Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  The most amazing thing for me during the past two weeks is that I discovered I could live without mail. I never would have thought it possible. I’ve always doted on mail—at least from the time eleven years ago when I sent out my first novel. During the first few months here I’d always found an excuse to make a second trip to the post office (mail is picked up every morning at nine by most villagers), just in case Georgette, the postmistress, had put a letter of mine in somebody else’s stack. (In Spéracèdes, you can buy stamps and make calls on credit—Georgette keeps a record of the town’s debts to the P.T.T. in a narrow-lined school copybook.) About two years ago I had the dream of dreams: I went to my mailbox, opened it, took out a pile of twenty or thirty letters, and the mailbox was filled again. The process repeated itself endlessly. I woke up smiling: I had seen Paradise.

  My politics grow more radical, my temperament mellows. Life here, hopefully, has unfitted me for a return to American civilization. It’s not so difficult to give up the American way of life when one can replace it with something more satisfying. Food, clothing, shelter, work one loves, friends one can see often—what more does a man need?

  I wonder if black revolutionaries will ever renounce their claims on the cities—of what use can these polluted accumulations of steel and concrete be to human beings? The cities are dead, incapable of renewal. To struggle, to risk life, to die—in order to control Manhattan Island or Los Angeles?… There must be other possibilities.

  In Grasse, the farmers and merchants have been giving food to the workers, free. In Paris, students have been giving away chickens. As often in such crises (cf. the New York subway strikes, blackout)—a certain release of inhibition, a lifting of repressions…

  The students have been buoyant, joyful. They went into the streets, battled with police, and the workers—to everybody’s surprise (including that of the students)—joined them. When Prime Minister Pompidou offered amnesty, reopening of the Sorbonne, withdrawal of police, and promise of reform, the students responded by occupying the university. They took over the Odéon, where they are still camped, engaging in continuous dialogue. “When the General Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater,” one of their signs reads, “bourgeois theater must become the General Assembly.” When Daniel Cohn-Bendit was asked, in a TV interview, why he wasn’t satisfied with the government’s concessions, his reply was direct, simple: “Because nothing has changed.” Not only the university, but the society which is reflected in the antiquated structure of the university must change, and change radically.

  The workers seem to agree. Despite the fact that the government—and, more important, the French Communist Party and the Communist-dominated C. G. T. (Confédération Générale du Travail—the largest French labor union)—have been steadily attacking and maligning the students (the Communist Party has called them “provocateurs,” “counterrevolutionaries,” “poor little rich boys”), the workers have maintained their alliance with the students. Moreover, the workers have rejected the strike-breaking offers made to them by the government and private companies—offers which their own leadership had recommended they accept. The offers seemed considerable—a 10 percent raise in all salaries, more social security benefits, a reduction of the workweek to forty hours, a raise in the minimum hourly wage (to sixty cents an hour)—but the workers voted the package down and they continue to occupy the factories, demanding for themselves what the students have demanded: substantial control of the processes (of management) which govern their lives.

  If, here in France, or in Czechoslovakia, Spain, West Germany, the students seem united in their opposition to the government (whether it be Communist, Fascist, or Democratic), in America the radical students remain, distinctly, a minority. Most students, like most Americans, guard their positions and prospects. The numbers of radicals grow, the power of students to disrupt society, to control their immediate environments (e.g., Berkeley, Columbia) grows also—but this has no decisive effect on the society beyond university walls. The effect of student rebellions is buffered all along the line, reforms are (sometimes) instituted, things return to normal, life goes on as usual. The ordinary processes of life are not interrupted or changed for significant numbers of people.

  Something else should be said: it is natural for young people to change their style of living and risk everything. The world has gone wrong, America is sick, things must be transformed, revolution is the order of the day: one has, if he perceives the world this way, no choice but to drop out, to turn one’s energies to resistance, revolution, reconstruction. Is it another thing for me to reject the world that I have accepted, if partially, these thirty years? I like to think so; this would be—from habit-unnatural.

  In fact, I don’t know how it’s done. How does one give up the American way of life and still remain in America? If one feels the necessity to be involved in the struggle for radical change, then one must remain in America. But what then? Some over thirty will, as I will, give support, will be arrested (jail seems the risk we run nowadays to allow our consciences to continue to function on American soil), will get their heads cracked—but their lives will like mine remain, generally, middle-class American. The revolution that will change the order of things will come from without, if it comes at all.

  What is the good of withholding a percentage of one’s income tax, for example, or all of it, if, with the money one earns, one remains a contributing member of the society? Those, for example, who refuse to buy Volkswagens or to invest in Chase Manhattan or First National City Banks should, by this logic, refuse to buy the products of any American corporation. But one cannot be part of a society—even for the purposes of revolution—and exist outside it. The center of day-to-day living is un-dramatic, a series of compromises. The center of revolution, also, is undramatic—not one confrontation after another with state troopers, not meetings in dingy basements with African chieftains, not warehouses of arms and battle plans; but, more simply, essentially: organizing people where they are so that they can seize control of those things which affect their lives.

