All in all, to put it charitably, there was enough self-delusion, if not dishonesty, in those years of the great historical crunch for everyone on every side to take his portion.
No one of my generation can be understood without reference to his relation to Marxism as “the God that failed,” but I have come to think the phrase is wrong. It was an idol and no God. An idol tells people exactly what to believe, God presents them with choices they have to make for themselves. The difference is far from insignificant; before the idol men remain dependent children, before God they are burdened and at the same time liberated to participate in the decisions of endless creation. The dilemma has many surfaces and is no closer to being disposed of now than it was in the early thirties, nor will it be while Western society continues to leave so many of its people spiritually alienated, so empty of the joys of life and culture that they long for a superior will to direct their lives.
I was reminded all over again of idol and God in Turkey, where I went in 1985 with Harold Pinter on a mission for International PEN and the Helsinki Watch Committee. It was a long time since the thirties, but I had a few conversations with Turkish writers that threw me back five decades, to Brooklyn and Ann Arbor and New York. They were conversations that could have happened in many other places, from Beijing to Havana to New York, from Moscow to Phnom Penh to Prague, at that moment in history.
Some of these writers had been severely tortured in ghastly Turkish prisons for being members of a peace organization opposed to Turkey’s dependency on both the United States and the Soviet Union. They were more or less conventionally leftist, as most of the educated are in the Third World, and scornful of American pretensions to democratic principles when all they knew of us was our support of right-wing dictatorships everywhere, including the Turkish military government that had put them behind bars.
Some twenty of them had arranged a dinner for us in a restaurant one evening, and over food and a lot of drink a certain hostility began to appear, hard to understand when we had come here to draw world attention to their situation. One man stood up with raised glass and a mocking look and announced, “To the day when we are rich enough to go to America and investigate civil rights conditions!” Talking with him later, I found it hard to judge if he was an agent of the reactionary government trying to ridicule our mission or simply a Communist attacking me as an American, the archenemy.
Another writer, sitting beside me holding his vodka-loaded head in his hands, said, “If they rearrest me I will escape the country. I could not face torture like that again.” He wore a plaid sports jacket and slacks and a rep tie, and his hair was cut short in fifties college style. “Are you a Marxist?” he suddenly asked.
“What is a Marxist?” I replied.
He looked at me incredulously. “What is a Marxist! A Marxist is a Marxist!” But there was more pain than anger in him.
“You mean a Chinese Marxist is the same as a Soviet Marxist with the two largest mobilized armies in the world facing each other on the border?—something like two million men up there, and each side has a picture of Karl Marx nailed to a stick. And what about a Chinese Marxist fighting Vietnamese Marxists on their border? Or Vietnamese and Cambodian Marxists in a battle to the death? Or a Cambodian Pol Pot Marxist against a Cambodian pro-Vietnam Marxist? I won’t mention the Israeli Marxist and the Syrian.”
I could see I had hurt his feelings; he had never wanted to think of it this way, and he was filling up with despair, bearing as he did the marks of torture on his body for the sake of a monolithic faith whose existence I was disposing of so airily. He got angry. “No, no, there is only one Marxism!” he nearly shouted over the mandolin playing nearby and the lilting voice of a folk singer.
I pressed no further but thought of the “one Christianity” clubbing itself to death in Ireland, or the “one Islam” in Lebanon. And of the seventeenth century, when in the name of Christ they nearly destroyed all Europe in the Thirty Years War. Or the “one Judaism” in Israel, with the murderous hatreds between Orthodox and secular Jews.
“Maybe we are living through the retribalization of the world,” I said. “One after another the remnants of ancient cultures are waking up from their long sleep, and maybe Marxism is the rationale that gives a modern sound to this upsurge of atavistic tribalism …”
A new voice interrupted; this was Aziz Nesin, author of some ninety books of humor and poetry, a Marxist since his youth and now a Socialist. He had been imprisoned many times and had once, a few years before, served six months for insulting the Shah of Iran in one of his pieces. Every Turk knew his name and his story: how he had left military school and ended up struggling against the American-backed military dictatorships of his former schoolmates. At fifty he was a short, reputedly rich man of imposing dignity.
“Stalin tried to grab an eastern province and the Bosporus right after the last war,” he said, “and right now Russia is still pressuring us for parts of our side of the border, a tremendous area.”
I was somewhat confused now; it was slightly odd that a man of the left, speaking to an American, should be slamming the Soviets. I said that Marxism had apparently not managed to curb Russian expansionism, at least in this part of the world, and he mournfully agreed, if with a troubled uncertainty in his eyes.
The first man, the one in the sports jacket who had been tortured, nodded mournfully too and without seeming to change the subject said, “Yes, American imperialism has missile bases all along the border, dozens!” As he elaborated on the size of the U.S. military presence in Turkey, the Soviet demand for the cession of a Turkish province quickly sank out of sight.
“Then as Marxists,” I said, trying to trace their thinking process, “how do you locate yourselves between the two giants here? Both menace Turkish independence, right?”
