Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

I found, though, that the life at Columbia, once I could be part of it, held little interest for me—I did my work and got paid for it, and spent as little time on campus as I had to. Though it was supposedly against Columbia’s rules, I continued to do substitute teaching in the city schools, and this teaching was more important to me.

  Yet, in Spéracèdes, when I came to write about my teaching of black and Puerto Rican students, I found that I didn’t want to—and again, now, back in America, I find that I resist detailing any experiences, friendships, anecdotes. To do so would, I claim, be only additional exploitation of their lives. If I filled a book with stories, with my students’ compositions, and we read them, we would all, I suppose—even me—be moved; we might even vow to “do something”—but what could we do? The individual success I may have had during those years, the effect I might have had on a few students (and their effect on me)—what does this have to do with the problems of massive numbers of human beings trapped in massive school systems within massive social and economic systems?

  GM again. During my days in the city schools the refrain—without revolution, America is doomed—was stronger than it had ever been. Still, I resist trotting out the lives of black and Puerto Rican students I knew, I resist catering to what I feel is nothing more than the moral voyeurism of well-intentioned liberal readers, I resist providing a bit more of what Huck Finn would have called “soul butter.” For what warnings could I preface any extended account of these teaching experiences with that would be powerful enough to counteract the illusion that my account would produce—i.e., that if only there were enough such books (enough such teachers, enough such publicity), all might still be changed, improved.

  Nothing I could say, no memories I could conjure up would be more than a footnote to what I felt the first day I entered a ghetto school: that it was sheer madness to believe that what was needed to make things right would ever come from the things, the institutions which had made them wrong; that one could not—that I should not—ever try to argue about this.

  As always, one did the best one could—I continued to act “realistically” to try to change particular wrongs, to create options, alternatives—but there was more hope, I felt, not only for the children trapped in the schools, but even more for those of us who were not poor, black, and young—in blowing up the schools (the ghettos) and starting over, than there was in continuing with things as they were, with trying to institute reforms from within, via the means available.

  What, I wondered, were children doing in such places? What was miraculous, what mystified, even excited me—was not that the students knew so little, but that, given the world they’d made their way in, they knew anything at all, that they were still alive, still individual, unique, different—one from the other.

  But I stop here, before the anecdotes and editorials rush from me. (The picture that has been in my head while writing all of this seems to counter the seriousness with which I want to tell all, with which I want to resist telling all: an eighth-grade class lined up to leave the room at the end of the period, and as I glance at them I notice that one of the boys in the back of the double line has his arm around his girlfriend, his hand resting on her breast, fondling it. He sees that I see him, start to move toward him, and he smiles at me, as if to say—everything’s okay, man. He winks at me, knowingly; I stop, smile, wink back.) For even if I could arouse readers—could make them feel deeply about the children of the ghettos—what point? The liberal’s notion (wish) that understanding and love and goodwill and education will eventually solve all problems becomes, in America, only another version of the conservative’s notion that before we change anything else, as Barry Goldwater was telling me in 1960, “we must first change the hearts of men.” The effect of both is to sustain the status quo.

  The political and the personal, if they are ever separate for me, are certainly not separate here: i.e., I stop myself from further description and/or analysis out of the knowledge of how deeply these experiences and impressions went, out of the knowledge that these experiences—more directly than others—found transformation in my fiction (though here, as opposed to my letter to Kennedy, the fact came before the fiction); out of the feeling that the black children I’ve known have in some way been the brother I’d loved, felt guilty toward, wanted to help, to love, and—losing guilt—to be equal to (me to him, him to me).

  I taught, I wrote, I played ball, Betsey and I enjoyed living on the West Side (she got a job as a children’s librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, where I’d first discovered books), I became increasingly active in politics, and in New York’s chief political activity, political discussion. If the way to return to the real world lay in compromising my revolutionary vision, then the way to continue to make my way in this world also lay in compromise. I became a “respectable” activist—trying to persuade those to the right of me to move slightly left and those to the left of me to move slightly right. I was reasonable, realistic—I never appeared in a public demonstration without a jacket, tie, fresh haircut. The way to accomplish all objectives, I was learning, was to gain the goodwill of moderate Americans; and anything which threatened to alienate them became the gravest of political sins. In the antiwar movement, for example, one acted on the assumption that if only we could educate something called “The American People” about the war in Vietnam, they would come to oppose it; if they came to oppose it, they would make their voices heard; and if they made their voices heard, the government would execute their will and end the war. What I’d learned my second time in Indiana took precedence over what I’d felt my first time there.

  I remember, for example, in the fall of 1965, attending the first meeting of the Committee of the Professions to End the War in Vietnam, and earning myself a nomination to the steering committee of one of the subcommittees (The Committee to Organize an International Conference of Intellectuals on the War in Vietnam) by arguing against the participation of Communists (e.g., Yevtushenko) in the International Conference.

