The 60s
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flowing to the endless sea
whose waves come to this shore a world away.
Your body of new wood your eyes alive barkbrown of treetrunks
the leaves and flowers of trees stars all caught in crowns of trees
your life gone down, broken into endless earth
no longer a world away but under my feet and everywhere
I look down at the one earth under me,
through to you and all the fallen
the broken and their children born and unborn
of the endless war.
—Muriel Rukeyser
October 7, 1967
Moon Song
I am alive at night.
I am dead in the morning—
an old vessel who used up her oil,
bleak and pale-boned.
No miracle. No dazzle.
I’m out of repair,
but you are tall in your battle dress
and I must arrange for your journey.
I was always a virgin,
old and pitted.
Before the world was, I was.
I have been oranging and fat,
carrot-colored, gaped at,
allowing my cracked O’s to drop on the sea
near Venice and Mombasa.
Over Maine I have rested.
I have fallen like a jet into the Pacific.
I have committed perjury over Japan.
I have dangled my pendulum,
my fat bag, my gold, gold,
blinkedy light
over you all.
So if you must inquire, do so.
After all, I am not artificial.
I looked long upon you,
love-bellied and empty,
flipping my endless display
for you, my cold, cold
coverall man.
You need only request
and I will grant it.
It is virtually guaranteed
that you will walk into me like a barracks.
So come cruising, come cruising,
you of the blastoff,
you of the bastion,
you of the scheme.
I will shut my fat eye down,
headquarters of an area,
house of a dream.
—Anne Sexton
September 7, 1968
Feel Me
“Feel me to do right,” our father said
on his death bed. We did not quite
know—in fact, not at all—what he meant.
His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall.
He left us a key, but how did it
fit? “Feel me
to do right.” Did it mean
that, though he died, he would be felt
through some aperture, or by some unseen instrument
our dad just then had come
to know? So, to do right always, we need but feel his
spirit? Or was it merely
his apology for dying? “Feel that I
do right in not trying, as you insist, to stay
on your side. There is the wide
gateway and the splendid tower,
and you implore me to wait here, with the worms!”
Had he defined his terms, and could we discriminate
among his motives, we might
have found out how to “do right” before we died—supposing
he felt he suddenly knew
what dying was.
“You do wrong because you do not feel
as I do now” was maybe the sense. “Feel me, and emulate
my state, for I am becoming less dense—
I am feeling right, for the first
time.” And then the vessel burst, and we were kneeling
around an emptiness.
We cannot feel our
father now. His power courses through us, yes, but he—
the chest and cheek, the foot and palm,
the mouth of oracle—is calm. And we still seek
his meaning. “Feel me,” he said,
and emphasized that word.
Should we have heard it as a plea
for a caress—A constant caress,
since flesh to flesh was all that we could do right
if we would bless him? The dying must feel
the pressure of that
question—lying flat, turning cold
from brow to heel—the hot
cowards there above
protesting their love, and saying,
“What can we do? Are you all
right?”—While the wall opens
and the blue night pours through. “What
can we do? We want to do what’s right.”
“Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be
with me. Feel with me. Feel me, to do right.”
—May Swenson
October 12, 1968
A NOTE BY JENNIFER EGAN
IN THE SIXTIES we discovered, as a culture, the thrill of watching ourselves. It was love at first sight. The televising of the Vietnam War in 1965 marked the birth of mass media as we know it: a ubiquitous, image-generating machine that purports to display raw human experience. Media coverage played a pivotal role in the student antiwar protests, as Todd Gitlin, president of Students for a Democratic Society in the early sixties, now a cultural critic, has argued persuasively. According to Gitlin, media coverage of S.D.S. protests altered the perceptions of the protesters themselves, creating tensions and distortions within the movement that ultimately undermined it. In a decade that was, for many young people, about altering consciousness, the most mind-bending new drug in town had nothing to do with hallucinogens. We’ve yet to begin our return from the trip it launched.
We’re savvier now, of course. Today, students forming a national movement would anticipate the need for a P.R. strategy—might well have taken classes on it in college. Everyone knows that media imagery obscures as much as it reveals, that reality TV is no less engineered than situation comedy. Yet the great irony of our technological age is that the phoniness of mediated experience leaves us craving authenticity that only more media can seem to satisfy. The historian Daniel Boorstin identified this paradox in his 1962 manifesto, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America: “The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses. The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images—however planned, contrived, or distorted—more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself….Our progress poisons the sources of our experience. And the poison tastes so sweet that it spoils our appetite for plain fact.”
It can also spoil our appetite for serious fiction. More mediation leads naturally to fetishization of the “real” as we sense that we’re getting less of it. And entertainment-oriented reportage—celebrity gossip, for example—can satisfy a desire for human drama while masquerading as news. The role of fiction as a source of cultural self-knowledge has been squeezed from both sides for decades. Some of the most celebrated novels of the sixties, like Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, were exciting, in part, precisely because they were true. New Journalists made a canny bid for relevance by applying novelistic techniques (many of them were fiction writers) to national and world events that seemed more urgent and extreme for having been thrust into millions of American living rooms.
