Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  Still, despite our guilt (Betsey’s mother would spell out, in Baptist terminology, the consequences of “living in sin” with a Jew) and our resolutions, we seemed incapable of avoiding each other, we each found ourselves taking strange new routes across campus between classes so that we would—daily and accidentally—meet. And when I finished a piece of writing I found myself doing what I’d done all year—immediately going to see her (telephoning her if she was already locked in her dormitory for the night) and reading her what I’d written, discussing it with her.

  That winter, in order, I thought, to cheer myself up, I’d once papered an entire wall of my one-room apartment with rejection slips—and was plunged instantaneously into a severe depression which lasted until we’d both torn down the slips. One Saturday afternoon that spring, after Betsey and I had “broken up,” I returned to my apartment feeling particularly low, thinking of papering my wall again. When I unlocked my door, though, I found Betsey inside, sitting on my bed. “I thought you might like to play tennis,” she said, and smiled.

  About a week later she called to tell me that she’d taken a job in New York for the summer—as waterfront director at a Girl Scout camp near Port Jefferson, Long Island. She pointed out that she’d applied for the job before we’d made our decision, and I offered to “show her around New York” on her days off.

  I received my Master’s Degree that June and returned to New York, where I rented a single room on the top floor of a brownstone on West Eighty-fifth Street. In Columbia’s graduate school, I knew, there was no attendance checking, no grades; my fellowship, then, was for the writing of a new (seventh) book I’d already begun to pressure-cook. During July and August my writing went better than it ever had. Betsey came into the city once a week and I drove out to her camp several times. One morning, after Betsey had spent the night at my parents’ apartment, I met my father in the kitchen. Nobody else was awake. He spoke to me in Yiddish and then translated. “From her,” he said smiling at me, “you can’t get poisoned.” In September, just before she went back to Indiana for her senior year, I asked her to marry me.

  That spring and summer, for the first time, I worked at a new form—the short story—and I discovered that here, too, as in my politics, I was no longer absolute. Most of my work consisted in rejecting ideas, in cutting—i.e., what I left out of a story became as important-more important—than what I included. I no longer seemed to believe that every word or idea or fiction that came from me need save the world, or be saved for it.

  In June an editor at a New York publishing house was optimistic about the chances for my automobile plant novel and invited me in to talk about it, asked me if I would be willing to undertake some revisions. What was needed most, we both agreed, was cutting—and when I was done with revisions, a month or two later, we both agreed that the result was immensely superior to the original. Unfortunately, what had been a five-hundred page novel was now a 140-page manuscript.

  _______________

  * Cf. the following account given by Erving Goffman, in Asylums: “… Persons who are lodged on ‘bad’ wards find that very little equipment of any kind is given them—clothes may be taken away from them each night, recreational materials may be withheld, and only heavy wooden chairs and benches provided for furniture. Acts of hostility against the institution have to rely on limited, ill-designed devices, such as banging a chair against the floor or striking a sheet of newspaper sharply so as to make an annoying explosive sound. And the more inadequate this equipment is to convey rejection of the hospital, the more the act appears as a psychotic symptom, and the more likely it is that management feels justified in assigning the patient to a bad ward. When a patient finds himself in seclusion, naked and without visible means of expression, he may have to rely on tearing up his mattress, if he can, or writing with faeces on the wall—actions management takes to be in keeping with the kind of person who warrants seclusion.”

  SIX: Good-bye to All That

  Responsible debate and legitimate political action—these are the ways to change policies in a democratic society. The resisters only retard the cause they seem to advance while threatening the foundation of the freedom they so recklessly exploit.

  —editorial, The New York Times.

  ‘The only good government,’ I said, ‘is a bad one in the hell of a fright; yes, what you want to do with government is to put a bomb under it every ten minutes and blow its whiskers off—I mean its sub-committees. And it doesn’t matter if a few of its legs and arms go too, and it gets blown out of the window. Not that I’ve personally got a bad opinion of governments, as governments. A government is a government, that’s all. You don’t expect it to have the virtues of a gorilla because it doesn’t belong to the same class. It’s not a higher anthropoid. It has too many legs and hands. But if you blow off some of the old limbs, well, imagine. There you have a piece of government lying in the middle of Whitehall, and it says to itself, “This is most unusual. I distinctly heard a bang. I must enquire at once—yes, immediately—I must appoint a commission.” So then it opens its eyes and looks at the crowd and says, “My God, what has happened, what are these creatures?” And the people say, “We’re the people, you’re the government, hurry up and do something for us.” And the government says, “I’ll have a committee on it at once.” And the people say, “You haven’t got any committees—they’re all dead—you’re the government.” And the government says, “Haven’t I got a secretary?” And the people shout, “No, we’ve just chopped her up with a rusty axe.” “Or an office boy?” “No, we’ve pushed him down a drain.” ‘

  ‘But I can’t be a government all by myself.’

  ‘Yes you are, and you’ve got to do something.’

  ‘But one man can’t be a government, it isn’t democratic.’