  We had, I insisted, to keep our principal objective in mind: how would the mass media treat the conference? If there were Communists invited wouldn’t this give the media the opportunity they were looking for to malign us and to ignore the force of our arguments against the war? The reason we professionals (artists, writers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, et al.) had come to that meeting was, I declared, to form a “new” kind of antiwar organization that would be “effective” precisely because it would be immune from the attacks usually leveled against left-wing organizations. Our job, in short, was to make antiwar activity “respectable.”

  Although I wanted to feel that my political views were closer to those of more radical organizations, I was at home in the Committee of the Professions. Yes, I agreed with those to my left, it was regrettable that we had to try to make antiwar activity “respectable”; yes, we should probably direct our attention to changing those things which made such compromises, tactics necessary—but first we had to do everything possible to try to end the war in Vietnam, and this meant trying to build a “mass popular movement,” this meant trying to make our cause seem legitimate in the eyes of “The American People.”

  I remember sitting around tables in comfortable East and West Side apartments (from my position as co-chairman of the International Conference Committee I had been made a permanent member of the steering committee of the Committee of the Professions), drawing up lists of the most prominent intellectuals in the world, discussing their relative merits, deciding which of them we should invite to the International Conference, figuring out which of us were friends with them, which of us had friends who were friends with them. I drafted the letter that went to them, and we all complimented ourselves when replies (from Mumford, Sartre, Niemoller, Russell, Toynbee, et al.) began coming in.

  I also remember getting the Committee to back one of my proposals: for a national advertising and fund-raising campaign on television. If we wanted to reach the American people, I said, then why not do
it in an American way, with one-minute spots coast-to-coast by prominent individuals, in prime time. I was guaranteed funds by the Committee, prominent individuals, a sympathetic ad agency to handle things—and I began contacting the major TV networks—only to discover that they would accept no political advertising whatever, except as part of the campaign of a legitimate political candidate during an election year. To work through the courts to force the networks to take antiwar ads, or to try to get the FCC to rule that they had to—everyone we consulted was of the same opinion: forget it.

  From time to time I wrote articles about the war, about the antiwar movement, about the civil rights movement—and in the Committee of the Professions I was (more so than at Columbia) thought of as a writer; people discussed my ideas with me, inquired about my fiction and my articles, read my stories. I remember helping to organize the first of the nation’s read-ins, sponsored by the Committee of the Professions—composing letters, ads, making arrangements with Town Hall—and thinking all the time of the day when someone like myself would be doing the secretarial work and I (with Mailer, Malamud, Miller, Kazin, Lowell) would be asked to read from my works. (This was now something less than a grandiose fantasy, I told myself, since the novel—Big Man—I’d completed during my first year of marriage—I’d worked on it for two and a half years—had been accepted for publication.)

  I enjoyed—in somewhat the same way I’d done so the last time I’d been in New York—being an anonymous helper in “the movement.” The first job I did for the Committee of the Professions was to pick up and deliver its stationery. And I also enjoyed New York name-dropping games, being “in” on things literary. When, for example, during the Town Hall read-in, one of the speakers chose not to read from her own works, but instead to explain to the audience, as spokesman for all the other writers, poets, and actors, why the read-in was taking place, why she and the others had chosen to protest the war in this particular manner, I could smile, gossip to friends; she had telephoned our office a week before the read-in to ask why she had not been invited. When she’d been told that we already had too many participants, she’d insisted until we’d reluctantly agreed to let her have five minutes of stage time. She took twenty.

  I seem always to have been soliciting signatures and money for ads in The New York Times. Generally, faculty members who refused to sign refused because, although they were, they assured me, “against the war,” they did not agree “completely” with the text of our ad. If they could suggest some revisions…if the wording could be changed to represent more accurately their viewpoint… One well-known professor in Columbia’s English Department looked first at a list of signers and, without reading the text, returned the sheet to me; he would not, he said, sign an ad that had already been signed by Allen Ginsberg.

  One particular ad contained over six thousand signatures, took up three pages of The News of the Week in Review, and was the largest political ad that had ever, until that time, been bought for the Times. We received wire-service stories, we were able—from contributions that came in because of the ad—to reprint it in a dozen other cities, to spend an evening debating the choice of these cities. For a time I suppose I felt that six thousand signatures in the Sunday Times, or several dozen prominent intellectuals reading from their work at Town Hall somehow related to what was happening in Washington or Saigon.

  My writing went well in New York. The more I acted in the world of “real” politics, the more I was willing to compromise my political vision in order to obtain specific objectives, the less, it seemed, I felt a need to compromise the vision that informed my novels and stories. Though I was, I told myself, no less enraged by the world than I’d been before, I was now able to deal with this rage (in both my fiction and my politics) in an efficient, objective way. The process reinforced itself endlessly: the more control I gained over my rage, the more I came to believe in this control and in the power it gave me. The more regularly I put myself into ongoing political activities, the more I came to believe that my ability to have a specific effect on other individuals (and/or a few events) mattered; and the more this happened (as it did in the Committee of the Professions), the more I taught myself that with this power came—the favorite word of the newspapers I’d been brought up with—“responsibility.”

