by Peter Martin
The rest you know from before, how I could not put myself over to my own deepest loved. The grief and anger holds, but I tell you this:
Nothing is ever forgotten, everything is remembered, and this makes everybody a relative, you follow me?
io. M.ottel
(1848-1887)
Except after it was too late, i segregated myself.
I segregated myself from the segregated and the segregators both.
From man I flew, as from God.
Indifferent to death I feared life except after it was too late; fighting movement with inertia, remaining restless and stationary.
I lived by No and it was insufficient.
Lenka and Sergey; finding them by apparent chance, they showed man to me by the tracks of his trail. I went with them for no honor, victory, or survival — too late for me to drink the use of man, the wealth of blood and brain — but to abolish such as myself.
By accident, it can be wrongly said, I helped push my nephew Laib to America. Yet nothing happens accidentally, only surprisingly. The inevitability is masked.
The face of it was and is more than ugly. It blew arrogant winds over fires denied water, carrying the unburned to other fires.
Its exhalations blew pieces like myself into holes and corners until the flames found them again; or a curving gust flew them to other traps, the winds whistling in an imitation of eternity.
In this climate, say the learned clothed apes, it is possible to sew sails that can accommodate these winds, using needles ground fine out of the bones of the less cunning and thread woven from their sinews. Beware. This is the core of its victory.
Make no friends with those winds, nor compromise with its fires, nor trust in water.
Make friends with the earth.
Afterword
By Wallace Markfield
JL J-ERE we see force in its grossest and most summary form—the force that kills. How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the creature it can kill at any moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same; it turns a man into a stone. . . . He is alive; he has a soul; arid yet—he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this—a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accomodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it?—Simone Weil
At sixty inches I stopped growing; year after year in my youngest manhood the recruiting clerks would measure me. Some tried to stretch me; one of them made a change in my nose with his pistol butt and I never wore the Tsar’s uniform.—Nochim (1834—66), in The Landsmen
For six, eight weeks, I put off reading The Landsmen in the smug certainty that it was yet another crudely written, sentimental celebration of piety and poverty, yet another ruefully nostalgic chronicle offering the everlasting shtetl population o iluftmenschen and schlimazilim . (Rootless intellectuals and hapless fools.) Weary with the genre, anticipating, at most and at best, permutations and combinations of wonder-working rabbis, ritual slaughterers, sadsack yeshiva students, drunken horse thieves, chicken pluckers, militant socialists, and the single obligatory
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sweet-tempered gentile, I started skimming. How styleless, how stilted, I told myself! Why, who in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe ever asked questions like, “Can’t you reach God though your boots are pinching?” Went “Hiba-hiba” when they laughed or lamented? Sang such songs as “If the wind of pigs thickens the air / Look not to drive the pigs away?” Talked in aphorisms and paradoxes? (“The cleaner dirtied me.” . . . “Happy the generation wherein the clever listen to the fools.” . . . “Look for heaven and find only worse hells.”)
But presently I came across:
The sergeant cut sapling wood with his sword to make a small hot fire. Removing the handkerchief from the mother’s mouth, he thrust the face and arms into the fire, keeping it hot with more wood until the skin had shriveled, more especially the arms. He drove the sword under her left shoulder blade as an afterthought of surety, wiped the sword with the handkerchief which had been in the mother’s mouth, and threw the handkerchief in the fire. Watching the fire burn itself out, the sergeant felt the sudden press of his bowels and he relieved himself, and threw stones over the last few smoking embers, and walked back to the highroad.
I was grabbed and shaken up by this passage, but not only because of its consummate brutality. (From my grandfather, after all, I’d heard enough to understand that in Alexander Ill’s army the revolver was too costly, too high-prized an instrument to use on a Jew.) What unsettled me, I must confess, was a glimmering, a presentiment, a hunch that I would soon have my hands full coming to terms with a talent too profuse to place or pigeonhole, an American-Jewish writer whose intensity and energy and singularity were light years removed from those forces and figures which, more than I cared to acknowledge, had shaped the roots and reaches of my own work.
For I’d never heard of Peter Martin, never so much as spotted his name in the explications and anthologies of American-Jewish literature. And nobody I knew had anything to say about him. After a score of inquiries, though, I turned up one critic who dimly recollected refusing an
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invitation to review The Landsmen for either Commonweal or The New Leader. “What can I tell you?” he told me. “Granted, it had the flavor and savor of authenticity, but authenticity was the last thing this young Jewish intellectual had on his mind in the 1950s. A thousand words on a bunch of lumpen, landlocked Yiddenl Not with my exquisitely fine- tuned post-Stalinist, post-existential sensibility, my taste for dialectic and disputation, my grounding in the New Criticism! Let Lionel Trilling risk his tenure. My reputation would be made exalting symbolic, archetypal, quintessential Jews—kvetchy urban characters specializing in angst and alienation, moral undergroundlings who gave me a chance to plug the human condition.”
