I had not heard this litany since the 1930s and early ’40s. But here it was again, as though freshly minted, brand new discoveries which the caller was supremely confident everyone knew perfectly well but thought it bad manners to talk about in public. And such was the confidence of his manner that he soon had the poor priest on the ropes, and could assert with utmost self-assurance that he was simply being factual and not anti-Semitic.
The differences now, of course, are that no Hitler stands at the head of the greatest armed force in the world vowing the destruction of the Jewish people, and there is an Israel which, notwithstanding all the futility of much of its present vision, is still capable of defending the right of Jews to exist. Focus, in short, was written when a sensible person could wonder if such a right had reality at all.
It is inevitable that one should wonder whether anything like the situation in this novel could recur, and it is a question no one can answer. In the Fifties and Sixties I might have persuaded myself that its recrudescence was not likely, and I would have based such reasoning on what had begun to seem a truly profound shift in the world’s conception of the Jew. For one thing, anti-Semitism, linked as it was to totalitarianism, was being viewed as one of the keys to the dismantling of democracy and at least in its political forms was no longer an option for people who, whatever their private grievance against Jews, were still committed to the liberal state. By the end of World War II, anti-Semitism was no longer a purely personal matter.
But there was also the shift, however paradoxical, in the perception of the Jew as a consequence of the first successful decades of Israel’s life as a state. In a word, the Jew was no longer a shadowy, ghettoized mystery, but a farmer, a pilot, a worker. Throwing off the role of victim, he stood up and was suddenly comprehensible as one of the world’s dangerous peoples—dangerous in the conventional military and characterological sense. He was like everybody else now and for a time it would be difficult to imagine the traditional anti-Semitic attitudes feeding themselves on warriors rather than passive victims. For a time, Israeli technical and military missions were spread across Africa and her example seemed about to become an inspiration for any poor country attempting to enter this century.
This exemplary condition was not to last. By an irony so gigantic as to sweep the mind into the explications of mysticism, Israel has turned in the world’s perception from a land settled by pastoral socialists and internationalist soldier-farmers into a bellicose armed camp whose adamant tribal defensiveness has inevitably hardened against neighboring peoples to the point of fanaticism. Jewish aloneness is back, but now it is armed. One more impersonation has been added to the long historic list that supplied so many contradictory images; Einstein and Freud and/or Meyer Lansky or another gangster; Karl Marx and/or Rothschild; the Prague communist chief Slansky running Czechoslovakia for Stalin and/or the Jew Slansky hanging by the neck as tribute to Stalin’s paranoid anti-Semitism.
Focus is much involved with impersonations. Its central image is the turning lens of the mind of an anti-Semitic man forced by his circumstances to see anew his own relationships to the Jew. To a certain degree, it seems to me that Newman’s step toward his human identification with some part of the Jewish situation has indeed occurred, at least in sectors of the democratic world, since the mid-Forties, and so the projection of such a change as occurs in this story was not altogether romantic and unlikely.
But in the four decades since I wrote Focus, new perspectives on the Jewish situation have opened up from surprising angles. In particular, the attitudes of some Asian peoples toward certain successful strangers settled in their midst, for example the Chinese in Thailand and the Vietnamese in the Cambodia of Sihanouk before the Vietnamese occupation of that country. It used to amuse me to hear descriptions in Bangkok of the local Chinese which were so exactly similar to what people used to say about Jews, and doubtless still do in the West: “The Chinese really have only one loyalty, to one another. They are very clever, study harder in school, always try to be first in their studies. There are lots of Chinese bankers in Thailand, too many; in fact, it was a real mistake to give Chinese Thai citizenship, because they have secretly taken control of the banking system. Besides, they are spies for China, or would be in time of war. Actually, what they are after is a revolution in Thailand (despite their being bankers and capitalists), so that we would end up as dependents of China.”
Many of the same contradictory things were said about Vietnamese who had been settled in Cambodia for generations. The similarities in these two instances were striking—the Chinese in Thailand and the Vietnamese in Cambodia were very frequently visible as merchants, landlords of stores and small houses, peddlers, and an inordinate number of them were teachers and lawyers and intellectuals, enviable in a peasant country. They, so to speak, visibly administered the injustices of life as far as the average Thai or Cambodian could see, since it was to them that one paid the rent or the limitlessly inflated prices of food and other necessities of life, and one could see with one’s own eyes how soft a life they led as intellectuals.
It is important also that the host people characterized themselves as somehow more naïve than these strangers, less interested in moneymaking, and more “natural”—that is, less likely to become intellectuals. In the Soviet Union, and the lands ruled by her arms and culture in Eastern Europe, the same sort of accusations are made openly or implicitly. Focus is a view of anti-Semitism that is deeply social in this particular sense: the Jew is seen by the anti-Semitic mind as the carrier of that same alienation the indigenous people resent and fear, the same conniving exploitation. I would only add that they fear it because it is an alienation they feel in themselves, a not-belonging, a helplessly antisocial individualism that belies fervent desires to be a serving part of the mythic whole, the sublime national essence. They fear the Jew as they fear the real, it often seems. And perhaps this is why it is too much to expect a true end to anti-Semitic feelings. In the mirror of reality, of the unbeautiful world, it is hardly reassuring and requires much strength of character to look and see oneself.
