The city itself was a disappointment to me. The radical years there were over. The riots and mayhem I’d been hoping to see had passed like a storm. The revolution of the sixties was supposed to have ushered in a new “Age of Aquarius” when all would be peace and love everywhere. Big surprise: it never happened. Instead, the college town’s streets were littered with the detritus of the hoped-for millennium. Scruffy street people begged and sold drugs along the sidewalks of the main drag, Telegraph Avenue. Self-serious radicals hawked their failed philosophies with pamphlets and grandiose speeches in Sproul Plaza, the university quad.
Myself, I drank. I slept long hours, sometimes twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day. I caught colds that lasted for weeks and weeks. I haunted restaurants and bars, glum and beetle-browed, barely able to speak to strangers yet always looking to pick up girls. The few relationships I had with women were brief and reckless. When they were over, I would hole up in my room for days, tormented by hypochondriacal fears that I had contracted a sexual disease.
Late at night, through the night, I would write in a kind of fever. I would sit at the table by the window in my little kitchen. Week-old dirty dishes filled the sink beside me, the food on them turning green. I would scribble in my notebooks hour after hour without lifting my eyes. With a sort of mad discipline, I taught myself my trade. I would spend an entire night writing and rewriting a single sentence. Then I would spend the next night expanding the sentence into a paragraph and rewriting that. Then, during the next two nights, I would turn the paragraph into a page, writing and rewriting every word until it sang to me, enlarging that first line until I had a full scene or even a short story. When I was finished, I would stumble pale and grey into the pale, grey light of dawn. Dressed in a ratty trench coat, unshaven, hollow-eyed, I would wander down to the local doughnut shop to watch them make the first doughnuts of the day. I would carry a hot one home and devour it in a bite or two. Then I would crawl into bed and sleep and sleep until well into the afternoon.
After a couple of months like this, I finally realized something was wrong with me. I willed myself to get out of bed earlier and to get out of the apartment more. I joined the campus radio station as a news reader, just to meet people. I had an old friend from Great Neck in one of the dorms and he brought me into his weekly poker game. The worst of my depression started to lift, though a heavy sadness lingered in me still. I felt lost.
In class—when I did go to class—I went through all the usual razzle-dazzle shenanigans: bluff and fakery. I read none of the books. I conned and wrote my way to passing grades. I remember once in particular taking an essay test on William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” It’s a great poem—now one of my favorites of his—but I hadn’t read a word of it at the time. Funnier still: Blake was both a poet and an engraver and the subject of the course was the interplay between the visual and written arts, so not only did I not know what “Visions” was about, I didn’t even know whether it was a poem or a picture. I had to write the entire essay using the vaguest words I could think of so as not to give my ignorance away. “This work—if work is the word I want—draws a picture, so to speak, of Blake’s internal world . . .” It was the utterest of utter nonsense. What poem or engraving doesn’t draw a picture, so to speak, of the poet or artist’s internal world? I laughed out loud when I received a grade of B-minus on the test. B-minus was fine with me. I just wanted to get by.
I should mention—for lovers of earthly justice—that I did get caught at this flim-flam once. It was incredibly humiliating. I took a seminar on the novels of William Faulkner, a small discussion group of maybe ten or twelve students. I was the star of the class. I had opinions on everything Faulkner had ever written. I would hold forth eloquently at almost every session. It was just the sort of bloviation with which I’d always hidden my ignorance, just the trick to avoid any sober fact-based discussion that might queer my con.
One day, however, the teacher sprang a short-answer quiz on us. She had warned us she would, and I tried to avoid it, but I mistook the schedule and got caught. It was awful. Here I’d been mouthing off about these books for weeks and I couldn’t answer the simplest questions about their plots or characters—because, of course, I hadn’t read them. I received an F on the test, and my fakery was revealed. Even worse, I had to go to the professor’s office to pick up the test booklet personally. She was a smart, attractive woman whom I liked and respected. It was terrible to have to look her in the eye as she handed me the booklet, both of us knowing what a fraud I was. But if ever a son of Adam deserved his fate, I was that man!
By late winter of my first year in school, I felt as if I was strangling on my own wanderlust. Mardi Gras was coming to New Orleans. Now, there was a party town I’d always loved whenever I’d passed through it, all Dixieland, hookers, and booze. I bought a round-trip bus ticket. I put a hundred dollars cash in my pocket. I lighted out for the territory.
At first, it was spectacular. Mardi Gras was everything I could have wished for. Even on the Greyhound down, a wild country girl in the seat beside me threw a blanket over us both and came into my arms in the deep shadows of the night. When I reached the city, I saw a full-blown Feast of Fools. Beneath the wrought-iron railings and lantern-style streetlights of the French Quarter, the people flowed and frolicked and danced. The crowds were so dense they carried me with them like a riptide. There were cold drinks and hot jazz, both of which I loved. There were grotesque floats carrying giant pagan gods made of papier-mâché. Half-naked men and women, their breasts draped with bead necklaces, their faces hidden behind masks, gamboled around the idols in an all-day Bacchanal. Local girls took me to their apartments. Drifter girls took me into their sleeping bags. I felt alive for the first time in half a year.