They now stared at me with a peculiar blankness. Not exactly a denial nor yet an affirmation that they were truly between the hammer and the equally blameworthy anvil, it seemed more like a metaphysical suspension, a meeting point between the logic of an argument and the inadmissibility of its approaching conclusions. I had run into a phenomenon—the mystery of alienation—that had plagued the postwar years in so many places.
People of principle, confronting evidence that their beliefs are mistaken, dig themselves further into their convictions to stand off the threat of despair. To lose hope is to become corrupt. Here were two Marxists a few hours’ drive from a Soviet border that they thought the Russians wished to bend southward into Turkish territory, but almost the entire weight of their resentment was against the United States. Never mind Soviet reality; Russia was the enemy of their enemy, and that was enough—enough, that is, to keep them from submission to the evils around them.
I knew their despair, for that is all it was or can be if alienation is the prize of moral thought and fact is set aside as mere detail.
The resurgent American right of the early fifties, the assault led by Senator McCarthy on the etiquette of liberal society, was, among other things, a hunt for the alienated, and with remarkable speed conformity became the new style of the hour.
As the fifties dawned I already knew radio scriptwriters who could no longer find producers to hire them. Initially one assumed that if they were not Party members they must be very close to it, and so society as a whole remained, one supposed, intact. But now, as America tested the first hydrogen bomb, condemned by many as immoral, and the expectation grew that the Russians would soon have one of their own, and Mao Zedong chased out Chiang Kaishek, a heaving dough began to displace the solid liberal earth underfoot, and one did not know from day to day when it would all fall in like a souffle. On Brooklyn Heights one day it all seemed to have done just that.
Louis Untermeyer, then in his sixties, was a poet and anthologist, a distinguished-looking old New York type with a large aristocratic nose and a passion for conversation, especially about writers and writing. Forty years before, he had left the family jewelry business to become a poet. He ha
d married four times—twice to the same woman, the poet Jean Starr—had taught and written and published, and with the swift rise of television had suddenly become nationally known as one of the original regulars on What’s My Line?, a popular early show in which he, along with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, publisher Bennett Cerf, and Arlene Francis, would try to guess the occupation of a studio guest by asking the fewest possible questions in the brief time allowed. All this with wisecracking and banter, at which Louis was a lovable master, what with his instant recall of every joke and pun he had ever heard.
Louis loved poetry and young women, not necessarily in that order; on his eighty-fifth birthday he would say, “I’m still chasing them. The only difference is that now I can’t remember why.” He had old friendships with many of the great American poets—among them William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore—and was a fellow who could easily spend an afternoon just talking and witticizing with kindred souls. One evening I saw unusual deference paid him by the kingly and much older Robert Frost, who sat still for a lengthy lecture from Louis on etymology. That afternoon my young springer spaniel, Red—an unteachable animal I later gave away to my Ford dealer, fleeing his showroom before he could change his mind—had rushed through our Willow Street doorway down the stoop and smashed into the side of a passing car, stunning his brain still further and sending him hysterically running, with me behind him, way up to Borough Hall. In the evening, Frost listened to the story of my chase and then, staring out like one of the heads on Mount Rushmore, drawled, “Sounds like a comical dog.”
Louis very much enjoyed life, most especially now that he was such a success and making real money on the television. His present arid final wife, Bryna—named by populist parents after William Jennings Bryan—was the editor of Mademoiselle and had her own arch wit to match his, although nobody had Louis’s energy; he could pun in whole streams that she could only dam up by screaming from the middle of the room with hands clapped over her ears. In the ensuing silence he would go to the piano and play some extremely loud Beethoven. Urbane and cultivated, and now with an amazing check coming in every week, they lived in a snug and cluttered Brooklyn Heights apartment.
As the obverse side of his confidence in the world, Louis seemed not to know what guilt was. The only self-recrimination I ever heard from him was once, in his nineties, when he suddenly said, “I wrote too much,” and presumably too often superficially. I suppose his innocence was what left him so unprepared when one day he arrived as usual at the television studio an hour before the program began and was told by the producer that he was no longer on the show. It appeared that as a result of his having been listed in Life magazine as a sponsor of the Waldorf Conference, an organized letter campaign protesting his appearance on What’s My Line? had scared the advertisers into getting rid of him.
The producer had actually been one of Louis’s students in a literature course in years past and was unhappy at having to fire him, especially when it had been his idea to hire him in the first place. But as Louis quoted him years later, after he had recovered from the experience, the producer said, “The problem is that we know you’ve never had any left connections, so you have nothing to confess to, but they’re not going to believe that. So it’s going to seem that you’re refusing to be a good American.”
Louis went back to his apartment. Normally we ran into each other in the street once or twice a week or kept in touch every month or so, but now I no longer saw him in the neighborhood or heard from him, and when I did call, Bryna always answered and talked obscurely about him not wanting phone conversations anymore, preferring to wait until we could all get together again. But that didn’t happen. As a very infrequent television watcher I was still unaware of his absence from the program and figured he would call me when he felt like it.
Louis didn’t leave his apartment for almost a year and a half. An overwhelming and paralyzing fear had risen in him. More than a political fear, it was really that he had witnessed the tenuousness of human connection and it had left him in terror. He had always loved a lot and been loved, especially on this TV program where his quips were vastly appreciated, and suddenly he had been thrown into the street, abolished. This was one of the feeds that went into the central theme of After the Fall, a play I would write more than ten years later.
