Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  It occurs to me that I am, technically, liable to at least five years in jail for having urged resistance, for having sent back my draft card. That should—however remote—be faced. My immediate reaction: I would not endure five years in jail, I’d return to Spéracèdes. This then, may be the best reason for not trusting me now that I am thirty; for just as Huck lost interest in “Moses and the Bulrushers” when he found out that they had lived thousands of years ago (“I don’t take no stock in dead people”), I’d probably lose interest in political action, at this point in my life, if it meant five years in jail. I don’t take much stock in jail—not for me, not now: America doesn’t seem worth it.

  Yet my mind engages in a mad political calculus-five years never, four no, three probably not, but if the sentence were a year, even two—all right, then, I’d go: the political value might compensate. This, despite the fact that I regard all court battles as somewhat irrelevant; opportunities not so much to radicalize America as to vindicate, to justify the American system (which allows free speech, due process, legal battles over resistance, during wartime). What it would be, if the time came, is a question of tactics, of weighing possibilities. Like most Americans, I’d have to ask the pragmatic question: How much good would it do?

  A true revolutionary (my romantic version of one?), if he dies during a revolution, does not die knowing—or even hoping—that his death is necessary to overthrow the forces of oppression. He dies because he dies; he dies for the revolution, to be sure, but he dies because he has no choice; he does not ask if his death “will do good,” if it will “accomplish something.” For five years of prison I’d probably have to have the reassurance I wouldn’t need for my other actions: that it would do more good, in some tangible way, for society, for others, than it would do harm to me. Unproductive self-sacrifice, martyrdom—they don’t interest me.

  I feel at peace today. Unusually so. There will be many days, soon, as there have been recently, when my rage against all that I find wrong with the world, against my country, against individuals, against all the murder, hunger, the grinding down of lives—will rise up in me so that I feel ready to do whatever is necessary—without hope of success—to change things. To murder, to give up my family, my writing, my own life…

  But one must, so they say, be realistic. Changes take time (though those who say this can well afford, it always seems, to wait; those they urge patience on cannot). But bitterness, rage, sorrow—the emotions that I refer to lately as my political emotions—they come and go. What matters is the commitment which resides. I am thirty years old today. I might wish that all human beings could have certain things—I think of the final scene in Figaro, when, after the masks have been taken off, the lovers revealed to one another, the men forgiven by their mistresses, all join, happily, gloriously in song: tutti contenti saremo cosi (Let us all be happy together, forever, as we are now). But my reference, a musical-literary one, is the giveaway. The world is not about to turn into a Mozart opera; idyllic desires for peace, for justice, for the ability of human beings to do what they want with their lives, to love one another, etcetera, etcetera—such desires, translated into expository prose, remain as vague and abstract as the speeches of those I would tumble from power. Everybody wants peace, everybody wants happiness for mankind, goodwill between all men: but everybody does not want revolution, will not take the risks, will not make the commitments with their own lives that revolution will require.

  Still, peaceful today, enraged tomorrow, my life has changed. The emotions, thoughts which came to life during my stay at General Motors eight years ago have proven more powerful than I suspected. I’ve been rereading things I wrote at the time, and I laugh at myself for certain ways of saying and seeing that I hope I’ve outgrown—but I do not deny what I saw and said: without revolution, America is doomed.

  A month ago nobody could have predicted what is happening in France today. Still, I don’t expect that the conditions which produced this revolution will occur in America. I do whatever I do without illusion—what I and those I want to work with are struggling for is not about to be achieved—perhaps not in our lifetimes, perhaps never. But the movement we build, if built well, is the only hope we have; the only way we know, now, to begin to obtain and exert power, to begin to control our lives, to begin to give up what must be given up, to create what must be created, to risk what must be risked.

  If I’m out of the country for a year or two or three, and if I feel, as I apparently do, a need to justify my absence, I can reassure myself with the thought that there will be more than enough work to do when I return.

  On the front page of the Nice-Matin, the local paper (pages two and three detail automobile accidents, robberies, weddings, births, murders, suicides), is an item that draws me back to America: THREE YEARS IN PRISON FOR THE HUSBAND OF JOAN BAEZ. I worked with Dave Harris last year—he was organizing the Resistance on the West Coast at the time I was organizing faculty and others for civil disobedience against the war; we gave speeches from the same platforms, helped organize the Oakland Induction Center action of October 16, 1967, etc.

  Thought: the logic of events continues to confirm the notion of an “historical force”—the Vietnam war and the events that have been attached to it continue to make Marxists of many of us (without, like myself, bothering or needing to read Marx). Dave changed the Stanford campus (he was president of the student body)—one of the best public speakers I’ve ever heard: charismatic, especially for those of high school age. And though the faculty at Stanford had not been apathetic before I came there, I did organize them on a new level of involvement, action. (The call to civil disobedience issued by forty-seven of the faculty last May, which I initiated, was brought East by Mitchell Goodman—teaching at Stanford in the spring—and became the basis for organizing the Justice Department confrontation which led to the Spock trial.) Still, history moves without us—this year, when Dave, Mitch, and I are gone from the campus, Stanford had its most militant actions—burning down an ROTC building, occupying campus buildings for several days, winning major concessions from the administration. Last year when we marched on the Stanford Research Institute, a corporation involved in chemical and biological warfare research, we were able to rouse only fifty students, three faculty members.