But by the third day, my money ran out. I had no credit cards. This was before ATMs. I had assumed I’d be able to cash a check, but no one would accept my identification. I had nowhere to stay, nowhere to clean up, not even a bag to sleep in. I spent one night in the basement of the stadium at Tulane University. The city had set the space aside to handle the influx of homeless wanderers. I slept on the concrete floor wrapped in my thin trench coat. When I woke up, my whole body was rigid and thrumming with cold. Another day, as I was swept along in the vast, roiling mob, I saw a girl lose her footing just ahead of me. I caught her arm to steady her. By some insane chance or providence, she turned out to be a girl from my high school! Reluctantly, she and her boyfriend let me sleep for a few hours on the spare bed in his dorm room.
After that, though, I was on the streets. The rains began, heavy tropical rains. I became as filthy and disheveled as all the other homeless drifters in the city. I had enough loose change in my pockets to buy rolls and doughnuts, but I was getting hungry too. When I tried to take shelter in the bus station for the night, the policeman there kept rapping me with his billy club whenever I dozed off. When I went out in the rain-drenched streets and curled up in a doorway, another cop dragged me to my feet and chased me away, threatening to put me in jail.
By the time the party ended, I was burning hot with fever. My vision was blurred. My mind was muddy. I staggered when I walked. All I had left in my pockets now was my ticket home. It took days to get a seat on one of the crowded buses out of town but I finally did it. I leaned my steaming forehead against the cool bus window and lapsed into semiconsciousness.
The bus rolled out. I grew sicker by the minute, by the mile. I coughed and shuddered and began to shiver uncontrollably. At a stop in Texas somewhere, an ancient-looking black man boarded the bus and sat down beside me. I was hallucinating by then, wandering lost in hazy dreams, but I’m pretty sure the guy was real. He saw me trembling next to him. He leaned over and felt my forehead. He took off his heavy overcoat and wrapped it around me, tucking it in behind my back and buttoning it closed under my chin. As the bus rolled on, he hand-fed me aspirins. He held a cup of water to my lips and steadied my head with his hand so I could drink. After
I-don’t-know-how-many hours of this treatment, my fever broke. I started pouring sweat. “You’ll be all right now, son,” the man said to me. I fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up, I felt better—and the old man was gone. I was half-convinced he was an angel. If he wasn’t then, he is now.
I made it back to school, but by the end of that academic year, I had had enough of it. I dropped out. I wandered around the country some more, then returned to Berkeley, where my friends were. I landed a job in the news department of a small radio station out by the bay. It was an ironic triumph. I went there to do a voice audition. I sat in the news director’s office and read some news copy out loud. I’d never had a professional audition before. I was nervous. My reading was terrible and I knew it. I was sure I wouldn’t get the job. As I came to the end of the copy, I glanced up. To my surprise, I saw a small picture of my father on the wall. It was a promotional football card with my father posing as a football player. Startled, I blurted out, “Hey, that’s my dad!” The news director was from back east. He was a big Klavan and Finch fan. He hired me on the spot.
More Experience. Not long after I joined the station’s small news team as a reporter, the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by a gang of radicals. It was the crime of the decade. At nineteen, I found myself moving in a pack with the most famous reporters in the country. It was like some kind of crazy circus with journalists as the clowns. I saw sophisticated national newsmen get into fistfights at press conferences over who would put his camera where. I joined celebrity reporters in sneaking past watchful guards to get into crime scenes. I learned to steal documents off officials’ desks like they did. At one point, a five-foot-nothing woman from some local newspaper somewhere taught me an excellent trick. As we walked together to a one-on-one interview with a police spokesman, she elbowed me in the solar plexus so hard she knocked me into a wall—just to make sure she got the interview first.
Meanwhile, the Patty Hearst story got curiouser and more deadly. Soon the missing heiress was issuing tape recordings announcing she had joined her kidnappers’ radical army. She had herself photographed holding a machine gun during a bank robbery committed by her captors. Later, she claimed she had been brainwashed by them, but that didn’t save her from doing time. It all climaxed down in Los Angeles with the radicals holed up in a house, shooting it out with the LAPD. The house caught fire and most of the radicals burned to death. So much for the Age of Aquarius.
By the time that final gunfight exploded, though, I had left the radio station and returned to university. I hadn’t had a change of heart about school, not exactly. But a faint—the faintest—glimmer of understanding had begun to filter through the darkness of my angry and egotistical ignorance. It was beginning to seem to me just possible—just barely possible—that I did not know as much as I thought I did. It was beginning to occur to me that I might not learn what a really good writer needed to learn by staying out here in the working world. Experience was fine. Experience was fun. But no matter how much of it you got, you could only really experience the territory right around you, a vanishing arc of space and time. Not only that. Your personality shaped your perceptions of whatever you saw. Your upbringing, your culture, your little moment of history hemmed your vision round. In the words of my old pal William Blake—whom I still hadn’t read yet—“The eye altering alters all.”
