Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  Parentheses

  An Autobiographical Journey

  Jay Neugeboren

  Dzanc Books

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1970 by Jay Neugeboren

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Part of Chapter One appeared in different form in New American Review no. 5

  Published 2014 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-45-6

  eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For Miriam Nancy and to the memory of Nancy Cusack

  Contents

  ONE: Reflections at Thirty

  TWO: North from Brooklyn

  THREE: My Blessing Not My Doom

  FOUR: A Letter to Kennedy

  FIVE: Pictures from an Institution

  SIX: Good-bye to All That

  SEVEN: Home

  It must interest us that he [Martin Luther] urged the postponement of monastic vows until the age of thirty—the age when sexual drive has passed its peak, when identity is firmly established, and when man’s ideological pliability comes to an end.

  —Erik H. Erikson. Young Man Luther.

  PARENTHESES

  An Autobiographical Journey

  ONE: Reflections at Thirty

  The point is that it is almost impossible (except in the form of fiction) to write in America about America for Americans. You can, as an American, go to the South Sea Islands and write upon your return; you can, as a foreigner, travel in America and write upon taking leave; you can, as an immigrant, write as you get settled; you can move from one section of this country or from one “class” of this country to another, and write while you still have one foot in each place. But in the end you always write about the way it feels to arrive or to leave, to change or to get settled. You write about a process of which you are a more or less willing, but always pleasurably harassed, part, and your style soon runs away with you in the high gear of dithyrambic or outraged expression.

  —Erik H. Erikson. Childhood and Society.

  Memorial Day. May 30, 1968. My thirtieth birthday. Up late last night hunting snails by flashlight with Jeannot, a friend. He is gypsy, Spanish. “Domesticated gypsy,” Betsey and I say. Jeannot has three children, works with his wife Jacqueline doing silk-screen designs. It has been raining these last few days, our tub of snails grows. More humid than usual. I spend my time writing, gardening, and listening to the radio for news of the revolution in France. The entire country shut down for thirteen days now: between nine and ten million workers on strike; no public transportation, no schools, no postal service, no garbage collection; banks, factories, stores closed; electricity comes and goes; no radio and TV except for news.

  Here in Spéracèdes the effect of the national strike is slight. There is no mail, no gasoline, no sugar, electrical service is erratic (nothing new)—but life goes on much as usual. We are about four hundred people in Spéracèdes and not that dependent on the outside world. The butcher has his own flock of sheep, most people have their own small farms or gardens. Jeannot and I will plant tomatoes, beans, squash this afternoon. All our friends in Spéracèdes—some of whom, like Jeannot, may be ruined by the strike—are hoping it will continue.

  From my window, beyond rows of olive groves, a deep green valley, mountains covered now with broom, red-orange poppies, cypress, the haze has obscured the Mediterranean Sea. (At sunrise, on a clear morning, we see Corsica—150 miles out—from our balcony.) I am on the third floor of our three-room three-storey three-hundred-year-old cottage: with a garden (mimosa, roses, strawberries, parsley, thyme, basil, grapes) it rents for fifty dollars a month. Downstairs Betsey is laboring to make me a birthday cake with the small amount of sugar we have left.

  I would like to consider myself radical, revolutionary. I have committed civil disobedience, I have filed a Conscientious Objector’s form, I have organized demonstrations, I have taught the poor and the black, I have urged civil disobedience in my writings, I have—like Spock, Goodman, et al—signed complicity statements urging resistance (the first back in 1963), I have sent my draft card back to the government, I have fought against the police—but I have not done what a young man of eighteen or nineteen or twenty does when he sends back his draft card, when he devotes his life to organizing in a ghetto: I have not risked my position and my prospects in my society. After six months in this country village, I feel only the vaguest compulsion to return home, to join the struggle again.

  I have begun to try to change my style of living: the possession of property is the beginning of slavery—this is the song Betsey and I sing to one another endlessly. If the government wishes to prosecute me for my numerous illegal acts of resistance, it can—but it’s not likely that it will. I’m thirty years old; moreover, the one time I was called for a physical (at the age of twenty-eight, after I’d filed the C. O. form), I was sent home halfway through-high blood pressure.

  I don’t have high blood pressure. I attributed my score at the Whitehall Induction Center to my paranoia (I was certain they had called me for a physical because I’d told them I would never serve), to the peace buttons I wore on my lapels, to the looks these brought from the military who processed me, to the sight of naked young men, laughing, joking—scared and covering their fright.

  The television reports of the revolution here and the memory of the preinduction physical remind me of a French documentary I saw on TV recently. We had been visiting our friends Clément and Fernande Merle (they run the village Alimentation and we rent our house from them)—and the documentary was about American soldiers in Vietnam. I remember the sound of a harmonica, a black soldier singing a blues refrain about coming home. I was surprised at how young the soldiers seemed, at how much even the banality of the show could move me. It had been months, I realized, since I’d remembered—with any emotion or feeling—that there was still a war on. None of us said much—but later that evening, for the second time in the six months we’ve been living here, I was able to get Clément to talk about what life had been like in Spéracèdes during the war: a story about a Jewish family he had hidden out, about the signals the men in Resistance would use to give one another messages in Grasse—something about the way they would fold their newspapers while reading them.