We read nonfiction to find answers, fiction to find questions. Judging by the short stories gathered in this volume, the questions an era produces do very well at laying bare its preoccupations. Period anthologies are biased, of course, toward work that seems to tell the story we’ve settled on. Muriel Spark’s 1960 “The Ormolu Clock,” set in postwar Austria, dramatizes the tension between a fading aristocracy and industrial capitalism. John Updike’s 1961 “A & P” reads like an anthem of a generation moved to flout its parents’ expectations. The generatio
nal chasm makes an appearance in Mavis Gallant’s 1962 “The Hunter’s Waking Thoughts,” in which a woman remarks to her extramarital lover, nine years her junior, “You’re too young to remember the war.” That simple fact divides them.
Common to all of the stories is the tingling prospect of upheaval. In “The Indian Uprising” (1965), by Donald Barthelme, whose experimental works The New Yorker championed from early in his career, narrative unruliness storms the story’s surface, refusing to let it resolve into any one plot or set of characters. In John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” a man’s affluent suburban life appears, at first, as serenely untouchable as his self-confidence. In the course of an afternoon’s caprice, that life collapses into figments of a delusion. “At what point had this prank, this joke, this piece of horseplay become serious?” he wonders, a question that might caption any number of hopes that soured toward the end of the sixties. And equally, “He had covered a distance that made his return impossible.”
Cheever’s story, published in 1964, seems to expose the dread and unease percolating under the surface of nineteen-fifties suburban complacency. It might also manifest the anxieties of one suburban family man—John Cheever—whose bisexuality was a source of personal anguish. Both readings are plausible, even compatible, along with any number of others we (an evolving entity, of course) are compelled by. Readings change over time; the casual misogyny of Sammy, the nineteen-year-old narrator of “A & P,” was probably funnier in 1961 than it is today. Muriel Spark’s story, which includes voyeurism with binoculars and communication via the placement of a Baroque clock, reads to me now as a meditation on privacy and telecommunications. I’m tempted to lay out that argument right here, right now, but I’ll spare you.
Like artifacts of a collective dream life, the best fiction diverts everyday trappings into the service of a mystery. The stronger the work, the more inexhaustible—and receptive to readers’ own preoccupations (all right, I’m obsessed with voyeurism and telecommunications). Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1969 “The Key” is set in New York City—which, in the view of the story’s irascible widowed protagonist, has been reduced to rubble and flames by a predatory, anarchic, and racially mixed populace. Hers is the lament of a generation overthrown, consigned to urban solitude: “God in Heaven, since Sam died, New York, America—perhaps the whole world—was falling apart.”
Yet the source of her misery turns out to be largely her own paranoia; awakened by a spiritual epiphany, she finds the world renewed. The story is both a portrait of a certain kind of New York life at a particular moment, and a timeless parable of redemption. Doubtless there are other readings, too. That richness is what makes fiction unique among cultural documents, able both to embody the time in which it was made and to long outlast it.
Muriel Spark
SEPTEMBER 17, 1960
THE HOTEL STROH stood side by side with the Guesthouse Lublonitsch, separated by a narrow path that led up the mountain, on the Austrian side, to the Yugoslavian border. Perhaps the old place had once been a great hunting tavern. These days, though, the Hotel Stroh was plainly a disappointment to its few drooping tenants. They huddled together like birds in a storm; their flesh sagged over the unscrubbed tables on the dark back veranda, which looked over Herr Stroh’s untended fields. Usually, Herr Stroh sat somewhat apart, in a mist of cognac, his lower chin resting on his red neck, and his shirt open for air. Those visitors who had come not for the climbing but simply for the view sat and admired the mountain and were sloppily waited upon until the weekly bus should come and carry them away. If they had cars, they rarely stayed long—they departed, as a rule, within two hours of arrival, like a comic act. This much was entertainingly visible from the other side of the path, at the Guesthouse Lublonitsch.
I had come to this little town because it was cheap; I was waiting for friends to come and pick me up on their way to Venice. Frau Lublonitsch welcomed all her guests in person. When I arrived I was hardly aware of the honor, she seemed so merely a local woman—undefined and dumpy as she emerged from the kitchen wiping her hands on her brown apron, with her gray hair drawn back tight, her sleeves rolled up, her dingy dress, black stockings, and boots. It was only gradually that her importance was permitted to dawn upon strangers.
There was a Herr Lublonitsch, but he was of no account, even although he got all the marital courtesies. He sat punily with his drinking friends at one of the tables in front of the inn, greeting the guests as they passed in and out and receiving as much attention as he wanted from the waitresses. When he was sick, Frau Lublonitsch took his meals with her own hands to a room upstairs set aside for his sickness. But she was undoubtedly the boss.
