16HEMINGWAY AND DEATH
On July 2, 1961, in his home in Idaho. Hemingway put a shotgun in his mouth and blew off his head. I was shocked by the violence of what he had done to himself, not by the act of suicide. I commended him for that and wished that if I were in despair or painfully ill, I would have his courage. But the first thing I thought of was Eva remarking on the sadness in him, a sadness I, too, had witnessed but was loath to admit. I naïvely wondered how anyone with such fame and with a life so rich with adventure and creativity could ever feel lonely or sad or not want to live forever. Of course, I understand better now, so many years later, how one’s public façade may just be covering a great internal despair.
How things change. The very things Hemingway was prized for—his super-macho hunting and fishing and drinking, his love of the bullfight, and his pared-down writing style—are now in some quarters regarded as a patriarchal old story.
The Eiffel Tower and the Tundra
Manhattan, The City College of New York, Fall 1958
That fall, in our senior year at City College, Eva and I lived glued together. We spent our evenings reading and making love, which cost us nothing, bed being the opera of the poor, as the old Italian saying goes.17 We smoked unfiltered Gauloises, like the French intellectuals, and drank pots of coffee and stayed up until early dawn talking politics; we cried over the same injustice; the 1927 execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti was just over our shoulders an hour ago, and we were sure we would have gone to Spain in 1936 to save the Republic from Franco and the fascists. When we went out, we each paid for our own dinner and movie tickets because we were ardent believers in the equality of the sexes. How lucky for me, who sometimes skipped meals to save money to buy books.
“I don’t like a man who invites me out to dinner,” Eva once said on our first friendly walks though the Village. “It feels like I’m being bought.”
Eva and I were in sweet harmony until she said, “Let’s get married after graduation.”
I did not want to marry and get a straight job—to do what? Teach high school, like my beloved Mr. Anderson, explaining poems to indifferent students, dreaming of the summer vacation to Mexico, and living a middle-of-the-road life only to die of a heart attack while grading papers over the weekend? Have kids and stay at home at night washing the dishes, changing the diapers, and getting ready to go to work the next morning? The writer Cyril Connolly had said, “There is no more enemy of good art than a pram in the hall.” Marriage would also usher in the demise of erotic sex and the early death of my youth.
I was a writer and needed to see the planet and its wondrous doings. I wanted to be like Hemingway, who had invented himself and who wrote true sentences and who let the world come to him on his terms. I wanted to live intensely, as writers were supposed to, and one day arrive at a vision of life earned from experience and reflection. To come to some truth and to tell that truth in the form of an engaging, fresh story, I believed was the writer’s task—if ever writers were to have tasks.
“Let’s wait a year and get ourselves established first,” I said, hoping to buy time.
“Oh. In that case, my mother has offered to send me to Paris for a year as a graduation present.”
“I’d go with you if I had the money.”
“When will you ever have money, Fred?”
Now, with graduation not far ahead, I wondered what to do with myself in the job department. Of course I would write novels and stories, but how would I support myself in the process?
A former City College student, Sy Migdal, who was studying at Syracuse University, suggested that I apply to graduate school there. I balked. Hemingway had barely finished high school before he set out for Europe and penned his way to fame; Melville had only a grade school education but wrote Moby-Dick, the greatest American novel. Djuna Barnes never finished grade school, and she went on to live in Paris and pen her wild Nightwood, obscure passages of which we, the bohemian elite, read aloud in the college cafeteria.
Why would I spend five years or more of my life of adventure and travel and creativity to earn a PhD—then strive for tenure in some middling university thousands of miles from New York, where I would die the slow death of complacency and convention and where I could not find an espresso?
“There are three reasons for teaching,” Sy said. “June, July, and August. Also, you like to read.”
I succumbed and applied to graduate schools, the last refuge of the English major without prospects. Harvard accepted me but without a scholarship. So that was out. Columbia rejected me. Syracuse University offered me a teaching assistant position that included nine credits of free classes and a stipend of two hundred forty dollars per month for ten months a year. I read the letter and felt sick: Syracuse was Siberia, removed from everything I loved and understood. I was to go into exile before I had the chance to live, to write my masterpiece.
