I had not, before I entered Columbia, ever considered becoming a writer. Not, at least, since the time when, at nine years old, I’d written a novel: I’d been in the fourth grade then, and for about two months I wrote one chapter a week—which my mother dutifully typed for me—and each Monday morning I would stand in front of my class and read the new chapter to them. By the time I stopped, the novel was between thirty and forty pages long, the chapters two to four pages each, typed—thanks to an old typewriter—in glorious half-red and half-black lettering.
At the start of my first year at Columbia I listed as my probable professional choices, Advertising, Television Producing and Directing, and Architectural Engineering. Once a week, regularly, I would meet with my advisor, the late Andrew Chiappe (whose Shakespeare course was already legend in the college—the best course I ever had), and do my best to engage him in the discussion of “what I wanted to be.”
By the end of the first year—due in part to my courses and teachers (in particular, to a freshman composition course I took with Charles Van Doren), and in part to the antimaterialist ethic which pervaded the Columbia cultural scene—I decided to become an English major. By the end of my sophomore year, having glutted my program with writing and literature courses, I began (with announcements to all teachers and friends) my first novel. I began it, in fact, within two weeks of my operation—so that it would be finished before I died a year later. I shared the novel with Robert—reading each chapter to him when it was done. I finished the novel during the summer between my sophomore and junior years, and the following fall, I showed it to Charles Van Doren who became excited about it and sent it to several publishers on my behalf.
I remember one time, in the fall of my junior year, after I’d shown him the rejection letter I’d received from a publisher, trying to shrug it off. It didn’t really bother me, I said. We were walking down the steps that led from Low Library to College Walk, and he laughed: “Come on,” he said. “It bothers you. It’s as if somebody had told you your child was ugly.” I shrugged again, admitted he was right, and smiled. I repeated his remark to everyone—and I continued to submit the novel, to write, to enjoy the status of being—at nineteen—that most romantic of types: an unpublished novelist.
For my first three years of college I lived at home, sharing a nine-by-twelve-foot bedroom with Robert, traveling two hours a day on the IRT with my books and lunchbag. I never began writing until everyone else at home was asleep. Then I would move into the kitchen, push the dishes and oilcloth aside in order to have the smooth maple surface of the table to press pen and pencil against, and stay up until two or three in the morning working on my novels, essays, stories. My typewriter—an ancient heavy Royal—would rest, to muffle its sounds, on towels. The weak light from the overhead fixture always seemed stronger when the rest of the house was dark and quiet—and there was something tangible about the empty surfaces of the yellow enameled walls (the only ones in the house not overloaded with pictures and knickknacks).
My quiet was disturbed once a night, ritually, when my father, sometime between one and two in the morning would get up to go to the bathroom. He would peer into the kitchen rather blearily (he could not see too well, having gone blind in one eye in his thirties), and, shielding his eyes against the light, his head tilted to one side in order to focus better with his good eye, he would say to me irritably, in Yiddish: “From this you’re going to earn a living?”
He would shake his head despairingly, scornfully—and I would think silent angry thoughts: what had he ever accomplished in life to allow him to talk to me about earning a living? A second later I would hear the splashing of his urine in the toilet, and when he went by me again, I would hear the sounds of his disapproval clucking liquidly in his mouth. His pajamas always sagged; they were too big for his small frame.
The central fact of my life during my years at Columbia—as it had been since childhood—was the tension that resulted in my home from the fact that my mother was forced to work. Again and again during those nights in the kitchen I would turn the self-pity I was feeling for myself into rage—and generally the rage was directed against my father. Never, as I recall it, against anything as abstract as Society or The System.
My father’s business consisted of the rental of a desk in a printing company’s office, from where he tried to develop, as a “jobber,” a trade of his own. He was a stubborn and intelligent man who did not, during those years, want to work for anyone but himself. During my high school years I always looked forward to Christmas and Easter vacations because I would spend most of my time in “the city” with my father—sitting in his office, talking with him, visiting his clients (he was obviously proud of me, proud to introduce me as his kaddishal), delivering packages for him.
The first thing we would do every time would be to visit the printing plant: the presses were loud and huge, and my father would always introduce me to the printers, would show me a printing job of his own which was in process.
In addition to the tour of the printing plant, I would get to do, every day, something our family did only a few times a year—eat in a restaurant. Invariably, I would order scrambled eggs, french fries, toast and jelly—always amazed that I could get such a full plate for such a low price (thirty-five or forty cents), always impressed by the size of the tip my father would leave, by the easy way in which he’d kibbitz with the waitresses. Like the receptionists who took packages of printing from me, the waitresses obviously liked my father, and this pleased me.
I also liked the grown-up feeling that came with the fact that my father would confide financial secrets to me: despite what my mother said, he’d usually hint, things were going well—orders were coming in—he would soon be able to repay his debts and be out from under. Somehow, though, he never did get out from under the debts, and—what pained him most in life—this meant that my mother had to continue to work.