  In the end, as always, one does the best one can. For the past few months I’ve been writing about the period of time I spent, at twenty-two, as a junior executive for the General Motors Corporation—and of the ways this experience affected me personally, politically. Several months ago I would have tried to justify the fact of my writing about GM, about politics. Now I don’t. The political for me seems endlessly bound with the personal. This doesn’t invalidate political commitment, but it does lead me away from issuing calls to revolution, from attempting purely political analyses, from prophesying.

  Walk yesterday afternoon with Betsey, picking wild-flowers. Incredible reds, yellows, violets. Olive trees are being uprooted near the town cemetery two hundred yards from our house. The cemetery is being enlarged. The trees are dug out and encased in wood slats, the roots and earth bound round in metal, like huge tubs. We collect wood scraps to use for making buttons, knick-knacks. Graves, in his description of trench warfare:

  The trenches were wide and tumble-down, too shallow in many places, and without sufficient traverses. The French had left relics both of their nonchalance-corpses buried too near the surface; and of their love of security—a number of deep though lousy dug-outs.

  My impulse, when I sometimes think of returning to America: to buy a home in the woods, to stock in food, books, to tend to my garden, to avoid contact with cities; in a society which continuously assaults one with the need to aggrandize possessions, property, power—which, in its everlasting Puritanism, still regards the lack of these things as the proof of Sin—is it surprising that some men should try to steal the power of others by taking their lives? I used to wonder, in California, when some enraged student was going to take a shot at me while I delivered an antiwar speech. But to kill me he would have to have identified with me…

  Even a trip to Monoprix (a combination supermarket-department store the size of a small Woolworth’s), in Grasse, has become too much f
or me. The sight of men and women standing in lines at checkout counters, not speaking to one another or to the cashiers, their arms laden with groceries (there are no shopping carts yet, only plastic handbaskets) seems absurd, insane, unnatural. One of my daily pleasures, I know, is talking with Clément and Fernande when I buy our groceries and vegetables. Romantic, of course, but it no longer seems to me unrealistic to believe that the purchase of one’s food—like the cooking of it, the eating—should, in some way, be human and pleasurable—part of the daily round of one’s life.

  Perhaps the reason I find myself responding so instinctively, so positively, to the actions of the students here is because I find that I agree with them about the nature of the enemy—which is not merely the archaic university and its structure, not merely the de Gaulle regime, not merely—not even such things as imperialism, fascism, capitalism, communism, bureaucracy, mechanization—but something more general and generalized, more comprehensive and lethal: la société de consommation—the consumer society. (Sign on the Sorbonne: “Commodities are the opium of the people.”)

  My feeling—unprovable, of course—is that America will tolerate anything except an assault on its consumer culture. It will tolerate riots in the schools, riots in the ghettos, riots in the cities—but when the disruption threatens to move into the shopping centers, the supermarkets, the department stores, and the factories which create the commodities—then the nation will move, act, repress, and do everything necessary to preserve its “freedom of choice,” its right to buy and consume an expanding quantity of goods at an expanding rate.

  In the local stores we receive credit until the banks open again. In Spéracèdes people have not, as they have in the cities, ransacked the shelves. (Fernande Merle rations sugar.) One reason things have moved so quickly, everybody agrees, is that Paris is at the heart of things. (One could, conceivably, shut down a half-dozen major American cities and life would go on normally in the rest of America.) If you close down Paris you close down France. Not long ago all produce—even from this region (the south)—would go north to Paris before being redistributed southward. Though they worship bureaucracy, the French are not masters at organization. Everybody laughs at the quality of mass-produced goods here. Jacqueline claims that, even on an assembly line, a French worker retains his individualism: you cannot, quite simply, tell him to do something a certain way—the way you want everyone to—and expect him to follow instructions. He will nod, shrug, and do it the way he wants. Although the French changed their currency officially from “old” to “new” francs ten years ago (100 old francs became one new franc; one new franc equals 100 centimes), most Frenchmen still calculate only in old francs. In newspapers, two prices are listed for most items. On such a base of character, you do not build an efficient new order.

  Nor do you build a thriving industrial economy. Despite de Gaulle, France has been hurting economically. The average French worker now earns between $150 and $170 per month, though the wages vary from region to region, higher in Paris (around $200), lower here ($100), where there is much cheap Algerian and Spanish labor. Unemployment and prices have been rising (a Frenchman spends at least half his salary on food, not only because he loves to eat, but because most meat and canned goods are about twice the price of comparable American food; gasoline is over eighty cents a gallon). Businesses have been failing (virtually all the local perfume factories in Grasse—five miles away—have been bought by American companies). And in de Gaulle’s Common Market, French goods have a hard time competing against German and Dutch ones. At the same time, the French worker is made to feel inferior because he cannot become part of the new consumer culture (there are witty thirty-second ads on TV, one after the other, on how to use the bank, how to use aluminum foil, how to use electrical appliances, how to be a “modern” housewife, how to obtain credit; there are no ads for private companies, for brand names: the ads, then, are parodies of American commercials; appeals, simply, to consume—food, perfume, leather, automobiles, wristwatches, etc.). It’s not surprising that the government’s appeals to end the strike because it is hurting the ordinary man (Pompidou pleading last night for a return to “la vie normale”) go unheeded.

