For Vinny Longhi it was less easy to stand apart and objectify, because unlike Berenson, he could not help identifying himself—and maybe even hating himself for doing so—with the stylish gravitas of some of the waterfront power figures, who mimed or rather parodied the code-driven gallantry of feudal Italy. Like most radical materialists and Marxists, these two were romantics in analytical clothing; they thought they could see around their more naive bourgeois opponents, whose vision was narrowed by selfish interests, while they had no personal interests, only historical ones, and were thus freer to maneuver than those in the game for the purpose of gain. Thus their power—provided men would follow them—would be a kind of spiritual self-satisfaction at having assisted history to give birth. Morally they were puritanical, barring a few lapses Longhi could not help, because after all he was so handsome.
Periodically over the next six months I would join up with one or both of them as they sought to penetrate the fiefdoms of the waterfront. Longhi was a powerful, rather operatic speaker on the piers, attracting larger and larger crowds of longshoremen in the predawn mists as they stood around on Columbia Street waiting to be picked for a day’s work. Chopping the air like Lenin in October, he expanded on his main theme, the degradation of honest sons of Italy by an unjust union machine. The problem, of course, was that the men knew this better than he did, but it was nice to hear somebody saying it anyway. It did not take long to realize that only a power equal to what held them down could gain their trust, and I could see no hope that any such thing would be allowed to come to life here.
But in the meantime I was moving in and out of longshoremen’s houses and making some friends and tuning my ear to their fruity, mangled Sicilian-English bravura, with its secretive, marvelously modulated hints and untrammeled emotions. In the course of time Longhi mentioned a story he’d recently heard of a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration Bureau on two brothers, his own relatives, who were living illegally in his very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them and his niece. The squealer was disgraced, and no one knew where he had gone off to, and some whispered that he had been murdered by one of the brothers. But the story went past me; I was still searching for a handle on Pete Panto.
I fiddled with a screenplay, dropped it and picked it up again, wandered back into Red Hook searching for what I did not realize I already had— A View from the Bridge.
Melodrama stirred me once—Tony Anastasia appeared suddenly one afternoon in the loft where Berenson had his headquarters and threatened then and there to kill him and Longhi. There was even the requisite operatic crowd gathering in the street below to observe the festivities. Tony was outraged because, comically enough, he had been hired by a large corporation to sail two tugboats up the Hudson River with a couple of hundred strikebreakers who were to enter its plant from the water side, the land entrances being heavily picketed by the United Electrical Workers. He had pleaded beforehand with Berenson and Longhi, who had been feeling him out for an alliance against the Ryan leadership, to call their friends in the union and persuade them not to fight his strikebreakers. To this incredible request the two had replied with a lecture on working-class solidarity that left the gangster’s mind boggled.
His attempted naval invasion of the plant was thwarted by union motorboats—there was actually a little gunfire between the two armadas until the tugboat captains decided they’d had enough and brought the men back to Brooklyn—and Tony soon found Red Hook sniggering at his humiliation, and of course he was now being referred to behind his back as “the Admiral.” It was all too much, and he marched over to Berenson’s loft in full sight of the neighborhood to demand satisfaction for his betrayal by the radicals. He was very confused.
Forced into confrontation, sweating Longhi and Berenson turned on the eloquence—which Tony was a sucker for and Longhi especially a master of—castigating him for dishonoring the memory of his late and beloved father, who, as Tony adored to memorialize at the drop of a hat with real tears in his eyes, had hit the docks every morning for a hundred and fifty years and raised his hordes of children from the sweat off his back as a longshoreman, and whose son, Tony, was now betraying workers by breaking strikes when he had all the makings of a truly great workers’ leader and, if he chose, could be an honor to the persecuted Italian people, to say nothing of the whole human race. They ended up in a state of abeyance if not as friends, and the climax was their offering to get him two tickets for All My Sons. Indeed, I met him in front of the theatre a few days later, and when he looked up at the marquee and saw my name, then looked at me and said very little, he reminded me of my uncle Manny in Boston. He got into his car beside his driver and drove off without seeing the play. I figured he simply wanted to be sure Longhi and Berenson weren’t kidding him about me, insulting him all over again.
The uncomfortable truth was that I was finding the waterfront as absurd as it was tragic, and it was out of one of its absurdities that I ended up traveling to Italy and France with Longhi—a trip whose echoes would inform much of my life to come.
By the time I met them, Berenson and Longhi were veterans of many frustrated, nearly fruitless organizing attempts. In 1946, realizing that they lacked the political clout to guarantee protection for any workers who dared confront the union-Mafia combination, they had come up with the idea of running Longhi for Congress. But the Democratic Party in the district was owned by Congressman John Rooney, who in turn was in Joseph Ryan’s pocket. This bred a fantasy in Berenson’s maverick imagination that the Republicans, perhaps out of amused desperation, since they had never in history won an election in the district, might be sold on running Longhi in this Italian working-class area.
Putting one of his bowed legs in front of the other, Berenson took Longhi over to Court Street to see Johnny Crews, the Republican leader, a witty Scot who quickly saw that an Italian candidate, even if he was radical, might be the answer to a Republican prayer in this predominantly Italian district. The deal to back Longhi was quickly made.
