Without warning she turned to me and said, “I like you bein’ so tall, my husband was a tall man.”
“I like you too, Grandma.”
She patted my knee and went back to looking over the crowd. Mary came up and sat down on her other side, and they held hands. After a moment the old lady turned to me and said, “She was always the smart one, don’t y’know.” An immense feeling of safety crept over me as we sat there in the middle of America.
But the serenity of that scene begins to tremble as I look at it more closely after nearly half a century. I was far less secure than I have accustomed myself to believe, and the reasons were in great part political. Ohio was deep in isolationism in 1940, and I knew that most of the people on the lawn were persuaded that after a mere twenty years of peace America had no business entering another European war. I felt the same, but my reasoning, unlike theirs, was radical; I saw the conflict between Germany and the Anglo-French as a new version of the old imperialist conflict of the previous world war, another last gasp of an expiring, self-destroying capitalist system. The people on the lawn, even if temporarily denied its bounty, believed in capitalism. Some of them had also bought the idea that by standing against America’s involvement in the war they were foiling the international Jewish banker conspiracy to get us into it.
This message had gradually evolved into the main theme of a radio preacher with the largest audience in the world, Father Charles E. Coughlin, who by 1940 was confiding to his ten million Depression-battered listeners that the president was a liar controlled by both the Jewish bankers and, astonishingly enough, the Jewish Communists, the same tribe that twenty years earlier had engineered the Russian Revolution and was sworn to repeat it in “Washingtonsky,” as he called it. I could just see Mr. Slattery with his ear to his Philco, shaking his head with a deeply pleasured grin at the padre’s wicked wit. He was being educated, as were an unknown number of others on that lawn, to understand that Hitler-ism was the German nation’s innocently defensive response to the threat of Communism, that Hitler was only against “bad Jews,” especially those born outside Germany, just as he was against “bad gentiles,” the ones who had radical ideas. That Coughlin was broadcasting word-for-word translations of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s editorials in World Service, the German government’s official propaganda sheet, was not known to the people on the lawn, and for some of them would not have been shocking news. That I shared with them an opposition to entering the war while disagreeing with everything else they believed in was a gnawing unhappiness for me and a rather new experience with ambiguity. Every generation looks back longingly to an earlier age when things were simpler and clearer, a time before degeneration began, but the year 1940—the end of my bachelor-youth and of the Depression—does still seem to me to have marked the end of a simple democratic idealism handed us by the overwhelmingly obvious evil of Hitlerism. At least it was obvious to us in New York. The further into the country one moved, however, the more human Hitler seemed to look, simply another warlike German leader who was out to avenge his country’s defeat of 1918, a not entirely dishonorable ideal, come to think of it, and in any case not our business to interfere with.
In short, my conscience was muddled, as tends to happen when one knows one’s agreement with a friend or ally is not at all as unconflicted as it purports to be. I still believed in the goodness of a Soviet Union that in the official Catholic view of my new in-laws and their friends was the chief creation of the Antichrist. But I refused to despair, because I thought that it was simply their longing for peace that had allowed them to be misled by demagogues into what seemed a sympathy for fascism.
The end of all this inner turmoil was that it reinforced the weld between my personal ambition as a playwright and my hopes for the salvation of the Republic. More, it deepened the presumption that should I ever win an audience it would have to be made up of all the people, not merely the educated or sophisticated, since it was this mass that contained the oceanic power to smash everything, including myself, or to create much good. By whatever means, I had somehow arrived at the psychological role of mediator between the Jews and America, and among Americans themselves as well. No doubt as a defense against the immensity of the domestic and European fascistic threat, which in my depths I interpreted as the threat of my own extinction, I had the wish, if not yet the conviction, that art could express the universality of human beings, their common emotions and ideas. And I already had certain clues here in Ohio that at bottom we were all pretty much the same.
Slattery was actually going around spreading the news of my refusal to accept the delay in the granting of the dispensation. It seemed now that as a New Yorker and a “writer,” and possibly even as a Jew, there was something almost glamorous about me, dead broke as I was and altogether uncertain of my future. Sitting beside the old lady on the porch, I now began to enjoy acceptance of myself not only as a person but as a symbol of suspect strangeness beneficently transformed. Now people began recommending Mary to me, recalling what a great reader she had always been, practically the only kid who had loved school, as though her marrying an intellectual had been fated. The relaxed bursts of laughter of honest folk along the banquet tables on the grass, the high nasal women’s voices, the overeating of the roasts and turkeys and cakes and all the creamy goodness of that countryside, spoke to me of the oneness of mankind. My father had been right in his refusal to deny gentiles a capacity for justice and warmth toward the stranger.
And at the same time, of course, running parallel with this euphoric hopefulness was my certainty that if I should suddenly stand up and announce that it was all a mistake and that I was leaving alone for New York, Mary’s mother would thank me rapturously, followed by the whole clan.