  Curious irony: after my journey these last eight years, my increasing politicalization and radicalizaron, I found I had left America just before the start of its most turbulent year: the growth of the Resistance, the Oakland demonstration, the battle of the Pentagon, Johnson’s decision to retire, the murder of King and the ensuing ghetto riots, the ascendancy of Black Power, the ascendancy of Student Power, including, prominently, its rise at two universities (Columbia, Stanford) I’d taught at the last three years. I exchanged that for the peace and quiet of southern France, only to find myself living in the midst of revolution. Which suggests that what has gone on here for over two weeks now, initiated by the students (n.b., less than 10 percent of the students in France come from working-class families), is not about to end. The most significant upheaval is occurring here, but the forces that generated it are felt everywhere. My guess (I’m not alone, of course) is that 1968 is a turning point—much that will happen during the next generation will seem to stem directly from events of this year. And what happens here, in Germany, in Czechoslovakia, in America, is all of a piece. Put most simply, it is the struggle of the young against the old: not merely their disavowal of the ideological and power politics of the Cold War, but their refusal to be part of the bourgeois-technological society that has been offered to them as the reward for political and moral acquiescence. They will not, in simplest terms, be part of a world which does not make sense to them. The signs the students in Paris have been posting tell the story; this one in the Sorbonne amphitheater: “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.” Another, less abstract: “Humanity will only be happy when the last capitalist is strangled with the guts of the last bureaucrat.�
� Though, at present, the struggle is a political one, the minds of the students are fixed on things that go beyond political struggle. In their version of things there is an end both to ideology and to politics. They raise the black flag, not the red. (On the door of the Sorbonne, May 13: “The revolution which is beginning will call in question not only capitalist society but industrial society. The consumer society is bound for a violent death. Social alienation must vanish from history. We are inventing a new and original world. Imagination is seizing power.”)

  In Paris, de Gaulle appeals for unity in the face of a “Communist menace”; he appeals for the “preservation of law,” for the “voice of democracy” (via new elections); at the same time he lets it be known that he has met with General Jacques Massu, the commander of all French forces in Germany, that Army units (with tanks) are on the outskirts of Paris, that reservists have been called up.

  The Communist Party quickly reinforces de Gaulle’s appeal by endorsing his call for new elections, by condemning militant student groups, by continuing to urge its members to boycott the student demonstrations “in order not to provoke further incidents.” After de Gaulle’s speech, we take a quick trip into Grasse, in Jacques’s car, to the bourse du travail of the C. G. T. A handful of workers, all of them depressed. One whispers to us that “they are ready to fight the police.” But Jacques laughs and notes that the worker has only five sad-faced men with him. (On my first full day in Spéracèdes, I remember, Jacques and I got into a long political discussion. I was a bit puzzled by the fact that, though our village was traditionally Communist, all the Communists—such as the Merles—seemed to be quite capitalist in their accumulation of property. “Ah,” Jacques said, and he proceeded to give me one of his special definitions, “un communiste français, vous savez, c’est quelqu’un qui veut la grande voiture de son voisin.”—“A French Communist, you see, is someone who wants to own his neighbor’s big car.”)

  In Texas, Lyndon Johnson states at a press conference that he would prefer “not to comment on the decisions” taken by the French government, but he adds that it is “very important to the American people and for the rest of the world that we have stability in France.” I note the possessive pronoun.

  Our friends all spent the afternoon here: they brought presents, we ate cake, sang songs, I delivered a discourse from our balcony to the assembly in our garden, we played yan with dice, we listened to the radio. Good to share this kind of life with friends one cares about; in a community that can be traversed by foot. What Sapir was writing about over forty years ago—the almost psychotic split in our industrial civilization between work and pleasure—is crucial. Men cannot work eight hours a day at tasks unfit for human beings, and become human beings in the time that remains: what I sensed at GM. But it is worse in America, because American workers get well paid for their assembly-line work, and thus believe more in its necessity, its benevolence.

  When the French workers can fully enter the consumer society most differences will be gone. What seems so unique about our life in Spéracèdes is not only that there is no dividing line between our work and our pleasure (I would write, Betsey would paint, I would raise food even if I received economic sustenance from other sources), but that no part of our life seems compartmentalized. Not even visiting with friends. To visit is a natural part of the daily process, as writing is. For us, as for the others here, existence has not been segmented, organized: three hours for work, two hours for recreation, two evenings for entertainment. Within ten minutes walking time we can take care of all our needs, see all our friends. Our activities flow into one another as the days do: without any sense of time being divided. Our friends work in their own homes (writing, silkscreening, painting, selling groceries, making wine, raising jasmine, doing ceramic work, graphics, etc.), so that even that division is eliminated—like our friends, we don’t leave home for work: we live where we work, we work as we live.