A man like Louis Untermeyer broke down not, I think, for purely personal reasons but for historical ones too—the reassurances of the familiar past had suddenly been pulled out from under him. The question is whether there ever were such reassurances.
In the thirties, one of Ann Arbor’s small-town charms for me was its reassuring contrast with dog-eat-dog New York, where a man could lie dying on Fifth Avenue in the middle of an afternoon and it would take a long time before anybody stopped to see what was the matter with him. A short ten or twenty years later people were looking back at the thirties nostalgically, as a time of caring and mutuality.
Whence came the notion that solidarity had once existed and that its passing was sinister? It often seems that the impoverished thirties are the subliminal fixed point from which all that came afterward is measured, even by the young who only know those years from parents and reading. It was not that people were more altruistic but that a point arrived—perhaps around 1936—when for the first time unpolitical people began thinking of common action as a way out of their impossible conditions. Out of dire necessity came the surge of mass trade unionism and the federal government’s first systematic relief programs, the resurgent farm cooperative movement, the TVA and other public projects that put people to work and brought electricity to vast new areas, repaired and built new bridges and aqueducts, carried out vast reforestation projects, funded student loans and research into the country’s folk history—its songs and tales collected and published for the first time—and this burst of imaginative action created the sense of a government that for all its blunders and waste was on the side of the people. Hemingway would write, “A man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance”—amazing recognition from a professional loner that a new kind of hero had walked on the scene, a man whose self-respect demanded solidarity with his fellow men. For a while in school every other guy seemed to be studying to be a social worker.
By 1936, in my junior year, I had had more than a taste of life at the bottom, and there was no room for sentimentality there. Pushing hand trucks in the New York garment center—one of my summer jobs—you had to fight to hold your place in the post office line against chiselers breaking in to beat the closing time for mailing packages; my nine-hour days driving Sam Shapse’s truck through city traffic had been a ceaseless struggle for parking spots and entries onto bridges, lined with spikes of anxiety that the truck would be rifled while I left it to deliver or pick up parts. The bathos of the popular songs and plays and movies of the day seemed weirdly misplaced even at the time. A scene in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in which a storekeeper lets a hungry family keep a ten-cent loaf of bread without paying for it might be inspiring, but it was an amazing departure from any reality I had experienced.
So that by the time I went up from Ann Arbor to Flint, Michigan, on New Year’s Day 1937, to report for the Daily on the outbreak of sit-down strikes in the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number 1, I identified with the workers in no abstract way; in fact, my work experience may account for my amazement at their new solidarity. It was nearly incredible to me that hundreds of ordinary factory workers, a large number of them recruited in the southern states, where hostility to unions was endemic, had one day simply stopped the machines, locked the factory doors from within, and refused to leave until their union was recognized as their bargaining agent.
I arrived at midday after getting a ride up from Ann Arbor with a young test-driver for Ford, whose job was to put mileage on a new model coupe to be introduced in two years, and to report to the factory in Dearborn by telephone when something in the car went wrong. Ford, of course, was the most viol
ently anti-union shop of them all, and this southern boy, happy for some company as we drove north to Flint, talked about the tear gas that everybody knew Henry Ford had pumped into the factory’s sprinkler system in case his workers decided to pull a sit-down. “Man, they pull a strike in Ford’s and I’m headin’ back down home, ‘cause somebody goin’ to get killed in that place,” he said, laughing. The spirit of fascism had alarming vitality in the world then, and the scene in Flint seemed to stand in direct opposition to it.
The Fisher Plant stretched out along a broad avenue facing the General Motors administration building, where the office help and executives worked. The two buildings were connected by an enclosed overpass bridging the dividing avenue. Afraid of involvement in anything connected with unions, the Ford driver took one look down that street and drove off, leaving me standing there. And indeed, practically at my feet three National Guardsmen, two of them on their haunches and one sprawled on his belly on the sidewalk, were tending a machine gun on a tripod pointing up toward a two-story projection of the plant building. I learned later that they had fired at three workers taking the air on the roof, wounding one of them. Other soldiers moved around silently, rifles unslung, and a couple of army trucks filled with young troopers blocked both ends of the street. Two overturned police cars lay at odd angles, upended, I was informed, by a powerful stream of water from firehoses manned by workers who had connected them to hot-water outlets to keep police and soldiers at bay. To prevent invasion through the covered overpass, they had welded it shut with several Chevrolet bodies set vertically on end. This was the third day of the strike. There was a silence broken only by a muffled saxophone from inside the plant, where an improvised jazz group would periodically blow up a few numbers and then evaporate. At the moment the saxophonist seemed to be doing a practice solo. Jammed in a window on the second floor, many heads looked down as several wives appeared with boxes of food that the workers hoisted up on lines, chatting all the while and occasionally laughing at some remark; then the women waved and walked away. Inside, I was told, the men were sitting and sleeping on car seats but taking great care to cover them with paper; odd as it seemed, the rights of property were still quite sacred to them.
Timebends Page 36