As usual, it was dialogue that combed out my muddle. People now had momentarily ceased to come up to us on the porch, and turning to me with the vaguely apprehensive look in her eyes that old people sometimes show when addressing the opaque young, Nan asked, “What’re you making of this pact?”
The Nazi-Soviet Pact had stunned the world; Hitler’s archenemy had been Bolshevism, whose threat to Germany had justified all his barbarities and had won him support from many conservatives in the West. Partisans of the Soviet Union who had not quit the ranks in disgust were defending the pact by recalling that for years the Russians had been pleading with France and England for a treaty against the Nazis and had gotten nowhere; now they had simply turned the tables and from their point of view neutralized Germany in order to give themselves time to prepare for the inevitable German attack later on. In other words, the myth still held that these were not only different but absolutely opposite systems.
Before I could answer, the old woman said, “Looks like the Russians just got fed up with those French.” French sounded slightly distasteful, she being of German Alsatian background. “I wouldn’t blame them at all.”
Coming from so authentic a native of the heartland rather than from a New York radical, this was a relief to me. The truth was that with the pact there had come, as some such moment does to every generation, an end to innocence, the sunny air of youth clouding over with an ambiguous weather. Throughout the Depression years, whatever the frustrations and political twists and turns, one’s pure words had had no need to be colored by unacknowledged reservations: one had simply and directly reached out to the rational and landed on the left. The alternative was to justify insanities like the destruction of crops to keep prices up when people in the cities were starving for food. But nothing was that clear anymore.
“Well, I hope we can stay out of this one,” she went on, “but you just wait and see—those British are going to work around us till we’re bailing them out of trouble with our boys again . . .”
For a moment her simple common sense promised to settle my uncertainty about this single most crucial issue of the hour. In effect, she was saying that no conflict of values stood between the Nazis and their Western opponents: it was merely the
everlasting old power fight, this time over the redivision of empire as a result of a resurgent Germany having recovered from her defeat twenty years ago in the First War.
The issue itself is of course long gone, but the human process that underlay my rationalizations (and probably those of most Americans at the time) is still very much with us, now applied to other issues. For seven years I had literally been having nightmares about the Nazis, if only because they seemed in the profoundest sense to be unopposed, truly the wave of the future, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh had called them, a wave of total darkness as I envisioned it, a government of perverts, hoodlums, and the raving mad. How could I possibly have tolerated the idea that a Nazi victory would be no worse than that of the British and French, corrupt and decadent as they were, and craven as they had been during the decade in knuckling under to Hitler’s demands? This paradox was very much part of the radical mind-set of the thirties.
Part of the national confusion as to how to view the oncoming war grew out of an uncustomary American cynicism resulting from the Crash. The stock market, far more than a mechanism of investment or even legalized gambling, had carried for a great many middle-class people the prestige of capitalism itself. The market was the visible symbol of the rising line of “values” of property, even the proof of some sort of classless society in the making, since investing had spread so widely through the country. When the market collapsed practically overnight, with none of the great leaders or institutions capable of stopping it or even understanding what was happening, a panic deep in the spirit made questionable any and all belief in everything official. In an act of contempt, someone thrust a midget onto the lap of the great and formerly sequestered investment banker J. Pierpont Morgan while cameras flashed. Other financiers landed in prison or jumped out of windows. The uncontrollable slide of the market also took with it what had remained of the noble mythology justifying the First World War, which now became but another proof of the power of the moneybags to brutally squander innocent lives in order to make the rich richer. In this light the revolution in Russia, which had pulled the czarist army out of the war and its mindless slaughter, made terrific sense; from a distance it seemed a sublime instance of man’s intelligence.
Now, in 1940, they were going at it again, and again it was the Russians who were opting out of yet another war. And if it seemed a cynical turnabout to have allied themselves with the very fascists they had inveighed against, there was also more than a semblance of consistency in the pact, if that was what you wished to see. Russia in 1940 had no colonies, had annexed no neighbors (the division of Poland with Germany and the occupation of the Baltic republics were explained away as defensive acts), and could therefore claim a clean anti-imperialist record; and it had no unemployment, unlike every major European country. Could her alliance with Germany not demonstrate either that she was determined to stay out of a rotten war even at the cost of having to embrace the loathsome Nazis or that she was buying time in order to prepare to fight them?
The difficulty of understanding human illusion is the difficulty of discovering its premises, the logic of the illogical. Once the Western democracies, led by men like Chamberlain of England and Daladier of France, had simply handed Hitler the Czechs, who with one of Europe’s strongest and best-prepared armies could quite possibly have stopped the Germans, once it was perfectly evident in the refusal of the Allies to sell arms to the Spanish Republicans that they were accomplices of Italian and German fascism in the destruction of the first democracy in Spain’s history, it was not a difficult step to believe that the secret dream of the governments of France and Britain was a German victory in Russia, and afterwards a long future without any Communists at all in a world comfortably divided into spheres, none of them socialist, all of them held in place by German Nazis, English aristocrats, French millionaires, and their mercenary armies. That the Russians should now have drawn the teeth of this burgeoning new dragon by shaking its claws, leaving its tail to slash at Paris and London instead of Moscow and Leningrad, was certainly comprehensible.