  ‘Yes it is,’ the people say. ‘We’ve sent for another bomb. But you’ve got ten minutes still, so you’d better do something.’

  —Joyce Cary. The Horse’s Mouth.

  Encouraged by my first political successes in Indiana—over 100,000 copies of my New Republic article had been reprinted and distributed by the YSA—I returned to New York in the summer of 1963 ready to become a full-time political activist. During the next four years, three of them in New York, I did, in fact, become involved in dozens of political causes and groups, and in activities which, at times, consumed my energies almost full time.

  When I began this book—four months after we arrived in Spéracèdes—I had expected that the bulk of it would be about my political activities during these years. Doctor Spock, Mitch Goodman, and the three others had recently been indicted for conspiracy to violate the selective service law (for giving support to draft resisters)—and this indictment derived indirectly from a campaign I had started at Stanford University the previous spring. I had come to Spéracèdes in order to write a novel, but once there a familiar pattern repeated itself; I found (felt)—again—that things political (my activities of the previous years) threatened to overrun and destroy my fiction. In order to deal with my political activities—to put them to rest—I wrote several long political articles during my first months in Spéracèdes. The articles weren’t enough, though, and once again I found myself launched on a book-length project, one I thought would be political in nature, and one whose ultimate purpose, again, would be to exorcise (to explain) the political emotions I’d been carrying around in me so that—the material made tangible, dealt with in print—I could get on, could feel free to return to fiction, to a new novel.

  The beginning point (GM) and the end point (the Spock trial) were there, and I only, I thought, had to describe a few of the events in my life which had led from one to the other—particularly my political involvements during the years 1963–67. By the time, in the fall of 1968, that I came to write about these years, though, I found that they didn’t interest me, that all of the items I’d listed, made notes on, been ready to describe in detail, seemed unimportant.

  My political a
ctivities—which I’d thought would be the most important part of the book—now seemed only parentheses between General Motors and Spéracèdes.

  The narrative I was at work on, as the thoughts I put on paper the week of my thirtieth birthday showed me, was itself becoming less and less political. The more solidly I made my way into the world of politics during the years 1963–67, the more abstract, the more boring (in my memory) all the activities began to seem. Having made the decision to leave America just before major actions which I had helped plan, I had to wonder—especially as I became more and more at home in the daily life of Spéracèdes, as I felt less and less desire to return to America, to become involved politically—how political I had ever been.

  Politics was supposed to be that activity which dealt with the possible, with the “real” world—yet, in my memory, my own political activities didn’t seem real. I felt a distaste for them, a revulsion to writing about them. And with this revulsion, with the necessity to write about my involvements, came one possibility: that all my political activities—even what I referred to as my political emotions—had been only one affect of my writing, of my desire to be a writer.

  Such a feeling was mixed with (a rationalization for?) my sense of hopelessness about all political activity in America; read-ins, teach-ins, protest marches, draft card burnings, ads in The New York Times or the Palo Alto Times—what, I began to wonder, had these ever had to do with murder and suffering, war and revolution? If I found that the most overtly political part of my journey during the previous ten years was now the most boring, I also found (had to find) that it was the least significant. The more I was able (as in Indiana) to gain control over the rage that had first driven me to become involved politically—the more, that is, I was able to act “realistically” and regularly to achieve concrete objectives—the more, in my memory, all my activities seemed unreal, hopelessly cut off from the conditions which had first inspired them.

  In the fall of 1963, however, such thoughts, literally, could not enter my mind. I was working on a new novel, I was working politically (with CORE, with antiwar groups), I was (this to pay for $150 monthly phone bills Betsey and I began to run up between Bloomington and New York) teaching blacks and Puerto Ricans in junior high schools in New York ghetto areas (Williamsburg, the West Side, south Harlem). I was twenty-five years old, I’d had three articles published, I’d written seven unpublished books, and, in my one-room apartment on the fifth floor of a West Side brownstone, I led the life of a New York writer, of a New York intellectual involved in left-wing activities. On the days I didn’t teach, I’d stay home and write, and keep in shape by going up and down the five flights to see if the mail had come, with its daily letter from Betsey, its daily batch of rejections. (There was a balcony under my window and I couldn’t see to the sidewalk below the house; the mail came anywhere from nine to eleven-thirty.)

  Above my desk I kept a scoreboard—a list of where each of my books, stories, and articles was, the date each had been sent out, and the odds. (These ranged, depending on my mood, from 10–1 or 15–1 for a story I felt confident about, to 989,989–1 for the film rights to an unsold novel.) At the bottom of the scoreboard I listed a Best Bet, Hopeful, Long Shot, Sleeper, and a Daily Double—and I kept a running count of rejections and acceptances—THEM vs. US. Once a day my friend Jerry Charyn would call, or I’d call him (we’d gone to Columbia together and he’d had his first story taken by Commentary the previous winter)—“How many pages today, Jay?” he’d ask. “Six,” I’d say. “Better get back to work,” he’d reply. “I did seven.”