  As always in such things I had involved inner theories to justify and explain (to myself) everything I did—this time, however, I found that I had little need to use my own sources of rationalization. What I did and said was approved—and protected—by the world I moved in, by those who agreed with me and worked with me, and by those who did not—but who would have defended to the death, as I saw it, my right to have compromised my more absolute demands and revolutionary desires.

  What I remember most when I think of my three years in New York are meetings, and what I remember most about the meetings is that there were so many of them. Not long after I’d begun working with the Committee of the Professions I was selected to be their representative to the nation’s largest antiwar group—the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, and early in 1966 I was made a member of the executive committee of this committee.

  Although Parade Committee meetings now seem indistinguishable, one from the other, I do recall the first meeting I attended. It was held in a run-down building near Union Square, and the meeting room was long, narrow, smoke-filled. We sat on wooden chairs, and as the arguments and speeches spun around me (the Committee was composed of representatives from over eighty New York antiwar groups) I felt as if I’d been sent back in a time machine, dropped into a romantic era when words like Working Class and Trotskyite and The Masses still had meaning.

  I was surprised that there were so many different groups organized against the war—even more surprised by the fury with which they attacked one another. Delegates spent most of their time denouncing one another—as if, it seemed, rival antiwar groups were more insidious enemies than Dean Rusk or Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, I was astonished by the tolerance and endurance of the representatives: I never—even after months of meetings—could understand how so many people could sit so long, so patiently through endless hours of what seemed to be the same old debates.

  At my first meeting there seemed to me to be an infinite number of motions, votes, appeals to Roberts Rules of Order (“Point of Information” was the standard procedure for interrupting in order to make a speech on any subject whatever). One little old woman lectured us for ten minutes on the evils of war; another told us why the war in Vietnam should be ended; a third told us about a tea party she’d held in her apartment in the Bronx, to which she’d invited her neighbors—the response of these neighbors to a discussion on Vietnam “proved,” she said, that “the American people were rising up against the war.”

  The person who sat next to me—an intense gray-haired representative wearing thick glasses, who, despite his hair, seemed to be in his late twenties, spoke to no one, didn’t respond to the few attempts at conversation I offered, and sat through three or four hours of the meeting staring fiercely ahead until, at one point, he suddenly rose from his chair and with a sweep of his arm which almost knocked me from mine, his fists beating the air, he proclaimed through the smoke—“What we must all do, comrades, is to educate the working men of America to the fact that their true enemy lives in Washington! We must rip the mask off the bloody tyrant and let the American people see his murderous face!…”

  Five minutes later he sat down—and while representatives actually argued for or against what he had said (it was in the form of a proposition, or an amendment to a proposition—I can’t recall which), he returned to his former expressionless pose, staring silently ahead.

  What surprised me most afterwards was the fact that some decisions had actually been made at the meeting. Those we thought we were struggling against, I recall thinking, were surely not handicapped by such fierce and insane allegiance to democratic procedures.

  Although at the time I kept vowing to quit—kept t
elling myself how mad the meetings were, how nothing was being gained by all the fights, or even by the marches, I stayed on; and when I think of the Parade Committee now I find that I do so with some affection: I think of the pleasant sensation at seeing my name—on letterheads, handbills, and ads—alphabetically trapped between those of Otto Nathan and Grace Paley. I recall also, at the close of one meeting, being approached by a short, balding man in his sixties or seventies. He shook my hand warmly and thanked me for having supported his group’s position during the meeting. “It seems to me, though, young man,” he went on, “that you have some significant gaps in your education.” He smiled and put his hand on my arm. “I was wondering if you have ever heard of the six hundred families?” I said no. His smile was broader. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “we can get together some evening and I can explain to you just how America’s ruling class works.…”

  By the spring of 1966, my confidence built up by my activities on the executive committees of two of the nation’s major antiwar groups—I began advocating direct action against the war. With the growth of both the war and the antiwar movement, some form of mass civil disobedience, I felt, was necessary and possible.

  When I brought the subject up at Committee of the Professions meetings, however, nobody was enthusiastic. Less than that: they seemed offended by the suggestion—as if sitting down on Fifth Avenue or at an induction center was something below them, something vulgar. When, somewhat earlier that year, I’d tried to get the Committee of the Professions to join forces with some civil rights groups—this was before people such as Martin Luther King, and organizations such as CORE had joined the antiwar protests—the results had been disastrous. I invited representatives of a Harlem group to a meeting and the discussions took a wrong turn when the Harlem people made some remarks about how they had been double-dealt in the past by white liberals. “What,” members of the committee kept asking me afterwards, “do those people want?”