  Clément is almost fifty—he calls Betsey and me “mes enfants.” Watching the TV documentary, he sighed, closed his eyes, said it again—“Ah, mes enfants…” A slight shrug of the shoulders. The TV show disturbed me in a way I was unprepared for: too painful. I wondered again, if—not risking my own life—I had the “right” to demand an end to my government’s policies. Seduced by the government line, I suppose—that I am, in some way, letting the boys over there down. The obvious response—that I am for American boys, that I am against them being in Vietnam, that I fought to bring them home, to save lives—this now seems mere rhetoric: they are the ones in Vietnam.

  Reading Robert Graves’s memoir of World War I, Good-bye to All That, this week, I typed out a passage. Graves is telling of Siegfried Sassoon’s protest against the war, after Sassoon had previously distinguished himself as an almost maniacally heroic soldier. Graves writes—the sentence I copied—that the war’s “continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elde
r.” Has it ever been different? Plus ça change…

  Here in Spéracèdes, I risk nothing, it seems: neither death nor jail. Betsey and I are pretty sure she’s pregnant—we’ll know definitely in another week. The doctor (a house and property at the other end of Spéracèdes are given by the village to whatever doctor takes up residence here) says he is “presque certain”—we asked about the possibility of taking a pregnancy test, so that we could be sure, but he discouraged us with a disparaging uplift of the eyebrows—“Les laboratoires, vous savez?…” Not wanting to oppose his skepticism concerning French laboratories, or to seem, in some way “typical Americans,” we’ll wait another week.

  Who knows—perhaps if and when I become a father, I will, like friends begin to possess, by instinct, a desire for calm, for stability. I will have, in my bones, a vested interest in the status quo, in protecting what life and property is mine. Who knows?… But this is why I am not to be trusted. For no matter what I write, no matter what demonstrations I organize or participate in, no matter how many times I say no to my government—my future—and I cannot say this too many times—is not endangered the way the future of a twenty-year-old is. I have already been twenty, and twenty-one, and twenty-two. I spent those years in nonpolitical activities, and my future is, therefore, barring catastrophe, the unseen, fairly secure. Though I won’t court jobs, status, money—they’ll probably come in adequate amounts. I’ll probably return to America within a year and teach. I enjoy teaching. I’ll earn enough money to give us food, clothing, shelter. If my writing sells, I’ll have a bit more. If there is political action on my campus, in my city, I know which side I’ll be on. True, I am no longer—have not been for some time—in the same left-liberal camp that most of my friends are in. I was aware four and five years ago of the inadequacies of more advertisements by professors, more peace marches, more peace candidates, more anti-poverty programs. These were all sops, I said. They all bought off the poor, the protestors. What was needed was a movement which did not request change, but demanded it—and which was prepared to disrupt society, to overthrow the government. I was urging direct action against the war several years back; I found Stokely and Rap and the Black Panthers sensible from the beginning.

  Still, I did not need, in my own life, a revolution; I merely wanted one. The difference is crucial. I would like to see a revolution—in my life, in the life of my country, in the world; but I do not, in the conditions of my own material life, need one.

  The French seem to need one, and they are getting one. Young people—those I leave behind from this day on—need a revolution. Black people, poor people—they need revolutions because the conditions in which they live—the young, the poor, the black—are, literally, insufferable. They cannot, if they are poor and black, move on, or change—they cannot, as I’ve done, simply give up America for a year or two. Only if the entire society changes will their lives change. As in France.

  But how is this to be done in America? Two dead in a night of riots seems a heavy toll in France. Thirty or forty dead in rioting in a single American city seems part of the order of things. Item in the International Herald Tribune, dateline Washington, April 24:

  Forty-six persons were killed in the disorders that erupted after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. April 4, Justice Department figures showed yesterday.

  The compilation, based on reports from 76 cities, also listed a total of 2,561 persons injured and 28,271 arrested.

  The 46 deaths occurred in 13 cities. That nationwide figure compared with 43 deaths in Detroit last July, 23 deaths in the Newark riots, also last July, and 34 persons killed in the Watts district of Los Angeles in August, 1965.

  This way of describing reality comes as naturally as the gathering of the data. America seems too rich, too powerful, too well insulated to fall at once, to be changed by a few days or years of riots.