ALL MY SONS
Belief in America
(FROM SITUATION NORMAL . . . )
1944
Riding away from the camp it became clear for the first time why I had looked so hard for a sign of Belief in the Army. It was, I saw, a personal reason. I had an instinctive fear that millions of men could not be put through the hell of battle and be expected to return to American life as whole men unless they had some basic elementary understanding of why they had had to go through their battle. I had been, I saw now, afraid of what such men would do to America and what their returning to America would do to them. My fear had not been, as I thought all along, that they would not fight well without the Belief, for everything I saw convinced me that our soldiers, for many different and sometimes totally irrelevant reasons, have sufficient faith in their leaders to follow them into battle. Now I saw that the danger lay in the return of the warriors, in the time when they were no longer webbed into the Army organization, no longer under their military leaders commanding them in the pressure of battle and war. Riding away from the camp I wondered for the first time whether I ought not be wandering through St. Paul and Kansas City, New York and Los Angeles, instead of through the camps. For as far as Watson was concerned it was in America as much as in the island where he fought that his wholeness had been wrecked and his mind distracted. It was not only the Japanese who had shaken his wits. We here did our part in that, and with terrible effect.
It is wrong to use a single man as the basis of a statement about all soldiers, but from what I have been able to learn since speaking to him I have come to the conclusion that he represents a nearly classic extreme of a state of mind found in all men who have been in actual battle, hard battle.
For want of a better word—this one has certain sneering connotations—Watson was in love, in love with his comrades in arms. I sensed it as h
e spoke to me, and I was sure of it when I had left him. Probably his whole conflict consists of his fear of returning to battle, set against his love for his unit. The feeling of guilt that such a dilemma would generate in a man needs no defining. He was not merely letting “the Army” down or his “unit.” He was being forced by fear to forsake a group of men whom he had loved. His avowal that he would die for any of them was even truer than I had imagined.
Now what happens to a Watson when he returns to America? It must be remembered that as far as anyone could tell he returned whole, sane, and fit for further training. What happened to him here? What did he see or fail to see here that so shook him?
I can only guess at that. But I am not trying to solve Watson’s problem. In the present state of American affairs I do not know how his problem can be solved. But Watson is an extreme. Many hundreds of thousands of men are going to return from terrible battles, and in some degree they will have shared Watson’s feeling of love and identity with their particular comrades and units. And in differing degrees they are going to have to transfer that love to other—civilian—“units” or be forever in that restless, aimless state of emotional thirst which in other countries at other times has made veterans the anxious and willing collaborators of any demagogue who joins them together under a common color of shirt, for a common and often violent social purpose. We will dispense with the argument against those who still say it can’t happen here. It has begun to happen here too many times for us to argue about it at this late date. But what about Watson, about the millions of Watsons who are even now coming down the gangplanks in American ports . . .
They have fought their battle. Carried forward by faith in an officer, by a feeling of love for their comrades, by an innate sense of honor, by a plain love of adventure and danger, by whatever drive obtained in them at the time of battle, they fought their battle, and now they are home. No man has ever felt identity with a group more deeply and intimately than a soldier in battle. But now their uniforms are off. They walk out of the circle of the imperative order, out of the unity of feeling they had known in the Army. They go home.
Home is many things. Home can be a family well loved or a wife longed for whose love is all-sufficing. Home may be the feverish joy of resuming projects left half finished. Home may give Watson—many of them—a satisfying substitute for the close comradeship of the battlefield. The battlefield and its emotions may quickly fade once the fighter is really home.
But maybe not. Home, to many, perhaps to most, means a town or a city cut into a thousand little disjointed pieces, each one an exclusive class in itself. If on returning home, the veteran should find the town in immediate danger of being inundated by a flood, with every sort of person in it working together toward a common goal, the problem might hardly exist for him. With each citizen protecting his neighbor, as he does in time of danger, and all divisions of race, economic and social position melted away in the face of the peril, the veteran would find himself strangely at home among his people. But a flood is a rare thing. The usual veteran returning to his city or town on the usual day finds no common goal at all. He finds every group in town excluding the proximate group. It is rich and poor again, it is white and black again, it is Jew and Gentile again, it is, above all, a mass of little groups each of whose apparent goals in life conflict with the goals of the next group. Watson must return to his former group. He must reassume its little prejudices, its hates, its tiny aims. He must lop off at once that onetime feeling of exhilaration he got from the knowledge that whatever the insignificance of his job, it was helping an enormous mass of men toward a great and worthy goal. Now he must forget that. Now he must live unto himself, for his own selfish welfare. Half of him, in a sense, must die, and with it must pass away half the thrill he knew in being alive. He must, in short, become a civilian again.