She worked as a Registered Nurse, and sometimes as an administrator of fund-raising campaigns for the Muscular Dystrophy charities. As often as she changed the furniture in our tiny four-room Brooklyn apartment (so that it would seem new, larger, different), she would change the shifts she worked at the hospital (8 to 4, 4 to 12, 12 to 8), and she often worked double shifts, took double cases. My father’s sole end in life, it often seemed to me as a boy, was the assumption of my mother’s household duties (washing clothes, cleaning the apartment, doing the dishes). Though I have pleasant memories of the conversations I had with him when I helped him at work, at home his longest conversations with me were the short-tempered sentences he’d spit out when my actions—usually by omission—showed ingratitude, lack of consideration for my mother.
Afternoons and evenings when, because of the night shift my mother was recuperating from, our house moved on tiptoes and any minor sound (the telephone, like my typewriter, rested on towels) brought my father’s hand into the air to strike me or Robert—I sometimes felt a hatred for him that overwhelmed me.
During my senior year at Columbia—with the help of a gift from my parents—I moved out of my home in Brooklyn and lived with a friend, Arnie Offher, in a furnished apartment on West 107th Street. Our bachelor life was more than I’d hoped for: we each had girlfriends; I cooked for myself (making cheeseburgers out of chopped meat I bought from a local butcher at nineteen cents a pound, and Velveeta); I worked furiously on a new novel; I lived in as much dirt as I pleased; I became closer with Robert, who would visit often, and sleep over. Away from home, we talked endlessly about books, girls, school, writing—and home.
Under the guidance of Richard Chase, I completed my second novel by the end of the year. “I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be published,” he wrote to me that summer, and offered to write a letter for me to his own publisher. The following fall, like the majority of my friends, I found myself—mainly for lack of knowing what else to do—in graduate school: on a fellowship to Indiana University, a school with which Columbia faculty-Chase, Steven Marcus
, Lionel Trilling—had been associated. I had, I thought, two purposes in going there: to get farther away from Brooklyn, and to support myself while I began a third novel.
THREE: My Blessing Not My Doom
For the man in the paddock, whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it…
—Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer.
I dropped out of graduate school the following spring (1960) and took a position with the General Motors Corporation as a Junior Executive Trainee. At the time, General Motors had been looking for a liberal arts graduate to be part of a special one-year training program, in order to see what would happen to someone with no preconceptions, no education in engineering and/or business administration. They wanted, they insisted, a “fresh, honest viewpoint.”
I wanted to write novels. It was, still, the only thing that mattered to me: by not attending classes at Indiana University, I’d completed my third unpublished novel, and I wanted to begin a fourth. The Dean of the Graduate School had already called me into his office to tell me that he didn’t think Indiana University was the place to do it (I agreed), and so, the biographies of other American novelists strong in my imagination, I’d been looking, on and off for six months, for a job that would be just that: a job—separate in all ways from my writing, a means to an end only, something that would give me the time, money, and freedom of mind to write. I would work during the day and write at night, and there would be none of the inner conflicts that had plagued me during my nine months in graduate school—i.e., between being a critic of literature, and a writer of the literature others criticized.
Two weeks after my twenty-second birthday—on June 16, 1960—I went to work at Chevrolet-Indianapolis, a body-stamping plant employing about three thousand blue-collar and five hundred white-collar workers. There were four others in the training program—two engineers and two business administration graduates. Our salaries were excellent, fringe benefits generous, and for the first year we were not supposed to do any real work; we would observe only—spending about half our time in the factory, half in the executive offices. Once a month we would submit reports, and at the end of the year we would be appointed to our first executive positions.
The five of us started in different departments, changed assignments weekly, and were, in this way, to learn, by the end of the year, how all the departments and divisions and subdivisions of one automotive plant were interrelated, linked, organized. Moreover, in order to know exactly what was involved in the various jobs over which we might someday hold responsibility we worked in the factory with the union men—loading boxcars, shoveling coal, welding parts, working on assembly lines. In truth, as good as the prospects seemed for someone wanting to get ahead as a junior executive, they seemed even better for someone wanting to write novels.
I was hopeful, optimistic. Working in a factory was, I felt, infinitely more “real” than being a graduate student, and though I—and friends—found it amusing that I should suddenly be an Organization Man, I can’t recall that I felt at all uncomfortable about taking the position. My girlfriend, Ginny, and my closest friend, Arnie Offher—he too was a graduate student at Indiana—gave me presents to mark the occasion. From my girlfriend, bermuda shorts and a sport shirt “For the Conservative Executive”—and from Arnie, a Parker Pen, and a card which said: “Someday I want you to autograph a book for me: Good luck at GM, executive.”
I had no particular interest in General Motors, cars, engineering, or business administration, but I didn’t see anything particularly wrong in them. Certainly I had no objections that were in any way political. As an executive, I might, I even told myself, be able to do some good someday. What kind of good I didn’t know—but I assumed that anyone who possessed power in the largest corporation in America would also possess the power to affect the lives of many men.