  Thirty years old on the thirtieth day of the month; the memorial day for the dead of past wars, the day of de Gaulle’s speech, the day I cease to be trustworthy. If de Gaulle had resigned the day would have been perfect. As usual, I have been too optimistic. The workers will hold out if they can hold out. The readiness is all. As always. All that matters is what happens. Intentions, hopes, reasons, “almosts,” “ifs”—all irrelevant. For me, for everyone, all that matters are outward events. From The Ethics of the Fathers: “Who is the righteous man? He who does righteous deeds.”

  We could, I suppose, organize inside the prisons…

  …But for what? As soon as the words are down I sense that they are false, that they derive not from what I feel now, but from habit, from some reflex action, from an impulse that dies hard, if at all: the desire to end on a note of hope, to find a way to blend somehow, in positive terms, the moral and the political, to promise an action which, if only in rhetoric, forges a political program from a virtuous gesture. Prison would be an indulgence, a waste. Spéracèdes is better.

  I wrote almost all of the above in one sitting—the greatest quantity of first-draft writing I’d ever done in my life. I felt high when I finished, and all afternoon I unwound, repeating—for myself, for our friends—the fact: thirty pages on the thirtieth day of the month of my thirtieth year. Except for the temporary malaise caused by de Gaulle’s speech (since there was no electricity, Jacques listened with a weak transistor radio to one ear, repeating—with groans and curses—the General’s speech), we were all in good spirits. While I delivered my birthday speech from our balcony, our friends raised our own flag in the garden below—my long underwear. During the week which followed, I continued to keep a journal—no more than a page or two a day—and I’ve incorporated a few paragraphs of that journal in the preceding section.

  Exactly one week after my thirtieth birthday—on June 6th—I stopped keeping the journal. The convergence of events that day was too much: the anniversary of VE Day, the day the national strike ended officially, the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated, the day—that afternoon, about five hours after we’d heard the news about Kennedy—that Doctor Joussaume told us what we’d expected to hear: Betsey was pregnant.

  Though I no longer agree with many of the things I wrote that week, though as I reread I want to correct, qualify, modify, delete, update—I’ve made only minor revisions, none of them substantive. The thoughts that spilled so easily represent one end of a journey I’d been on since, at least, my days at GM—and they represent—by their tone as much as by anything I actually said—thoughts, feelings—a mood—which had been gathering in me, had been with me for some time before my thirtieth birthday.

  We had been living in Spéracèdes for slightly more than six months when my thirtieth birthday arrived, and though I’ve left my brief description of our life there as I wrote it then, I should add one note: our life in Spéracèdes was neither ideal nor idyllic; it was good. The difference is important.

  It was good, not because Spéracèdes was in France, not because we lived in a three-hundred-year-old house and saw the Mediterranean Sea and the Esterel mountains from our balcony, not because we ate luxurious midday two- and three-hour meals, not because we were both working steadily and well at things we loved (though such things—to put it mildly—helped). It was good not only because the rhythm of our daily life seemed whole and natural, not only because we were spared some of the more brutal products and byproducts of the modern world; not—in short—because (as I may have given the impression) we had, in a village where the women still washed their clothes in the fountain in the town square, returned to some kind of idyllic pastoral or preindustrial life. Our life in Spéracèdes was good because—or so it seems now—we had good friends and we could see them every day if we wanted to. Like ourselves, they worked mostly at home, and, like ourselves, they were always ready and able to spend unlimited amounts of time with us, with one another.

  Our house, our village, the sea, the food—we loved these things (in a country where most cuts of meat ra
n close to two dollars a pound, we quickly—and painlessly—adapted ourselves to a diet which had as its staples wine, bread, and cheese)—but they seem somewhat irrelevant to our life there. What matters is that, for a year and a half, Betsey and I were able to spend twenty-four hours a day together, day after day—and for a year and a half we were able to spend as much time as we wanted with—the phrase cannot be changed—people we loved.

  There were, for most of our time in Spéracèdes, eight families in what we called “la groupe” (or “la troupe”)—only half of whom had been there when we arrived in December, 1967. We respected one another’s privacy almost religiously (when Jacques was in a bad mood we might not see him for four or five days), and, at the same time, felt part of a community, felt that all our friends’ houses were always open to us.

  After lunch, if Betsey and I would stop by a friend’s house, we might sit there with them, talking, while they continued to do their work (silkscreening, making lampshades, painting)—and sometimes we would find ourselves there, still talking, at midnight. Not so unusual, of course: but what seems remarkable now is that this happened regularly, and that it seemed normal, natural.

  If I finished my work early in the morning—before noon—I knew I could always find a group of friends in the bistro; they’d stop there for an apéritif before lunch (we were the only family still without children; our friends’ children would pass by on the way home from school—the lunch hour for Spéracèdes’ two-room school-house lasted from 11:30 to 1:30)—and sometimes we’d wind up eating lunch in the bistro (baguettes, paté, saucisson, fruit, cheese), and then spending the rest of the day (and evening) together.