Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Children, when you in turn come to it—you can usually count on us.

  Your granny hated going. To sit with bowed head until her turn came to mount one of those mock barricades that are never composed of a barricade’s rightful ingredients—which the dictionary will tell you are barrels, wagons, and stones. And an enemy, very near.

  As it happened, we were all herded into a kind of basement greenroom, there to wait our turn, listening to the program meanwhile, via the public-address system, while one after the other of us went upstairs to read, and came back. Downstairs, we hullo-hulloed with the sheepish looks of people accustomed to thinking of themselves as original, come together to share the same painfully undistinguished thoughts.

  “Granny, don’t you remember anything nice?”

  Yop, I do too. So-and-so kissed me, jumping from the chair he sat in. No I don’t either—that was on another barricade.

  “Granny, remember anything ghastly?”

  Well, not really. Downstairs, we festered familiarly along, as always in these dragged-out rituals, in which the effect was as if we gave ourselves the bastinado—a kind of foot-cudgeling, dears—with our own tongues. (I recall the kindly, sad face of Stanley Kunitz saying that many who hadn’t been asked, had demanded to read, in order to get in on it.) But as I turned to go offstage after my own stint, I saw the backdrop, one huge “atrocity” blownup, in which the dead and wounded bodies had been grossly magnified in the media manner—yet could one say vulgarised? I couldn’t decide.

  “And how about funny, didn’t you ever see anything fun—?”

  Yes, the look and shrug Lillian Hellman gave me as she held a friend’s jelly-jar of whiskey for him, while he went up. Why a jelly-jar?

  “Granny, is there a moral to it? What are we supposed to think?”

  You’re supposed to see what we know deeply, that reading one’s work aloud, being there, is not the same as writing it. A writer is not what he or she writes.

  And yes, there’s a moral.

  We had come there, all of us, a good portion of the writers of the nation, under agreement not to speechify, but to read from our own works. Glumstering over books thick or thin, or patches of paper rousted from pants-pockets, we did so. Only Sontag, chin Jeanne D’Arc high, and hands free, spoke—a speech as from an impulsive heart too feeling just to read like the rest of us.

  And next morning, that’s what the Times remembered.

  Then, while a poet was reading, a man, later identified as an unemployed detective, jumped on the stage and asked the audience to sing God Bless America.

  And next morning, that’s what the Times remembered.

  I had been in straits between “liberal” action and writer-action before this—remember? If I record these new trials of ego, it is for a reason. In the Gallup-poll of consciousness, writer’s egos are no different from other people’s—except in their ability to record.

  In no war I had read about, or lived through, had the collectively expressed peace-consciousness ever been less than several respectful or frustrate years behind the starkly moving events. I had long since concluded that “made” events, such as the Read-in, did not make history. We were only having a dialogue with our own need to have a part in history. (As no doubt our grandchildren, if they exist, will be able to testify. To want the “real,” and settle for the unreal, is part of that history.)

  So I began writing letters—for publication.

  Exhibit D: Excerpt from The New York Times, dated December 10, 1965.

  EDUCATORS BACK

  VIETNAM POLICY

  190 Professors Sign Petition—They Defend Debate

  One hundred and ninety professors representing Harvard, Yale, and 15 other universities announced yesterday full support of the Administration’s Vietnam policy. …

  The statement of the professors, while welcoming debate, expressed serious concern, however, about the tactics of a “small minority of the intellectual community” in opposing the Administration on Vietnam.

  These tactics, they said, led to exaggerated estimates of their numbers and could cause Peking and Hanoi to underestimate seriously the extent of the American commitment, thereby prolonging the war.

  The signers included Max Lerner, who is also a political columnist, of Brandeis; Morton H. Halperin and Henry A. Kissinger of Harvard; Harold Isaacs, Max Millikan, and Myron Weiner of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Bruce T. Dahlberg and Thomas C. Mendenhall of Smith College, and Gunter Lewy of the University of Massachusetts.

  Exactly half of the signers are professors of government, history or the social sciences, and almost one quarter are political scientists.

  Dr. Wesley Fishel, chairman of a 10-year-old organization known as the American Friends of Vietnam, which coordinated the petition project, contrasted the signers with those who have signed academic petitions opposed to Vietnam policy.

  “Opponents of U.S. policy on the campuses,” he said, “are largely teachers in fields unrelated to political science, international relations and Southeast Asian affairs.

  “The further one gets from the subject—Vietnam and U.S. foreign policy—the more opponents among campus teachers there seem to be. The reverse is equally true. Most of the teachers of government, foreign policy, and international affairs support U.S. policy or accept it as necessary.”

  Dr. Fishel is a professor of political science at Michigan State University.

  Letter in reply:

  205 W. 57th St.

  New York, N.Y.

  December 10, 1965

  The Editor

  The New York Times

  New York, N.Y.