She worked the hired girls fourteen hours a day, and they did the work cheerfully. She was never heard to complain or to give an order; it was enough that she was there. Once, when a girl dropped a tray with five mugs of soup, Frau Lublonitsch went and fetched a cloth and submissively mopped up the mess herself, like any old peasant who had suffered worse than that in her time. The maids called her Frau Chef. “Frau Chef prepares special food when her husband’s stomach is bad,” one of them told me.
Appended to the guesthouse was a butcher’s shop, and this was also a Lublonitsch possession. A grocer’s shop had been placed beside it, and on an adjacent plot of ground—all Lublonitsch property—a draper’s shop was nearing completion. Two of her sons worked in the butcher’s establishment; a third had been placed in charge of the grocer’s; and the youngest son, now ready to take his place, was destined for the draper’s.
In the garden, strangely standing on a path between the flowers for decorating the guests’ tables and the vegetables for eating, facing the prolific orchard and overhung by the chestnut trees that provided a roof for outdoor diners, grew one useless thing—a small, well-tended palm tree. It gave an air to the place. Small as it was, this alien plant stood as high as the distant mountain peaks when seen from the perspective of the great back porch where we dined. It quietly dominated the view.
· · ·
Ordinarily, I breakfasted at seven, but one morning I woke at half past five and came down from my room, on the second floor, to the yard to find someone to make me some coffee. Standing in the sunlight, with her back to me, was Frau Lublonitsch. She was regarding her wide kitchen garden, her fields beyond it, her outbuildings, and her pigsties, where two aged women were already at work. One of the sons emerged from an outbuilding carrying several strings of long sausages. Another led a bullock with a bag tied over its head to a tree, and chained it there to await the slaughterers. Frau Lublonitsch did not move but continued to survey her property, her pigs, her pigwomen, her chestnut trees, her beanstalks, her sausages, her sons, her tall gladioli, and—as if she had eyes in the back of her head—she seemed aware, too, of the good thriving guesthouse behind her, and the butcher’s shop, the draper’s shop, and the grocer’s.
Just as she turned to attack the day’s work, I saw that she glanced at the sorry Hotel Stroh, across the path. I saw her mouth turn down at the corners with the amusement of one who has a certain foreknowledge; I saw a landowner’s recognition in her little black eyes.
You could tell, even before the local people told you, that Frau Lublonitsch had built up the whole thing from nothing by her own wits and industry. But she worked pitiably hard. She did all the cooking. She supervised the household, and, without moving hurriedly, she sped into the running of the establishment like the maniac drivers from Vienna who tore along the highroad in front of her place. She scoured the huge pans herself, wielding her podgy arm round and round; clearly, she trusted none of the girls to do the job properly. She was not above sweeping the floor, feeding the pigs, and serving in the butcher’s shop, where she would patiently hold one after another great sausage under her customer’s nose for him to smell its quality. She did not sit down, except to take her dinner in the kitchen, from her rising at dawn to her retiring at one in the morning.
Why does she do it, what for?
; I asked this question at the café across the river, where I went in the late afternoon. It was the place where one got one’s information.
“Yes,” they said, “why? Her sons are grown up, she’s got her guesthouse, her servants, her shops, her pigs, fields, cattle…”
And they said, “Frau Lublonitsch has got far more than that. She owns all the strip of land up to the mountain. She’s got three farms. She may even expand across the river and down this way to the town.”
“Then why does she work so hard?”
“She dresses like a peasant,” they said. “She scours the pots.” Frau Lublonitsch was their favorite subject.
She did not go to church; she was above church. I had hoped to see her there, wearing different clothes and perhaps sitting with the chemist, the dentist, and their wives in the second-front row behind the count and his family; or perhaps she might have taken some less noticeable place among the congregation. But Frau Lublonitsch was a church unto herself, and even resembled in shape the onion-shaped spires of the churches around her.
I climbed the lower slopes of the mountains while the experts in their boots did the thing earnestly up on the sheer crags above the clouds. When it rained, they came back and reported, “Tito is sending the bad weather.” The maids were bored with the joke, but they obliged with smiles every time, and served them up along with the interminable veal.
The higher mountain reaches were beyond me except by bus. I was anxious, however, to scale the peaks of Frau Lublonitsch’s nature.
· · ·
One morning, when everything was glittering madly after a nervous stormy night, I came down early to look for coffee. I had heard voices in the yard some moments before, but by the time I appeared they had gone indoors. I followed the voices into the dark stone kitchen and peered in the doorway. Beyond the chattering girls, I caught sight of a further doorway, which usually remained closed. Now it was open.
Within it was a bedroom reaching far back into the house. It was imperially magnificent. It was done in red and gold. I saw a canopied bed, built high, splendidly covered with a scarlet quilt. The pillows were piled up at the head—about four of them, very white. The bed head was deep dark wood, touched with gilt. A golden fringe hung from the canopy. In some ways this bed reminded me of the glowing bed by which van Eyck ennobled the portrait of Jan Arnolfini and his wife. All the rest of the Lublonitsch establishment was scrubbed and polished local wood, but this was a very poetic bed.