The absurdity of one day glancing right and left for whoever was about to throw them into the river and the next owning the Republican nomination for Congress sent the two of them into incredulous laughter, but such situations are never so totally without meaning; time would show that Berenson might have gone into Crews’s office an opportunistic buccaneer but he was something different when he came out. His and Longhi’s relation to themselves and the country had begun a subtle change that would lead to unimaginable consequences. Hopeless though his chances for election were, Vinny had now stepped out of the dark and frozen world of the feudal waterfront into daylight America, where, quite literally, the most amazing things could still happen.
For Johnny Crews a Vincent Longhi candidacy might be a merely symbolic and even wry piece of theatre by which to throw Rooney off balance for a few weeks, but Vinny actually intended to win and be photographed with the president on the White House steps and send the photo by special delivery to his lavishly adoring mother. Running as a Republican, with the endorsement of the American Labor Party, he stumped the Twelfth Congressional District tirelessly, making a powerful appeal for reform. It was a hot, bitter campaign, with Rooney denouncing the Republicans for backing a left-wing upstart, and when the votes were counted, Vinny pulled in 31,000 to Rooney’s 36,000—an amazingly close result considering that a few thousand votes could easily have been stolen from him.
Encouraged by his first foray into mainstream politics, Longhi decided to take Rooney on again in the 48 elections. This time the Republicans were playing it safe with a party regular, and Longhi was running on the ALP line. Now he really begged me to raise some money, and for the first and only time in my life I approached another person for a political contribution. I had been seeing Tennessee Williams on and off over the past year and had mentioned my interest in the waterfront. It now turned out that Frankie Merlo, with whom he lived in a Manhattan apartment, was the son of a Mafia chieftain in New Jersey. Frankie knew
the waterfront story better than I, having sat as a young boy at his father’s feet during meetings when such matters were discussed and dealt with by the old man. He insisted that Tennessee write a check for five hundred dollars, a good piece of money then. Tennessee, I thought, regarded my interest as remote from him as a writer and yet quite parallel to his lifelong sense of living among the unjust and the cruel. He sat listening to my descriptions of waterfront indignities holding his gnarled white English pug on his lap—as much to keep it from pissing on his bed again as to pet it—and with Merlo explicating for him as his adept social specialist, he seemed moved, although it was particular persons and words that touched him more than any general condition of men.
Despite Vinny’s speaking ability, it was soon obvious that only some fantastic coup could dislodge Rooney, something so grandiose as to be unanswerable. And he soon hit upon it—he must make a trip to Calabria and Sicily, look up as many relatives of longshore families as he possibly could, and return with their best wishes, which he would personally deliver to several hundred households. Apart from its characteristic but efficient sentimentality, the plan had another even more useful feature—hundreds of Italian longshoremen had two families, two wives and two sets of children. In most cases they had not deceived either the American second wife or the original in Italy, whom they continued to support and even to visit periodically in order to beget another child. But in their financial straits these trips home were often very far apart, five or six or more years. They would be in profound debt to someone bringing firsthand news of the original wife and kids—a debt most natural to repay with a vote.
With Vinny’s decision to go my own took shape. America was where you got rich, but Europe was where the thinking was going on, or so you tended to imagine. America was becoming suspiciously unreal. An imaginative builder named Levitt was building wonderful, not unreasonably priced houses in a town named for himself, with two bathrooms and even attic two-by-sixes of finished lumber that made the previous generation’s homes seem primitive. I was running into old atheist friends and cousins who, bizarrely, were now contributing to something they called “temple”; before the war I would not have imagined that anyone of my generation would ever go to shul again. From Europe, however, one heard of new men like Sartre and Camus who had come out of the Resistance and the European night with a new, politically usable democratic vision that was not bound to Moscow, apparently. I was thirsting for a new sense of the future now that fascism was dead, and with it, ironically enough, the form it had given my life in resistance to it. The yin and the yang of existence had gone slack. Italy in 1947-48 was the focus of speculation as to Europe’s future, what with her immense Communist Party, the largest outside the Soviet Union, and Vinny would be useful with his ability to speak Italian.
Jane was just beginning school and Bob was even younger, and with travel abroad not yet the easy option of ordinary people, it seemed inevitable that I should make the trip of three or so weeks alone. The very leaving behind of the familiar is implicitly erotic and renewing, an opening of the soul to the unknown, a kind of expectancy that calls for aloneness, and besides, with so little confidence that I could write another commercially successful play, I needed to conserve money. In short, I fled to the future as I had once done on my bike into Harlem when life was tangling up my feet and I wanted nothing I knew around me.
The SS America, the least expensive way to cross the Atlantic, was two-thirds empty and rode high and vicious on rough February seas. I was desperate enough to spend my time as lone swimmer in the pool, pretending it was merely the real ocean, where one never got seasick, until it got so rough that the pool had to be closed down before I was bashed to death against the tile walls. I spent most of the last twenty-four hours at the bar standing with Albert Sharpe, who had just quit as the star of Finian’s Rainbow, having earned all the money he would need for the rest of his life in his Irish country cottage. I let him shower my head with one gorgeous Irish story on top of another until dawn broke into the lounge portholes and we went out on deck to greet the land fog.