There is a great and deep sense of loss in that. A man who has known the thrill of giving himself does not soon forget it. It leaves him with a thirst. A thirst for a wider life, a more exciting life, a life that demands all he can give. Civilian life in America is private, it is always striving for exclusiveness. Our lifelong boast is that we got ahead of the next guy, excluded him. We have always believed in the fiction—and often damned our own belief—that if every man privately takes care of his own interests, the community and the nation will prosper and be safe. Unless your Watson’s attachment to his family or his wife or his girl is so overwhelming that nothing can distract him from it, he is going to feel the loss of a social unit, a group to which he can give himself, a social goal worth his sacrifice. He may find that unit and that goal in his trade union, his club. But most Americans do not belong to unions, and the goals of most American clubs will never make up in vitality and largeness for the goal he left behind. Watson, then, if he has the average social connections which are slight, is going to wander around his American town, and he is going to find himself severely lonely a great and growing part of the time. America, to him, is not moving in any direction. His life is standing still. And he is alone and dissatisfied.
What could civilian America possibly give Watson that it did not give? There is only one answer to that. The Belief. America tried everything else imaginable, and nothing satisfied your Watson. It tried giving him medals, it tried giving him a parade, it tried big publicity for him, it tried to give him everything within reach of its well-meaning heart. When people met him they tried being sympathetic, and that did not help. They tried being sorry for him and they tried being proud, and he did not seem to react fully to any of it. What did he want from them? They would give him anything he wanted if only he could tell them what it was that would make him feel at home in America.
Knowing it or not Watson wanted to find the Belief in America. It is a very hard concept to nail down; Belief so often means a dogma of some kind to be memorized and bowed down to, and that is not a thing that could satisfy Watson. But say it this way. If when he returned to this shore he walked in the cities and the towns and all about him he sensed and heard evidence that the people were unified in one concept—that he, Watson, had gone forth to rescue something very very precious and that had he not gone forth, and had that thing been lost, the people would have been left in mourning for it the rest of their lives. What Watson wanted in America is equivalent to what the Russian or British soldier must find when he returns home. In Russia or Britain the broken cities and the maimed children and the many civilian dead and missing say in so many words nearly everything the returning soldier needs to hear. It is very clear, there, why he went; it is superlatively clear what a unity of feeling lay behind him while he was gone, and it is bloody well apparent and understood what it was that he accomplished by going. The force of bombs and the horror of rape and destruction has spawned the quantities of a unified Belief there, and when Tommy and Ivan come marching home their people know them through the very arterial link of that commonly held Belief, that rock-like understanding. But here the marks of war are different. Watson found a people without scars and without any commonly held understanding of why he had to go and what he accomplished by going. True, his comrades too were not sure of what, in the end, they were accomplishing by their battles, but for them that kind of understanding, that kind of political Belief was compensated for by an emotional unity born of the common danger and the common military goal—they knew each other through that and they were one with each other because of it. What links Watson with the civilians at home though? A parade? Sympathy? Pride in him based on the same kind of understanding required for pride in the hometown football team? The only means by which Watson can rejoin himself with America is by sharing with civilian America a well-understood Belief in the rightness, the justness, the necessity of his fight. That is how he will be made to feel at home. It will by no means dissolve his memories and solve all his problems, but without it nothing can be solved in Watson. He will be wondering why he went and why he is alive for the rest of his days. And what could th
at Belief be?
Since the war began our most brilliant statesmen and writers have been trying—only in America, as far as I know—to frame a statement, a “name” for this war. They have not found it, and they will not find it, because they are looking for something new. It is pretty late now for this kind of talk, but not too late. From the first day of this war we should have understood that the kind of thing we fight for is a very old thing. We fought for it in 1776 and in 1865, and we found the words for it then, and they are perfectly good words, easy to understand and not at all old-fashioned. They are good words because they recur more times in our ordinary conversation and in the historic conversations of our long tradition than any other words. They represent a concept which, to the vast majority of Americans, must not be offended. The words are not “free enterprise,” as the well-known ads of our big industries maintain. Nor are the words, “Keep America the Same,” as a certain automobile company insists nearly every week in the national magazines. Neither the people of America nor those of any other nation ever fought a war in order to keep everything the same and certainly never for free enterprise or jobs. No man in his right mind would risk his life to get a job. But we did fight two wars for our Belief. And that Belief says, simply, that we believe all men are equal. We really believe it, most of us, and because a powerful force has arisen in the world dedicated to making the people of the world—us included—unequal, we have therefore decided to fight. We insist upon a state of affairs in which all men will be regarded as equal. There is no nonsense about it. We believe that everything will rot and decline and go backwards if we are forced to live under laws that hold certain nations and peoples to be inferior and without rights. We are thinking primarily of ourselves and our own rights, naturally, but that is perfectly all right, for once our right to be equal is assured we will want nothing better than to see every nation on our level. I believe the majority of Americans agree to this.
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