  Dear Sir:

  Dr. Wesley Fishel’s statement (p. 16, The Times, Dec. 10) that “opponents of U.S. policy on the campus are largely teachers in fields unrelated to political science” and that “the further one gets from the subject—Vietnam and foreign policy—the more opponents on campus there seem to be”—is interesting on several scores. It attempts to suggest that political science is an exact expertise which can tell us what to do, rather than merely the study of politics—an intermediary and quite ordinary subject, which often stands on just as illusory ground as any other. By implication, the statement carries also that latent contempt for the humanities which pure scientists have long since deserted, plus the same contempt for these scientists. But most of all it reveals the true limitations of those who put themselves forward as the only “informed” men, and therefore the only competent judges of what the body politic must do.

  Historically, political scientists have often been used as apologists for the status quo or military ambitions. It is less easy to name those conspicuously chosen to lead nations in peacetime—perhaps because men who have at their fingertips all the reasons for past wars, are by habit of mind that much closer toward proclaiming a particular war “reasonable.” On campus, a political scientist is merely a man with a doctorate, like the rest; except for his small ballast of scholarliness he is as much at sea in human affairs as any, no better than they at the “practical,” and hopefully no worse at the “ideal.”

  The educators who have signed Dr. Fishel’s statement, though implying that their colleagues in the pure sciences and the humanities must not be taken seriously on matters outside their ken, very graciously award us the right to speak out without being called Communists. In Dr. Fishel’s capacity as chairman of the American Friends of Vietnam, one must award him the same—and imply the same. But beyond that, any educators who so suddenly separate themselves from the rights of their colleagues, who so impugn that medium of total knowledge or inquiry in which they have spent professional lives to date—are at once suspicionable. To give them the status they demand is like awarding the exclusive right to serious statement only to pure scientists because they are “purer” than other men, or to us of the humanities, because they are more “humane.”

  Most shocking of all is to see how such a statement fails to recognize that to categorize whol
e groups of men as incompetent to judge, is only deviously different from stigmatizing them politically—the intent to muffle or nullify being the same. For these educators not to see their own pronunciamento as a classic one of all war periods, is to be far farther away from their own subject—from a sense of history—than any of us.

  Sincerely,

  Hortense Calisher

  None of my anti-war letters to the Times ever made it. I don’t blame the Times, which was never for the war, and hadn’t yet expanded its letters page. A more ancient force was at work, in journalism as well as history. People believe in war. They only dream of peace. In time of war it is always the believers who get the podium.

  Three years later, long silent in this neighborhood, I wrote again, on entirely another subject, and this time the Times printed my letter.

  Its genesis was simple. Two speaking engagements of mine that spring had coincided with two deadly weekends. Just after Martin Luther King was shot, I had to speak at Brandeis—a reading. Just after Robert Kennedy was shot, I was scheduled to address the Alumnae of Barnard College—and spoke out against the war. (Not receiving the usual thank-you note, or any, from the college, afterwards.)

  Kennedy had been my candidate. I had met some of the people working on his Bedford-Stuyvesant project, and been heartened. Certainly he stood for my hopes in government more than the others. Because of his stand on the war, I had volunteered to work for his candidacy in New York. Though I was not part of the writer-artist “in” group around him, I knew most of them, as well as the exact nature of the glamour-glue that held them there, and had drawn them, in richly collegiate bonhomie, from “the Vineyard”—to travel west with him. Except for Jules Feiffer, a serious man, none I knew had had any political commitment before—even if old enough to. They were “casserole” Democrats. No other candidate would have drawn them. In personal grief—and yes, snobbery, they would now disband, fall apart. Yet their vital force, together with the young people who had been for Eugene McCarthy, might tip the balance against Nixon. For another Democrat. No pearl. But no Nixon. I doubted the young collegians could see this either, or bear it. But hating to be only a fireside Cassandra, I wrote;

  Exhibit E: Letter to The New York Times, dated Aug. 29, 1968, from Monhegan Island.

  To The Editor:

  Millions of anti-Administration Democrats now face a terrible disfranchisement. If we stay away from the polls, we shall most certainly help to elect Richard Nixon, who will most certainly mistake this as a sign that the temper of the country is with him—so to let loose in 1969 a violence sure to be worse than what we have seen.

  Politics is the art of working with what you have. We Democrats now have an organization man, nominated under circumstances which no apology of his can disavow. Yet it is rumored that he had a noble youth. And it is said that the Presidency often brings out the better in a man.

  Yet I cannot vote for Hubert Humphrey unless he and all know what my vote means. The duty now of all anti-Humphrey Democrats is to help us express ourselves in vote.

  The mails exist, as a start, and they can be powerful. We must be provided with some immediate en masse means of saying to the nominee and to the party: “I am a Democrat opposed to Administration policy. Although you were not my candidate for the nomination, I plan to vote for you because I cannot on any score vote for Nixon. Sir, if you get the people’s mandate, remember me.”

  Some such memo should be put in our hands as soon as money and mimeograph can make it—as the start of a program to provide us with a positive modus vivendi for the next two months. Democrats for the memo, and Republicans it may be, can be a force within the election, to be reckoned with now and after.

  We, the deciding, independent voters, must at once have some honorable expression made open to us—and made clear to all—which will allow us to work with the Democratic party. Apathy now—which everyone of us feels—could be tragedy by winter.

  Hortense Calisher

  Monhegan Island, Me.