  During the afternoons I’d play basketball in Central Park, and two or three evenings a week I’d be at a political meeting of one kind or another. If, for a while, my silent politics had been irresponsible, mad, and uncompromisingly radical, I found, back in New York, that I had swung to the other extreme: in things political, I now became realistic, responsible, sane. Thus, though I was signing statements that fall, before Kennedy’s death, in which I declared I wouldn’t serve in Vietnam, and in which I urged others not to—I was working, during the following spring and summer for the (re)election of those (the “lesser of two evils”) who were sending men to Vietnam. Though I still believed in immediate equality for all men, in immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, I was able to speak to groups about the need to write to their congressmen in order to urge de-escalation of the war, or passage of the voting rights bill.

  During the spring and summer of 1964 I worked with Lower East Side CORE in voter registration. I still see the looks on the faces of the Puerto Ricans who answered doors—their fear, their shame, eyes lowered, as they said, as if they’d all agreed on a single response: “Spanish don’t vote.”

  I remember how quickly I became immune to the rot and odors of their buildings. I remember their politeness (excessive—nobody living in such conditions, I said, should be polite), the times I was invited in for something to eat, to drink—and the thrill when we’d be able to convince a single man or woman to go with us to the local firehouse to register. Most of all, though, I remember that we worked that summer to get them to register so that they could vote for Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  My job, as I saw it on my return to New York, on behalf of any cause, became an eminently American one: to win friends and influence people. This could best be accomplished by demonstrating something that was equally American: that what was morally right was also pragmatically profitable. (E.g., it was in America’s “self-interest” to get out of Vietnam.)

  I met obstacles—facts which, a year or two before would have returned me to the letter to Kennedy, and the memory of which, in Spéracèdes, helped account for my desire to reject what I’d been part of. I remember, for example, talking with friends in the spring of 1964 about the “stall-in” of automobiles that was being planned for opening day of the New York World’s Fair by militant CORE chapters. My friends—like most liberals, like most civil rights leaders, like the New York Post and Times—opposed the stall-in. This was “going too far.” There were, I was told endlessly, peaceful, orderly ways of registering grievances, working against injustice. Moreover, my friends argued, hadn’t the passage of a civil rights bill, hadn’t the March on Washington, the victories of Martin Luther King—hadn’t these shown that things were changing, progressing? Most important, tying up New York’s highways would only “alienate” those white people whose support Negroes had worked so hard to gain and whose support “they would need” to achieve further gains.

  I asked some of my students at a junior high in south Harlem about the stall-in. Most of them didn’t know anything about it—those who did seemed to agree with my friends. A few, however, dissented. One seventh-grade boy wrote: “If a man not going to be my friend cause he gets held up in a traffic jam for some hours one afternoon he must not be a very good friend in the first place.”

  I remember also, during my first year back in New York, working with a friend, Gene Glickman, on a mass income tax refusal campaign which (again) was to be national in scope. We drew up a plan, drafted a covering letter, met with a lawyer, and then sent out dozens of letters to friends we thought would be sympathetic to the idea. So as to draw in “moderates,” we stated that the taxes would be placed in escrow until the United States government was involved in negotiations on Vietnam, or had been rebuffed in an honest attempt to get negotiations going. Also, that—so as to minimize personal risk—the tax refusal would not be undertaken or announced until five thousand people had pledged themselves to it.

  Not a single response was positive. Though such experiences confirmed some deeply skeptical part of me, at the time they only made me work harder in a “realistic” way, they only made me work to do away with those things whose continuance threatened to make me radical in action as well as belief.

  Betsey and I were married in the early summer of 1964 and we moved nine blocks south to a brownstone apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street. By then I had finished the novel I’d b
egun the previous fall and I’d also had—a few months before we were married—two short stories accepted (one by The Colorado Quarterly, the other by Transatlantic Review), the first fiction of mine that had been taken for publication since I’d begun submitting material seven years before. By this time I’d had, by count, over five hundred rejections—and nothing, not even the impersonality of the acceptances, could dampen my joy (one of the acceptances—for ten dollars—came on a mimeographed form; the other began: “I wonder if we ever told you we’d like to do your story? Would our usual $25 be acceptable?”).

  I’d attended no regular classes at Columbia that year, and taken none of the requisite exams along the Ph. D. route. In May, I applied for a part-time teaching job in Columbia College, one supposedly given only to graduate students who had already passed their “orals” and were at work on their dissertations. When the head of the department questioned me about my progress toward the Ph. D., I mumbled something about taking the “orals” the following year. “And if you start another novel—?” he asked. I shrugged, smiled, got the job, and shortly after classes started in September, began work on another novel. It was one I’d been planning, trying to start for over a year and a half.

  I taught at Columbia for the next two years (my office during my second year was the one that Mark and Charles Van Doren had shared, across from Richard Chase’s), and found at first that I enjoyed the teaching, enjoyed the fact of being in the position (at twenty-six) of those I’d admired most in the world when I’d been seventeen. The men who had, nine years before, seemed like gods to me—Lionel Trilling, Andrew Chiappe, James Shenton, F. W. Dupee—were now—the word had a wonderfully snobbish sound to it—colleagues.