  The young, the black—they have neither the numbers nor the power nor the skill in the exercise of what power they have to shut down, to threaten the entire nation. Can there be a revolution, peaceful or otherwise, without the support of workers? The young, the black, their numbers insufficient to date, need the support of the workers, but in America this is the last segment of society from which they will ever receive support. From that underclass of workers—the one below organized labor—yes; but from organized labor, never. What many of my liberal friends said to my arguments for revolution before I left: that America was big enough and flexible enough to absorb change and cataclysm, seems true. Not in the way one finds liberals rushing headlong to approve and embrace this fact (e.g., Irving Howe in an article in The New York Review of Books, praising Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign: “For all its creakiness and cumbersomeness, the democratic process seems to have come through pretty damned well.”), but simply as a description of the way things are. Reassuring to the majority, I suppose.

  Time, in its coverage of the national strike here, compares the French and American systems. Time’s position (whatever is, in America, is right) is brilliantly phrased; it would, alas, probably be endorsed not only by the likes of Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, but by everybody this side of what Time labels The New Left: McCarthy, labor unions, ADA, NAACP, Dissent magazine:

  In the U. S., where power is widely diffused, serious dissatisfaction with policies, politicians or institutions can be resolved or at least ameliorated by democratic processes—despite the extremist assertion that “the system” is hopeless. Unlike French workers and students, most Americans with a cause can lodge their protest with the hope of inducing reasonable change by their numbers and their voices rather than by entirely rebuilding society or bringing down an elected government between elections.

  There has been no clearer, more honest statement of the American Myth. Either you believe in it, or you don’t. Either you think that solutions to problems are forthcoming through such a system, or you don’t.

  If it need be said again—I might wish that the above description of things were truthful and adequate—but it is not: moreover, I realize, I’ve come to believe that the maintenance of this myth actually impedes necessary change. The illusion is maintained that such change is possible within the political process, when this isn’t so. While the basic structure of the society remains intact, the myth forces critics to limit the fire of their protests, their demands. It reserves all power to the system. The price we pay for democracy, then, is to lose our freedom. No paradox. Power is so diffused in America, as Time notes, that it is held by those who would prevent change—i.e., by the majority. Whether in their own best or worst interests, we shall see. What is certain is that the causes of the war in Vietnam and the murder of King are too pervasive, too deep, to be dealt with by the policies available.

  According to the newspaper which I saw in the bistro this morning, the NLF has launched its third major attack of the year against Saigon. The day the Tet offensive began I met a friend at the Nice airport: a middle-aged American writer. Also there to meet him, a well-known American writer, one who has written many political essays, books—the word “radical” prominent in the title of one. Both of them were upset, worried by the Tet offensive, by the possibility of an NLF victory. It might mean, they explained, the resurgence of McCarthyism in America. So strange to me to have the events in Vietnam prove their significance in this way: I was not old enough, I suppose, to have suffered this legacy of McCarthyism. The liberal’s credo—all must take second place to the preservation of civil liberties in America; anything that threatens to destroy them must be opposed. More important to preserve free speech than to resist genocide. This is what they say, by what they do.

  Time is easy here. Even a national strike—a revolution—does not disturb the essential tranquility of life. We rise early, I walk into town to get the day’s bread (fresh, warm), we eat—then I go upstairs to write and Betsey goes downstairs—or outside—to paint. (Our bathroom—next to her “studio”—used to be the chicken coop.) Toward noon Be
tsey begins to make lunch, and when I’m finished with my morning’s work, I join her in the kitchen—I read her what I’ve written, she shows me her painting, then I help her prepare our meal. We eat slowly, leisurely—entrée, main dish, vegetable, salad, cheese, fruit, wine. On warm days we move our table onto the balcony. Our lunch hour lasts until two or three o’clock. After, we usually take a long walk, visit with friends, read (we’ve both been going through mammoth nineteenth-century novels by Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoy-books we’d never found time for in America), finish up our morning’s work, take naps, talk. We have a late supper—usually at about eight o’clock—of soup, cheese, and fruit—and, on the nights we don’t visit with friends, we read together in bed…. America grows further and further away. We’re rarely homesick for our country, or for any part of it—not even for friends and family.

  I enjoy my garden, I enjoy not having to do anything at any particular time, I enjoy being able to spend twenty-four hours a day with Betsey. To my surprise, I get on well without a telephone, and without numerous other things: without television and sports (I used to sit through two or three football games in a row on TV every Saturday and Sunday), without washing machines and dryers, dry cleaning, supermarkets, electrical appliances, central heating, political activities. Reassuring to confirm what I’ve wanted to believe: that I could get along without the conveniences of modern society. For much of the time we even get along without a refrigerator. The one Clément gave us is a tiny two-shelf ancient Frigidaire, “Made in USA”; its motor, however, comes from an oversized French refrigerator, so that for at least twelve hours every day we have to keep the plug out of the socket. Even when it works, Betsey sometimes finds it easier to leave the plug out all the time. Like much of Clément’s handy work—as our friend Jacques has pointed out—it is a perfect example of French bricolage—“définitif-provisoire.”