From the late 1940s throughout most of the 1950s, God knows, my own mind was stuffed with similar notions. The writers I envied and emulated were Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Leslie Fiedler, and Robert Warshow—whose Jewishness, I believed,, gave them a wonderful kind of edge on the Zeitgeist, as though they’d been born a day older in history than everybody else. Each in his own way commanded a complex, embattled, sophisticated style which linked the idiom of the academy with the idiom of the streets, and collectively they constituted, as Seymour Krim has written, “the first homebred group of writers to bear the full brunt of Mann, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Celine.”
This was the period of heady half-truths, when Malamud proclaimed, “All men are Jews”; when Fiedler, in a discussion of Negro and Jew, concluded, “There seems to be a transcendent, eternal Jew who lives in the consciousness of all peoples”; when Warshow, reviewing Meyer Levin’s movie The Illegals, wrote, “The Jewish awareness of a long history often masks a refusal to recognize history at all”; and Clement Greenberg answered huffily that “the time is at hand to move out from ‘It’s hard to be a Jew’ to Kafka’s ‘It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds they have made.’”
And even the toughest-minded realpolitikers gave an impression of seeking, like Isaac Rosenfeld, “the everlasting in the ephemeral things: not in iron, stone, brick, concrete, steel, and chrome, but in paper, ink, pigment, sound, voice, gesture, and graceful leaping.” For the legacy of
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political insight and social criticism they’d conserved through the 1930s turned to ashes at news of the Holocaust. Still, they were left with a certain plaintive satisfaction: the world they’d seen coming had truly arrived. Something almost akin to euphoria—“Jewish vertigo,” Harold Rosenberg called it—could be sensed in the prevaili
ng mood of wanhope which invaded the avant garde; by 1930, at any rate, Delmore Schwartz was exhorting a symposium to “post yourselves on the periphery—the true center and community of marginal men who are homeless in the world. Sing from there the Jewish blues and find, amid the clamor and din, the roaring in your ears, a language commensurate with the unheard scream—a language which will bring joy alive.”
In fiction, this language turned increasingly ironic, oblique, curvilinear and, at times, almost gaggy. (“Syntax,” William Poster once asserted, “died around 1947.”) To be sure, it was sensitive and responsive—so sensitive, so responsive that it cracked under the pressure imposed by themes of suffering, redemption, and transcendence, by characters expropriated from Dostoyevsky or Kafka and given to speaking in the cadences of Sholom Aleichim.
Though I all along had doubts about the impulse and thrust of such writing, I nearly always fought them down. My own work, after all, dealt with these themes, expropriated the very same characters and carried comparable cadences. (Sample: “Believe me, the face we seek is seldom, seldom the face we come upon. Anyway, boyeleh , we are all strangers, and it is only the mass grave of history which brings us together.”) Thus, I felt bitterly irritated when Elliott Cohen went after “the herd of alienated writers” in a 195 1 Commentary editorial. “Enough, more than enough!” he thundered. “Declare a moratorium on that multitude of marginal men.” I promptly started a seething rejoinder— e.g., “Last night, Mr. Cohen, I dreamed I had been turned into a goat and was about to be dispatched by you into the wilderness.”
But then, in the midst of some prodigious point about “self-styled legislators of literary taste,” I rose and started rummaging through a two-year backlog of prestigious quarterlies. I found fifteen short stories by, among others, Calder Willingham, John Berryman, Bernard Malamud, and Paul Goodman. Eleven of the stories had to do with
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neurasthenic writers, consumptive tailors, unemployed cantors, and synagogue builders 'who schlepped about a metaphysical metropolis during a timeless depression; and in at least five I could have used footnotes from Martin Buber. And quite suddenly I was assailed by wild longings for the works of Sholem Asch and I. J. Singer and Abraham Cahan, for some straightforward, elemental accounts of steerage, sweatshops, and strikes.
Nevertheless, I suppose I’d have gone ahead lambasting Cohen. Only, before long I ran into William Barrett, then an editor oi Partisan Review. He started praising a story I’d just sent off to the magazine, and I was delighted. For it was the first time I’d made connection in fiction with my own boyhood—mentioned movies, egg creams, and Big Little books, celebrated Chinese food and a certain crazy girl around the corner named Maxine. “/ loved it,” Barrett said softly. “The others. ...” After a few silent seconds he went on to say, “The others felt it was a shade too peppy for the PR Weltanschaung."
Less than a year later, when The Landsmen appeared, most everybody who mattered to me was carrying on over the bits and pieces of Bellow’s Angie March which were popping up all over the place—their exuberance, audacity, bounce, and joyous affirmation. “Bellow,” Delmore Schwartz prophesied, “will show us the way back from flight, renunciation, and exile into our country and our culture: our America.” And Elliott Cohen, as I remember, remarked, “Who knows? Maybe our American-Jewish writers might discern from Bellow that Huckleberry Finn is as relevant to their situation as Joseph K. and Alyosha Karamazov.”