I also applied for a job as an organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. I was hired sight unseen. I was to organize shops in Georgia, a right-to-work state, where many of the New York City garment factories had fled, secretly hauling machines and equipment into trucks on weekends and leaving the workers to arrive on Mondays to vacant lofts and no jobs. Runaway shops, they were called, running to where no union could follow them. My mother had worked all her life in the garment center, and there were several instances in which her union was able to protect her from being summarily dismissed or had fought for her to get unemployment benefits when her boss falsely claimed that she had quit. My sympathy with unions had started early.
To be a union organizer had appeal—some glamour, even. It fit into my idea of myself as a fighter against injustice and as a radical, though I had done very little to fill those roles except to read the leftist classics—Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, André Malraux’s Man’s Fate, and Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution—and to argue politics with fellow lefties in the college cafeteria. In 1954 the United States engineered the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala’s democratically elected president, who was battling with the United Fruit Company. I was outraged and I joined a protest with five others in front of the United Nations. A photograph of me carrying a placard that said, “Get out of Guatemala” was on the front page of the communist Daily Worker, and I was sure that I was in the FBI files and that I would never have a job in the post office, as my mother had dreamed.
I soon learned that there was a reason I was hired so readily: the job was dangerous. Union organizers were not welcome in the fabled hospitable South, and they were greeted with clubs; some were dumped over the state line at gunpoint. I took Falstaff’s advice that the better part of valor is discretion.
In 1959, after graduation and a summer spent working in the hotels in the Catskills, I saw Eva off at the end of August, on a liner bound for France. It occurred to me, as I was waving her good-bye from the dock, that, like Marilyn, she, too, was going to live in Paris before I ever set a foot there.
Instead of setting sail to Paris, I took the bus north to Syracuse and landed in the tundra.
* * *
17THE RESCUE
The problems with living with my mother that previous year had become so exacerbated that I began couch surfing in the homes of fellow students whose parents took pity on me. One of them called the Jewish Family Services and they came to my aid again. Mr. Stanley Diamond, the social worker and counselor there, said, “We will take care of you until you finish your senior year, because we think otherwise you might not finish.”
I said, “You already know I’m not Jewish, right?”
“Yes, so what? In a traditional shtetl, if the family cannot afford it, the scholar receives full support for his studies from the community.” He laughed. “Sometimes it is money, sometimes a meal, sometimes some small change, and sometimes a chicken.”
They paid for my rent, utilities, a portion of a telephone, books, minimal clothes, and food. With their help I was able to share with t
wo roommates a railroad flat on 112th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway. One was a student at City College, the other at Columbia. I was slowly able to organize my life and my studies with a much-needed calm and order.
Dostoevsky said sometimes three thousand rubles made the difference in a young man’s life. The support from the Jewish Family Services was my three thousand rubles. There’s no way to describe to this day, to this moment, my feeling of gratitude.
The Owl and the Bookworm
New York, Syracuse University, Fall 1959
It snowed the September week that I first set foot in Syracuse. That snow is still falling on my head all these years later, even in the hottest summer.
When it was not covered in an iron blanket of pelting snow, Syracuse was a cheerless pewter gray. The sky’s complexion underscored my grim mood. Within a week I missed my friends back in New York City and their hunger to read and talk about books. I missed sitting with them in the college cafeteria and gabbing in the Emerald and in the all-night cafeteria on Sixth Avenue and Seventh Street, where the Abstract Expressionists had carried on after their Cedar Tavern hangout closed for the night. I missed Book Row, where I had spent so much rich time browsing and sometimes, when I could least afford it, even buying books. It was in one of those outdoor bookstalls that I had found a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, charred at the edges but signed in violet ink, for just a dollar. That was almost as exciting as finding a pirate chest packed with the gold that would free me from worry forever.