I spent my first week at GM reading stacks of company literature: the role of Chevrolet in the General Motors Corporation, the role of our plant in the Chevrolet Division, the role of the spot-welder in the door-assembly line, etc. Two other trainees and I were left in a pleasant air-conditioned room, told to relax, to read, and to ask questions when we had any—the Assistant Director of Personnel, Ralph Sharpe, had an office across from us. On my first day Ralph had taken me on a tour of the plant and offices, had taken me to lunch in the executive cafeteria, had introduced me to all the department heads, had told me about all the plans—stock option, car purchase, pension, health insurance, life insurance, disability—that awaited me in my new life.
I remember only two things that I read that week: the first was the story—told as if part of an adventure novel—of how the man who had founded Chevrolet (Louis Chevrolet) had selected the emblem for the car from a design he noticed on the wallpaper of his hotel room one night in the early years of the century when he lay sleepless in Paris. The other was a handbook used as part of an in-service training program for foremen on how to get along well with workers. It contained personality charts which described and defined the “twelve basic human motivations”; if you ranked a worker in each category and then, via a series of arithmetical maneuvers and references to the data in a Human Motivational Chart, constructed a graph of his personality, you would be fully equipped to handle him. (There were “tried and true” methods of handling every personality “type.”) There were some commonsense remarks about human nature and “interpersonal relationships,” and there were case studies—examples—illustrating specific situations, problems. The one I recall: when something went wrong in your section and you knew whose fault it was, you were to approach the worker and ask him what the reason for the trouble was. “Listen politely to his answer,” the handbook advised. “Then ask him for the real reason.”
I laughed, then showed the item to the other trainees, to Ralph—I mentioned it to others; but nobody seemed to find anything unusual in the advice. Everyone took it seriously, matter-of-factly; it seemed sensible, unnoteworthy.
At the start of my second week I was assigned to the Materials-Handling Department; on my third day there I was introduced to a middle-aged man named Henry Jones. Jones, in charge of one of the subdivisions of the department, put me at a desk directly behind his own, gave me several stacks of oaktag sheets, and told me to total—on my electric adding machine—columns of figures from one set of sheets, and to post the totals on other sheets.
The function of the Materials-Handling Department was to order and keep records on all material that came into and went out of the plant—steel, coal, wood, maintenance equipment, paint, automobile parts, office supplies, etc. Information was accumulated (“posted”) on thousands of cards, so that at any moment any individual item—a box of pencils or a right-rear-inner-door-bracket-connecting-hinge, could be located.
I’d been warned (and had already discovered) that there was, especially among the men such as Henry Jones—middle-aged, noncollege-educated personnel who’d spent the better part of their lives working themselves up to their positions of minor authority—resentment of “college kids” like myself. At Chevrolet-Indianapolis many men like Jones had begun as hourly workers in the factory; the salaries that it had taken them twenty or twenty-five years to work their way to were being reached (and passed) in less than five by those of us with degrees. I was, then, wary—reluctant to bother Henry, to question anything besides the mechanical details of operations assigned to me.
For a few hours I tapped at my adding machine, watched it gyrate and slide, and I posted the totals. When I’d finished the first stack of cards, though, I got up, waited at the side of Henry’s desk until my presence was acknowledged, and then asked if he could tell me what all the numbers that crisscrossed my sheets represented.
“Just do your work, son,” he said without looking up. His sleeves were rolled up, his ey
es were dashing madly across order forms from behind rimless glasses. I went back to my desk and, while I watched the back of his head bob in and out to the rhythms of his work, and as he télephoned frantically to people in and out of the factory concerning materials which were either late or lost, I continued to make, at my adding machine, hundreds of thousands of calculations. I added figures from one column, pushed the total button, listened to the pleasant whirring of the machine, posted the results on other sheets. To amuse myself I invented complicated problems in multiplication and division, in order—for several seconds—to watch the machine move by itself.
The office itself was a long glass-enclosed rectangle in the North Wing of the executive building. There were three rows of desks in it (Henry had the middle row), about ten desks in each row. The supervisor of each of the three subdivisions sat at the head of each row; the clerks, young executives (trainees), and secretaries were in line at the desks behind. Except for the secretaries, each worker had an adding machine at his desk; the young executives had telephones. The desks were gray, chrome-rimmed. At the rear of the room was the desk of the Superintendent of the Material-Handling Department’s secretary, and beyond this desk was his office, also glass-enclosed.
During the morning, and after lunch, I tried again to get from Henry—and that having failed, from workers who manned the desks behind my own—some explanation of what I was doing. I took my posting cards from desk to desk but nobody seemed to know the meaning of my numbers. I went back to my desk and worked until quitting time.
The man whose job I’d taken returned a day or two later and I resisted the impulse to ask him about the numbers. I could tell the story in Bloomington on weekends, where, in the retelling its mundane insanity took on exotic qualities: I had actually lived out a paradigm of the modern condition—for one eight-hour workday, sixty minutes an hour, I had performed thousands of operations, posted thousands of figures, and had never known what any of it had meant.
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