What was omitted from this scansion was power, in place of which we injected moral considerations. It was our desire for a moral world, the deep wish to assert the existence of goodness, that generated, as it continues to do, political fantasy. Given the depth of our alienation from the failing capitalism of the time, it would have been intolerable to see the clear parallels between the social institutions of the fascist and Nazi regimes and those of the Soviet Union. Captive trade unions, mass youth organizations, secret police, informers in the workplace and the home, masses of political prisoners, and at the center of it all idolatry of the state and its leader—all of these had originated in the Soviet system. Fascism and Nazism were imitations of Soviet forms, with manic nationalism and racism replacing international proletarian solidarity as their central “spiritual” content. The generic enmity between the two systems turned out to be no deeper than the enmity of England for France at certain times in history, or of Germany for England. The moral conflict, which we preferred to take to heart, concealed the nationalism and geopolitics that were the driving engines of the time.
The fear of drift, more exactly a drift into some kind of fascism, lay hidden somewhere in the origins of The Man Who Had All the Luck, an early play of mine—seemingly a genre piece about mid-America that has no connection with any of these political questions. It was, so to speak, handed me by a woman who climbed up on the porch and seated herself beside Mary, Nan, and me. She was Mrs. Slattery’s younger sister Helen, whose husband had hanged himself not long before. Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more. But there simply are circumstances in which plays collect and form, like bacteria in a laboratory dish, later to kill or cure.
Helen was eager to meet the stranger Mary was bringing into the clan and seemed to long for news of the world outside. Slender, with a small pale face and brown button eyes, she had a certain absentminded integrity in her unselfconscious way of crossing her legs and leaning on her thigh, in her unawareness of the hairpins dangling from her bun and the crookedness of her blouse neckline. She emitted the power of the distracted, the air of a Middle American searcher.
Mary had told me about Helen’s awakening one morning to see through her bedroom window the open barn door and her young husband hanging from a rafter. “I was sorry to hear about your husband,” I said. “I hear he was a fine man.”
With no hesitation she moved right into the subject, as though by telling it again and again her story might turn out to be less real.
“We were together in the same classes since kindergarten, don’t y’know, and right through high school, although Peter had to quit and get some work and I went on and graduated. Everybody’d always liked him, so he never wanted for a job, I mean people just liked having him.around, he was so cheerful, don’t y’know . . .”
Like a litany, her story seemed to have been often told, reminding me of the prisoners’ wives at Michigan’s Jackson State Penitentiary, the largest in the country, where as a student I had spent many weekends visiting a friend who had gotten the job of psychologist there after a single psychology course in Ann Arbor. Those women, too, seemed to have spent years repeating the same stories of injustice to anyone who would listen.
“Then he changed. Overnight, just all of a sudden started this getting up out of bed and putting on his clothes and going out.”
“Where’d he go?”
“A lot of the times to the filling station . . .”
Peter had owned a very lucrative gas station, only one of the properties he had developed while still in his twenties, and he liked to make surprise inspections to balance the cash against the gallons pumped. That no discrepancies ever turned up did not lessen his panicky conviction that his employees were pilfering. “You couldn’t contradict him, he’d get mad if you did,” Helen said.
Naive as they were, his friends realized he was ill and finally managed
to get him to doctors in a Cleveland hospital. For a time he seemed better, but just when Helen and he were planning a vacation to Canada, he killed himself.
The story swept through me with a certain familiarity that I could not understand. I was almost nakedly ignorant of formal psychology, and it never occurred to me to write Peter off as a case, a paranoid psychotic; instead I sensed the mysterious motion of spirit in his illogical behavior, and like Helen, who still could not recover her confidence in the reality of the daylight world, I was preoccupied by the unanswerable. Why would so successful a young man be drawn to his own death? Especially in this pristine countryside far from the crush and competitive pressures of the city? What logic required his death, a logic we ordinarily never notice ruling our lives?
First as a novel, which I never found a publisher for, then as a play, The Man Who Had All the Luck hounded me for the next three years, until its 1944 production, my first on Broadway, which lasted four sad performances and disappeared. But it was through the evolving versions of this story that I began to find myself as a playwright, and perhaps even as a person.
To begin with, Helen moved me through an odd resemblance to my cousin Jean, Aunt Esther’s daughter, who lived across the street from us on East Third Street in Brooklyn. Both were mild-spoken young women with intrepid and smiling natures that sudden death had struck down. Jean’s husband, Moe Fishier, a strikingly handsome man with straight and sparkling white teeth, a fascinating black mole on his flawless white cheek, glistening black hair, and a small, perfectly proportioned body, had also been a great success by his early thirties. He radiated an unmistakable aura of competence and good fortune. During the Depression, when everybody else was financially gasping, he had steadily risen to become a prosperous textile executive. But something had apparently come between him and his wife, and they barely spoke to one another anymore.
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