  There are demonstrations every day in all major cities (Spéracèdes was to have one last night, but the rain washed the notice, written in chalk, from the wall of the mairie.) The continuing unrest in the country is due in large part to the action of the de Gaulle government, forbidding Daniel Cohn-Bendit to return to France from Germany, where he was speaking to students. This brought the students back into the streets after several days marked by a lack of confrontation between them and the police. Two nights of pitched battle followed, the students setting up barricades in the Latin Quarter—from overturned cars, bricks pried from the street, debris, gratings, trees, garbage cans. Even Time Magazine was shocked by the brutality of the French police (e.g., taking people out of ambulances to beat them up), an indication of the ferocity of the combat. The students, despite the intensity of the battles, still refuse to play things according to the usual script. After Cohn-Bendit had secretly made his way back into France, his organization (The Movement of March 22nd, named for the day the students first occupied the University at Nanterre) called a press conference. The reporters showed up to interview Cohn-Bendit. They were met by other student leaders, who stated, smiling: “We are Dany.” (“The great danger,” Cohn-Bendit said this week, “lies in a revolutionary movement which tends to become just another show for our consumer society.”—“un autre spectacle pour notre société de consommation.”)

  The government’s hope (implicit in its action against Cohn-Bendit) that the workers and students would divide and fight one another has proven to be true (thanks largely to the Communist Party)—but not true enough. Pierre Mendès-France marched with the students two days ago, though the Communist Party and the C. G. T. refused to. Note well, though: in the first night following Cohn-Bendit’s banishment, more than half of those arrested were young workers, many of them unemployed.

  Odors drift up from the kitchen, pleasant. The sun wavers—sometimes out, sometimes in—and I can see the vague line of the horizon, of the sea. Betsey and I will stand on the balcony for hours at a time sometimes, especially toward evening, watching the changing effects of the light, the wind, the sun. Friends are coming to visit this afternoon, to have lunch with us: we’ll talk, eat, have birthday cake, I’ll do some gardening with Jeannot, the day will pass, I’ll continue on the book I’m writing. In about a year I’ll probably return to America. I will return believing what I believed eight years ago, when I was a junior executive trainee at General Motors: that the only hope—for the world, for myself—is immediate revolution. I won’t, as I did then, feel that I am one of the agents that can bring it about, or that we will all die within six months if it is not brought about. I will be resigned: if the Vietnam war is (hopefully) over by then, it will only mean that the long-range, day-to-day and undramatic work can begin—attacking those things, deep in our way of life, of which Vietnam is only the most spectacular and cruel symptom.

  Here in Spéracèdes I find myself becoming more and more direct with others, and perhaps this too is a function of becoming thirty years old. Life seems too short for lies, too short for living as one does not wish to—so I do what I want: the things that are most important to me, to separate the inseparable, are three: my writing, politics, my life with my wife and my friends.

  Maybe you can’t trust people over thirty because they know they’re going to die. When I was eighteen, at the end of my second year of college, I was operated on for a small tumor: the doctors and my family feared cancer, I was radiated afterwards. Walking from St. Luke’s Hospital the afternoon the doctor had asked me to come to the hospital for a biopsy, I felt good: the first thought that came to mind, after the thought that I might die within the year, was that I would not have to finish a term paper for a literature course.

  One is never aware of all the defense mechanisms
at one’s disposal; still, the thoughts which followed were that I would be more attractive, mysterious to girls, I would be able to write a great novel, I would be able to do what I wanted for a year, I would receive endless sympathy—and endless adulation for not appearing to want any…

  Notice of death at this point would not be so welcome: it would produce, I imagine, neither grandiosity nor relief. I like to think I’d react the way Orwell did during the Spanish Civil War. In his report on the war, Homage to Catalonia, he describes what went through his mind after he’d been shot through the neck. “There must have been about two minutes in which I assumed that I was killed…. My first thought, conventionally, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.”

  Perhaps then, if one has this sense of mortality, one becomes, in one’s own life, that deadliest of things: responsible. But if one risks his life anyway, I’d like to think he risks more—for he knows what he is giving up, he has been to places that those who begin as revolutionaries at nineteen or twenty have never seen.

  Yet without the recklessness of youth, it becomes difficult to risk much; one values too many things. I am too aware, for example, of the actual (though partial) good that certain programs do for individuals to be able, in the hopes of getting the kinds of programs which would help all people, to reject the inadequate programs totally. And I am too aware, today, of the actual hardship the national strike is imposing on many to desire, in all my feelings, that it go on very much longer. I know it has to go on longer if there’s to be any hope for the changes I want…but I can’t look forward to it.

  I remember, when I was teaching at Columbia in 1964, a discussion with another young teacher, one who described himself as a Marxist-Leninist. We were talking about Vietnam and I was lamenting the deaths of civilians, including those killed by the NLF. His reaction was a scornful “You can’t have an omelet without breaking some eggs.” This cowed me, made me feel inadequate, confused. I wondered if I could ever be a “true revolutionary.”