Sy Migdal, my studious roommate, had already spent a year in Syracuse and had made no friends. My portion of the rent for the furnished apartment we shared—two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a living room with two wobbly desks—was a quarter of my monthly two hundred forty dollar teaching stipend; heat was included but not electricity. We could have found a cheaper place if we lived some miles away, but neither of us had a car and, like many New Yorkers, had not learned how to drive. The campus was a twenty-minute walk—much longer if it snowed, which it did continuously, leaving me to trudge through knee-high drifts.
There was a bar and a Greek luncheonette two blocks from my apartment, and then, farther down the street, nothing but rows of brown houses covered in darkness. Syracuse proper was in the distance and too far for me to walk, so my life was circumscribed by a few cheerless streets. I was a displaced, provincial New Yorker, a greenhorn landed not in the polyglot and ethnic mixes of turn-of-the-century Lower East Side but in the true, vanilla, monolingual white America.
I was lonely. Although that had always been my state, it felt worse in Syracuse because there was so little to do to offset it. I could not, on a whim, go to a coffeehouse or a movie or a museum, or hope to run into a friend on a park bench in Washington Square. It was so much easier to have little money in New York City, where the city itself made you rich. I was an in-between person: not an undergraduate who could mingle with the other undergraduates, and not a married man like many of my fellow graduate students who had no interest in lonely bachelors. I came to understand why Sy had made no friends.
Sy wrote his papers within days of receiving his assignments. I spent hours in the library reading both primary and secondary material and making long, handwritten notes on large yellow pads. My papers were overdue before I even started writing them, and I had to ask for extensions or incompletes.
“Sy, did you look like an owl when I knew you at City?” I was envious of his ability to concentrate and get his work done on time. “Because you look like one now. A studious owl, in fact.”
“Did you look like a fool when I knew you at City? Because you look like one now,” he replied, without ever looking up from his Wordsworth.
I was a fool because of my dreamy approach to graduate school, to literature.
“I don’t want to be brilliant, Fred, I just want to get my PhD and get a good teaching job,” Sy said.
Where was his passion for literature? Why did he not become an engineer? Still, I took his point. Why was I so foolish, feeling that everything I wrote had to be brilliant, extraordinary? Did I think that I had infinite time to write my papers, infinite time for my life to come together?
After phone, laundry, food, and incidentals, I was left with about twenty dollars a week. I had two pairs of shoes, both always wet from the snow. I had only a thin spring topcoat, so I layered myself with old sweaters I bought from the local Salvation Army. Someone became ill in the third week of the semester, and I was offered his job teaching composition at night school, and that helped my finances. I bought long underwear and rubber boots and wool trousers that had the complexion and feel of Brillo. I had a bit more money, but now I had to read and correct compositions from both my morning and evening classes, fifty essays a week total, and I had to find time to study and write my own papers, that is to say, to forever prepare to write the papers.
I limped along, demoralized, and when the college closed for Christmas break and the students had fled for home—even Sy went home to his mother on the Lower East Side—or flown to warmer climes for vacation, I stayed behind. I spent days and evenings in the library doing research for my already-late final essays. One was on Melville’s novella Billy Budd. I went deep into the secondary material and read the available biographies, going back even to the earlier ones like Raymond Weaver’s 1921 Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. My yellow-lined note-filled pads resembled schizophrenic pencil drawings.
I did not simply want to master the bibliography; I was searching for the yet-unfound key to Melville’s art, to his soul. My love for Hemingway now seemed naïve. He was a lightweight and, in his vaunted brevity and concision, limited in the range and richness of language, shallow in experience, lacking in what great fiction offers and what Melville possessed, wisdom.
The first and only page of my essay was unoriginal, a bland digest of the already published and worse, stiffly written. Each sentence seemed a tortured translation from German. I had wanted to be considered serious, subtle, scholarly. Somehow I believed, with the example of T. S. Eliot’s critical essays, that the drier and creakier the sentence, the more profound the work. Also, I yearned to be more than a competent graduate student. What new and brilliant and penetrating and astounding thing could I say about Melville’s dark, complex story that would make me shine?