The first shock of Europe was a series of very simple absurdities. The great concrete piers of Cherbourg were brokenly tilted into the water; passengers were taken in by lighter to a temporary dock. Here was civil ruin rather than the wreckage of armies, and it was somehow ungraspable. I had never before thought of myself as in any way an innocent, but I did now. (The next time I had this same feeling was many years later, walking through the streets of a Harlem whose familiar apartment houses were burned out, standing in ruin.) Next, the gigantic nineteenth-century railroad station, whose stories-high, cathedrallike vaulted roof of glass panes, stretching several blocks, was totally smashed, an eyeless structure all that remained. It was all a monstrous vandalism, a rage and a spite so awesome as to strike fear into the heart for the species.
A young American in our train compartment, after fifteen minutes of inaction, suddenly called out, “When is this shootin’ match supposed to start!” We all laughed, the Europeans and Vinny and I, embarrassed at his insensitivity to the deprivation all around. Absurd, too, the obsequiousness in the trainmen toward us, the Übermenschen, the lords of the earth, Americans. I enjoyed the feeling, unearned though it might be, even as I saw us through their resentful and envious eyes.
The sun never seemed to rise over Paris, the winter sky like a lid of iron graying the skin of one’s hands and making faces wan. A doomed and listless silence, few cars on the streets, occasional trucks running on wood-burning engines, old women on ancient bicycles. Who that I passed had collaborated with the Nazis and who had hid in a cellar accompanied by his heartbeat? And what would I have done? I ordered an orange, toast, and two fried eggs for breakfast in Les Ministères across the street from the hotel, and the woman in charge and the cook and two waiters came out to watch me eat this massive amount of food, and to watch me pay for it out of a roll of cheap francs. The concierge at the Pont-Royal on the rue du Bac wore tails, but the sleeves were unraveling, and his chin always showed little nicks from having shaved with cold water. A hungry-looking, garishly got-up young woman in black lace stockings with a fallen hem on her skirt was allowed to sit in the lobby all night for the convenience of the guests, and she watched my approach with a philosopher’s superior curiosity. The round brass bars across the revolving door were missing, like a lot of the plumbing and metal fittings, stolen by the Germans in the last desperate months. The concierge had to rush across Paris and back once a day to feed his rabbits. Rabbits were saving a lot of people.
In the streets no man seemed to have a matching jacket and trousers, and many who looked like professionals wore mufflers to hide bare shirtless chests. Bicycles and bicycles—which I would recall in Beijing thirty-five years later—and people hanging from crowded buses that stank like the ones in Cairo. Later on in China, Egypt, Venezuela, so much would remind me of this time in the City of Light; the genius of Europe had been to bomb itself into what was not yet named the Third World. There were still fresh bouquets of flowers lying on sidewalks beneath plaques set in buildings to memorialize some Resistant shot there by the Nazis, who after all were also Europeans; had there been, in effect, two civil wars, in 1914 and 1939? I wrote to Mary, lonely for her, that the country seemed a wounded animal that would never rise to its feet again—France was finished. Sartre was said to hang out in the Montana Bar, but I never found him. The papers were relying on America to rearrange a new civilization, it seemed to me—as though we had the slightest idea of what to do with this failed continent. It was disappointing; I would have to go back to thinking myself into a future that certainly did not promise to exist here.
There was a réunion of writers in a palais near the rue de Rivoli to which I was invited by Vercors, founder of Éditions de Minuit, the French publisher of Focus. Catholic, Communist, Gaullist—artists and the unaffiliated were going to attempt to rebuild their wartime resistance unity, joining once more in reading their poems and making spee
ches into the government radio microphone that was set up in the grand eighteenth-century entrance hall of the palais, overseen by Frenchified busts of blind Eros and rounded curly-haired lovers like Pyramus and Thisbe. It was very cold standing on the marble floor, even with a couple of hundred men and women there and a glass of red wine. What joy these intellectuals drew from this gesture was not evident; their wartime spiritual unity and political toleration had been cracked by the new and rapidly deepening Cold War.
Vercors, a novelist and essayist and one of the most universally respected heroes of the Resistance, had befriended me and led me through some of the alleyways where he had evaded Germans to deliver Resistance literature and newspapers on his bicycle. If he had been discovered by those other Europeans, they would have shot him dead in the street. It was strange to think that on these lovely Parisian boulevards Frenchmen had been hunted down, shot like vermin. Again I had to wonder how I would have behaved under those circumstances, for the moral, the literary, and the political were one and the same then. As the meeting wore on in the echoing chamber of marble, the readings seeming interminable, without expression, dour, Vercors explained in whispers that this would probably be the last attempt to maintain some semblance of French culture, which would soon be completely fractured by political polemic. He pointed out Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, Camus and Sartre, Mauriac and other Catholic writers. I saw people finish their readings and quietly leave.
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