But what if you could see what other men saw—“men and women too,” as Blake would hurry to say? What if you could enter other minds? Not just those minds that shared your point of view, but also those that saw life differently, had other personalities, other upbringings in eras other than your own? What if you could become not just a Huckleberry rambler through the country you were given, not just a seeker of Experience in your accidental age but also, in Blake’s mighty phrase, “a Mental Traveller” through a vast universe of deep and sometimes contradictory ideas?
Given my anger, given my egotism, given my ignorance, I’m not sure how such a notion had even begun to occur to me. But I think it had been suggested to my mind during that miserable first year in college by another old friend of mine: William Faulkner.
Here was an odd thing. Though I rarely read any of the work assigned in class, though I hardly ever studied for tests, I always bought every book that was listed on the syllabus and I never threw any of the books away. I was very conscientious about this. If the campus bookstore was missing a volume on my list, I would hunt it down elsewhere or order it and return to the store to pick it up when it arrived. Whatever books the school assigned, I bought them and kept them, completely unread. It was a strange thing to do, not like me at all. My little studio soon became lined, stacked, and littered with the many books I was ignoring.
So it happened one winter morning—late one winter morning after one of my long nights—I found myself lying awake in bed, bored and staring at the ceiling, too lazy to rise. I looked down over the blankets. One of the many books that were strewn around the room had come to be lying at the foot of the bed. My sleepy eyes focused on it. It was The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.
Now, as I’ve said, Faulkner was the sort of novelist I did not read. I didn’t have to. I knew he was no good. Not tough. Not terse. Not realistic. He was florid and fancy and hard to understand. He made pretentious allusions that only pretentious intellectual snobs pretended to comprehend. I didn’t have to look at a word he’d written to know that I disdained him utterly.
But here I was. Bored and snug in bed. The Sound and the Fury was the only book I could reach without getting out from under the blankets. So I curled around and snagged its cover between my fingertips and drew it to me. I figured if I actually read a page or two, it might give me a bit more credibility the next time I denounced the author. I scanned the first line.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting . . .
I read on. And wait, this wasn’t hard to understand at all. It was a description of a golf game. If the writing was a little unclear, it was because the character describing the game was mentally retarded. And hey, that made sense. It was The Sound and the Fury, right? “A tale told by an idiot,” like in that sound-and-fury speech from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I kept reading. The book told the same story four times from four different perspectives. That reminded me of something too. Oh, yes: the Gospels! I was beginning to see how this worked.
I read the book through to the end. I loved every page of it. And I loved Faulkner’s Light in August. And I thought his Absalom, Absalom was one of the most profound and touchingly tragic novels I had ever read. I still felt I was betraying my values by admiring these fancy and elaborately written books. But I just couldn’t help myself. I would’ve had to be blind to miss how good they were.
It took time, a long time, but the shock of discovering Faulkner began to edge me away from my deeply held and completely uninformed literary opinions. I began to experiment a little, reading other books that were somewhat different from what I usually enjoyed. Two of those books had a powerful effect on the way I experienced the intellectual atmosphere of the rest of my university days.
I went to college just as the ideas often called postmodernism were rising up through the educational system. Up to that time—under modernism—academics and intellectuals had considered themselves to be participating in a Great Conversation, an interchange carried on across the centuries by the major thinkers and artists of the Western canon. The idea was that by studying this conversation you could move closer to the Truth and so find a fuller wisdom about reality and what made for the Good Life. Now, though, those intellectuals who derided and even denounced the Western canon and Western values in general had come to the fore. Literature was no longer to be loved and learned from, but deconstructed to reveal its secret prejudices and power plays. Language itself was now considered not a rude tool for transmitting meaning but a political instrument of imperialism and oppression that needed radical criticism. The very id
ea of Truth was being rejected. All morals were relative, all cultures equally legitimate.
Those professors who had studied literature under the old system were on the defensive and had lost their confidence. I remember sitting in a class on Alfred Lord Tennyson, a poet of the highest genius who often comes under attack now for his Victorian values. The professor was lecturing to an auditorium full of students about The Charge of the Light Brigade. The poem is a brilliant description of a disastrous but courageous charge on a Russian cannon emplacement by six hundred British cavalrymen in 1854 during the Crimean War.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the Valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
The professor, a mild-mannered woman in her forties, was discussing the poem with gentle enthusiasm when a very serious young lady in a very serious pair of spectacles rose from one of the front seats and demanded angrily, “How can we even read this poem when all it does is glorify war?”
The poor professor’s face went blank. Clearly, she was a product of the old school. She studied literature because she loved literature not because she wanted to use it to preen herself on her own political virtue. She had never had to defend the beauty of beauty before, or the wisdom of wisdom. She smiled, embarrassed. She shrugged weakly. “I see what you mean,” she said.
At the back of the auditorium, I leapt to my feet, appalled. Here was a poem I had actually read—and I loved it. I still do. Because it’s great. Inarticulate with passion, I began to slap my open volume of Tennyson with the back of my hand, reading the opening lines aloud and saying, “Listen! Listen to this! Listen! ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward—all in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.’ You can hear the horses! You can—listen!—you can feel the courage and the madness, everything, it’s all there . . .” I babbled on like that for a few more seconds and then dropped back into my seat, blushing, feeling like an idiot.
The Great Good Thing Page 12