2
Peter Martin was no child of those cannibalistic literary times. Indeed, from what his wife, Ruth, has told me and from the impression I’ve formed staring and staring at his photograph—the wide, blond, affable face, the air of gentle earnestness and courteous, manly decency—I suspect it’s just as well he never fell in with me and mes semblables. Where, after all, had he published? This schlocksmith, this
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TV writer, this Kraft Theater Big Thinker, this easy-going petitionsigning PAl-style progressive! Inside of five fast minutes we’d have most likely called him a liblab or a left-wing middlebrow, had some good mean fun parodying Reginald Rose or Paddy Chayefsky.
It turns out that he was born, by crazy coincidence, no more than two subway stops away from me in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He was a big, strong, solidly-built, street-wise kid with speed to burn—what candy-store intellectuals used to call a “shtarke.” (Significantly, I never thought to ask about Martin’s Jewish background, nor did his wife make a point of it; I’d guess, though, that like any average middle-class boy in that red brick one- and two-family-house neighborhood, he picked up a smattering of Yiddish, fasted a few hours on Yom Kippur and dragged himself through the obligatory year at a Talmud Torah where overworked, underpaid rabbis prepared you for bar mitzvah with a transliterated Hebrew paragraph and a hectographed speech.
He grew up in the 1920s on stoopball and running bases, Dixie cups and fudgsicles, rubber-band guns and air rifles, Abe Kabbible and the Katzenjammer Kids, “Og, Son of Fire” and Tom Swift, the Radio Rogues and “The Rise of the Goldbergs,” William S. Hart and Leatherstocking. ‘‘Our fathers wondered whether we were Jews or a new kind o ishaygitzf the poet Milton Klonsky writes of that generation and those neighborhoods. ‘‘But because time—and America—was on our side, they let us have our way, which was more and more becoming theirs as well. For they, too, could smell the sweet keen smell of Coney Island frying in its own deep fat.”
Coaches at Erasmus Hall High School must have adored this beautifully coordinated kid who showed such style at the plate and in the infield, who could have done at least the second-best breast stroke in Brooklyn if he hadn’t pulled a shoulder muscle tossing the javelin. Teachers called him ‘‘responsible,” ‘‘disciplined,” and ‘‘scholarly”; after grading his themes they had a habit of adding phrases like ‘‘nicely written and admirably researched.”
For he was something of a workhorse. When he covered sports for The Erasmian he made it his business to flesh out stories with oddball statistics and arcane analogies to Greek mythology; when he wrote
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varsity-show skits at N.Y.U. and Columbia he timed the laughs at rehearsal and discarded any piece of business which drew less than a boffo; when he fell in love with jazz he took jobs on seltzer wagons and newspaper trucks to pay for first pressings of Louis Armstrong.
I have an idea that he had little use for the graduate-student squalor favored by many of the writers I knew who saw dirt as one of the forms of liberation, that he kept his life and the objects about him in good bourgeois order. And though he started selling radio plays while he was still a college student, he never ran up against the blocks and self-doubts and recurrent failures of nerve which commonly exhaust the will and energy of writers who achieve early recognition. It was not Martin’s nature, for that matter, to agonize long about “losing his soul” in the marketplace; he thrived on the endless revisions, the impossible deadlines, the ulcerous meetings, the captiousness of actors, directors, and sponsors.
Because he had a knack with people and an extraordinary flair for administration, executive jobs came regularly and easily. After a spell in radio soap opera {Helen Trent), he set up a TV story department at NBC. There followed nine years at ABC, then three more at CBS in addition to his own free-lance writing for Kraft Theater and Philco Playhouse. Doubtless his mix of talents might have carried him farther along in those early years of TV—the “Golden Age” when on any given week fifty original dramas with a claim to seriousness showed up on the small screen. Yet he appeared to lack that final dedication, that absolute commitment which corporations exact in return for wealth and power.
Besides, he had six million Jews on his mind.
3
Perhaps Spring Valley, the New York town he moved to in the late 1940s, was the worst environment for a writer with a yen to be the American Sean O’Casey. Once a mean way station on the road to the Borscht Belt, a sprawl of broken-down bungalow colonies, kochaleins , a
nd chicken farms, it had turned into an etceterogenious muster of split-level developments, artsy-craftsy ranch houses, and Zionist-
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oriented communes. Now solid business and gemiitlich professionals joined with artists, poets, and academics to find a modern young rabbi for the Mies van der Rohe-style temple, form a Hebrew Study group, a B’nai Brith chapter, a Combined Jewish Appeal. “In the green pastures of Spring Valley by the waters of Nyack,” Harvey Swados observed, “they sat upon their daises and wept. And why not? Who had a better right? After twenty years of assimilation even the alrightnick could sense America was no sure thing.”
Along with everybody else, Martin sent money, food, and clothing to the survivors, and learned the new rhetoric of intergroup relations— those pious platitudes which would fit Buchenwald and Auschwitz within the realm of the explainable. But all the fund-raising dinners, all the talk by human relations experts about “mutual understanding,” “healthful democratic attitudes,” and “our common Judeo-Christian heritage” could never seriously engage him. He longed for continuity and connection. Perhaps he had in mind what Laib the musician calls “a history, a valuable history, a part in man’s enduring chronicle: Golinsk, but more than Golinsk, more than the remembered dead, the living and the imperishable.”