circumstances required it.
Anger, of course, is an extreme, and extremes are widely looked on as bad. If you have “anger issues,” you need to remediate them. Something’s gone sideways, become anti-social, unsustainable, potentially dangerous. Take a class. I’m not sure what template for human behavior underlies this attitude toward anger. A quest for constant mellowness, I guess. Turning the other cheek. Seeing everything the other guy’s way. “Oh, yeah. That’s fine. You’re good. Not a problem. Go ahead and break in line in front of me. Have a nice day.”
I’ve always believed I have a bad temper—though my wife tells me I really don’t; that I merely, occasionally, fall victim to an unruly spasm of (usually) frustration or an experience of bald unfairness. But that I’m not an “angry man” down deep. Her view makes it seem that susceptibility to bad temper is not the same as anger. That anger is more profound. But I can’t tell the difference—though I’d worry if I thought I was angry about nothing. Or about everything.
Both my parents most assuredly exhibited what I think of as fits of boisterous anger. And neither one of them ever told me I shouldn’t get angry (though they didn’t tell me I should, either). My parents typically got angry about things. The neighbors. My behavior. Getting angry—getting “mad”—seemed to be just a fact of life for them—something natural that now and then happened. My mother once got angry and threw a cloth sack of change at me, when I was sixteen. Right at my head. The change was the proceeds from my paper route. She wanted me to finish collecting from my customers so we could go away for Christmas. Only I didn’t want to. The winged cloth sack—banks still used those, it was the 1950s—missed me, sailed past, and broke a window in our house. We laughed about it afterward.
On another occasion, my father and I drove out to some Park Service property to illegally harvest a Christmas tree (I don’t know why both these events happened at Christmas. Possibly Christmas is a time when people are angrier). In the woods, my father picked out a modest-sized spruce he liked, but I persuaded him to cut down a much bigger one. When we got the tree home, however, it was far too tall to fit inside our living room; whereupon my father, possibly confounded by frustration, cut off the tree’s peak—instead of sawing it off from the bottom—thereby maiming the tree, in my view. This to me inexplicable act instantly infuriated me, so that I actually threw the entire tree at my father, then turned to run and get away. Only, he got a grip on me and held me, and whipped me committedly with whatever he’d found to lay his hand on. A piece of hemp rope, if I’m not mistaken. We did not laugh about that. Ever.
I readily acknowledge that by retailing these two now rather fond remembrances from my childhood, I’m not making a very positive case for anger. Indeed, I’m not trying to. Only a dimwit doesn’t understand that anger is almost always trailed by something unpleasant, sometimes something harmful—a stain again, or a wound—to someone, often to one’s own self. Though I will say about my father, whom I loved, that anger was not his usual face toward the world. He was volatile, easily frustrated, often overmatched by things he couldn’t make work right. In our father-son Christmas-tree-throwing episode he seemed to me to give over to a passionate energy, like a dark enchantment that separated him from his unlikeable circumstances, which—though the consequences were hurtful—I’d quite wittingly provoked and from which he needed freeing. I’ll never know if in his anger he renounced all control or embraced it. But I forgive him for it, and I commend myself for forgiving him. I’m sure he regretted it.
Plato advises that anger is—at least it can be—a stimulus to self-inquiry, though we might not always use it that way. It’s probably a good idea to wonder occasionally if the things we think about ourselves are true. Am I always a staunch friend? Am I patient? Am I really a good listener? Am I angry a lot? Possibly regretting anger was my father’s mode of taking stock.
Self-reflectively, I admit I’m always shocked by people who never seem to get angry. I’d never want to be such a person. To me, there are plenty of things (worse than breaking in line ahead of me) that are worth getting angry about. It’s prudent to distinguish the natural from the good. And where anger is concerned, in my view, we are not in the realm of the moral or the ethical, but of the natural and the emotional, the realm of stimulus and response—response to fear, to grief, to frustration, to need, and to much more. When I claim that I have a bad temper, I’m probably just using the promise of anger as an armament against the thing itself and its always-possible staining consequences. But in the end, it’s true: I regard anger as an acceptable behavior mode; not the best, not the worst, yet so like the many other human steps we take—into love, into trust, into revenge, into retreat and loss—a step into the vertiginous unknown.
Richard Ford is a novelist, a story writer, and an essayist.