  Aug. 29, 1968

  No doubt the Maine postmark had helped. Or the heart of the Times letter-sifter who always returned mine (I seem to recall a lady named Martha) had been touched. The one-room Island P.O. sagged with mail from those who had been—and wanted to help, offering everything from money to mimeographing.

  Winnie, the postmistress, said to me “What did you do?”

  What had I?

  Three years before, when an Air France plane, due to fly a group of us, publishers and writers, from London Airport to Orly just in time to connect with a once-a-week plane to Zagreb, had defaulted, I had suddenly heard myself say to the Air France hostess, “You must hold the Paris plane!”—and supply us another Channel one. “We are Marshal Tito’s guests—we have to be there.”

  Technically this was true—we were five out of perhaps a thousand at the P.E.N. conference. Luckily I had spoken in English; when I saw the hostess had caught nothing but the “Tito,” I repeated it, many times with increasing authority. The plane was held for us on the other side.

  “It’s that black raincoat of yours,” an English publisher whispered. “She thinks you’re Madame Tito.” But as guards met us at Orly and whisked us forward to where the huge immobile thing waited (with Arthur Miller, due to be elected P.E.N. President and all the rest of his delegation sweating inside, though I didn’t yet know this) I had that sense of power (Is it merely a modern one? I doubt that.) which comes from having for once stopped the hostile clockwork of the irreversible world. Not by being somebody—that would spoil it. By being nobody at all.

  “I wrote a letter, Winnie,” I said, taking the string-bound piles of them she kept handing over the counter. “And people answered. You see it happen all the time.”

  As I laboriously answered them until they outran me, yes—it did feel a little like Orly. And this time, by God, an act of the pen. Looka me. Except that now, it would seem, I had to have an organization. Did I want one—or want to start one?

  No. (I had hoped that the Democratic Party might use my suggestion.)

  A lady came forward, just in time to save me—if not them. Wife of a Princeton professor, she wrote for permission to use the letter as a statement to be published in a Princeton daily by a group there, faculty and others, who wished to organize around the letter’s suggestion. Ultimately the Times ran a news story on the Michel Balinskis—to me, when later we met, the prototype of those young, energetically concerned Americans who ought to be one of the glories of our political life, but are increasingly scorned there (for being college-connected “intellectuals”) by a country which deeply mistrusts the “universal education” it is committed to.

  Through the efforts of the Balinskis, and others on campuses all over the country, the campaign spread to many college and smalltown newspapers, and just before the election, I was told, the use of such a form-letter was being considered by a Democratic caucus held in New York State, and by some other states. Too late.

  Meanwhile, to help out as I could—with the pen, which still seemed to me the proper way—I wrote the editor of the Times’ Op-Ed page (now expanding), asking to report the progress of this campaign. Electioneering—but why not? This was refused, but with the request that I write something for them on some other subject.

  Months later, I did so. It wasn’t what I had asked to do—now a dead issue. But there was something else I wanted to say on civil rights, so I took the opportunity.

  This, a short piece on “Civil Rights in Black Hands,” as the Times called it, was much reprinted nationally, though Southern newspapers cut some of it.

  To what end any of it?—I begin asking myself. I can now see cynically clearer the odd paths to public expression; once you have been certified by the press as of sufficient interest or vigor, you can speak up on anything (and might learn to on everything).

  Twice more in time of student riot, I wrote in. Once, from the City College, in defense of an open admissions policy. And once from Columbia, m
y own university, whose record on freedom of opinion had long shamed me, when it at last came out against the war. At the time, I was teaching in both of them.

  If I hadn’t tired as suddenly of published letters as years ago I had of organizations, I might have been ready for one of the next steps in pop American personality. Public office. Political or educational.

  God is my witness I wasn’t smart enough to think of it. When, not long later, a man tells me my name has come up for the presidency of a good university, I say “You’re kidding.” Indeed not; he is on the search committee; I need only encourage him. When I still laugh, he says stiffly “Maybe you don’t realize what a good image you have.”

  Good? For an artist? I feel just as I had when the Nyack Library, putting in the basement some writers’ books as unfit for the young, hadn’t included mine. (Perhaps since repaired.)

  American life often gives one these raw glimpses of the ski-slides possible between its professions and its power-lines—to the alert. Between being a film actor say—and a governor. Or a district attorney—and a President. Do you have to be what the public wants, or simply a hard wanter? Do you have to be charismatic to the public eye, or merely be there?

  Artists often go pop, once they have money or fame—or enough of whatever else they came for. But often too it comes upon them out of their eagerness to be effective in the public world.

  One step nearer, and I wouldn’t be sure what was pop. Except that my letters would be, if I brought forth any more of them. In public. In private they could remain what they had been. Sometimes an honest wrath, sometimes a self-righteousness that has soared past soup. Sometimes the ignobler part of the process by which I find out what I think.

  A letter of indignation is its own best answer. Protests that require another’s answer aren’t indignation but controversy—wherein somebody else finds out what he thinks. I don’t mind.

  (My friend says reflectively, later: “They are part of the writer’s soul, that cannot elsewhere be utilized.”)