By the end of the Christmas break, I was not much further in my essay than when I had begun; the same was true of my essays for two other classes. By the end of the first academic year that spring, I had successfully finished only one class of the six I had taken; the others were incompletes, with papers due before the semester’s end, a deadline I had surpassed. My drive to perfection had only led me to nullity.
Perfume and Work Boots
New York, Syracuse University, Fall 1960
Eva returned from her sojourn in Paris looking like another woman. Gone was her peasant skirt and her embroidered blouses, her open sandals made in Greenwich Village. Her hair was cut short, showing her beautiful bare neck, and her chic, tight-fitting Parisian clothes and elegant shoes made her a woman you’d turn twice to see. And now she was also perfumed with a scent that meant sex. She had transformed herself from a bohemian girl into a glamorous Parisian woman. I was still a boy dressed in denim work shirts, work boots, jeans—like the clichéd bohemian rebel of City College and Greenwich Village.
Eva was now a woman with a past: Paris. She was Eva, but then again she wasn’t. Clearly she had learned exciting new things about bed and I was jealous—more, I was worried that I did not measure up against the skill of a Frenchman who was born to make love and to know wine. There was a new and unfamiliar erotic tension in our lovemaking, and I strained to win Eva away from this phantom Frenchman or Frenchmen. I suddenly felt that I could not let her go away again, that I could not lose her. I said, in the last hours before she took the train back to New York, “Wait for me until I finish the master’s degree at least. Only a year more. Then I can get a teaching job in a high school and we’ll marry.”
“You will never marry me, and if you did, it would be a disaster.” She was silent for a long moment, then added, “Let’s think about it.”
A few hours after she left, I wrote her saying how much I loved her and wanted a family, as she had always wanted. We would start a fresh and vibrant life in just a year. I meant it: I imagined us walking hand in hand into the conjugal dawn. But I did not believe it.
I would not marry in a year, or in the following year or the years after. I had not yet met the open road, had not yet written a complete, full, extraordinary novel, or any kind of novel, or any kind of anything. I had not yet lived life to its hilt or had ever been to Paris. When would all that life start? When, in fact, would my life start?
Rebecca and Sandra
New York, Syracuse University, Fall 1960
My second year at Syracuse University was grayer than my first. I found a dank, barely affordable furnished apartment on the top floor, under a leaky roof that the wind went through and sometimes let in the rain and snow. A single window generously gave view to a brick wall with runny mortar, its white lime leaving mysterious streaks for me to decipher when I was bored with my ceiling.
Rebecca, my neighbor across the hall, was an artist getting her MFA; her husband was a law student in faraway New York. On his few visits they spent their time arguing, then fighting, then making quickly finished love. He moaned. She didn’t. She was beautiful, with large and sad eyes. In fact, she was sad and beautiful. I thought, in one of my more profound meditations, that sadness was a kind of beauty and a way of life.
Me, exiled in Syracuse, 1961.
Sometimes Rebecca and I had coffee in her place and we smoked strong, expensive Balkan Sobranies she bought in a fancy shop in Manhattan, and we talked—the stuff of life, books and art. I even enjoyed the line that divided our taste: she was for Cézanne; I was for Van Gogh. I liked that she smelled of turpentine and that her jeans were paint flecked, reminding me of my Art Students League days, and our conversations brought me back to the talkfests at the arty table in the City College cafeteria. Rebecca was Brooklyn born and pronounced, as did I, “courfee” for “coffee” and “laur” for “law.” I found these familiar sounds comforting, taking some of the edge off my homesickness. Sometimes she left a pot of vegetarian lentil soup at my door. I did the same for her, but my lentil soup had hot dogs in it. Because men need protein, I explained. Of course I had a crush on her, mostly for her warmth and the mystery of her sadness.
My Young Life Page 20