My father was no longer to blame. It wasn’t he who had failed; it was that we were all in a drama, determined by history, whose plot was the gradual impoverishment of the middle class, the enrichment of the upper, and the joining of the middle with the workers to set up a socialist economy. I had gotten what the synagogue had not given me—the ennobling overview. It was possible again to think that people were important, that a pattern lay hidden beneath the despair and the hysteria of the mothers, that the fathers would again be in their places. Life suddenly had a transcendent purpose, to spread this news, to lift consciousness. For the day would arrive when conflict would end. Things would no longer have value, the machines would provide. We would all live, like people in a park on Sunday, quietly, smiling, dignified. The age of Things was over. All that remained was for people to know it.
They usually call this the experience of materialist religion, but it had little materialism for me. I wasn’t looking to it for anything like money or a better job but for a place, literally, in the universe. Through Marxism you extended your affection to the human race. The emptiness of days filled with a maturing purpose—the deepening crisis of capitalism, bursting into the new age, the inexorable approach of nirvana.
It was the last of the forgoing philosophies. The deeds of the present, the moment, had no intrinsic importance, but only counted insofar as they brought closer or held back the coming of the new. Man-as-sacrifice was its essence; heroism was what matterèd. We were in the Last Days, all signs pointed to Apocalypse. Self was anathema, a throwback; individual people were dematerialized. A Russian, Ostrovsky, wrote An Optimistic Tragedy, and the title signified the mood, I think, wherever Marx’s vision had taken root. Joy was coming—no matter what.
The Thirties has never been rendered in literature, because the emotions reported are all coiled around political and economic events, when in truth a religious sweep was central to everything one felt, an utter renewal of mankind, nothing less. The mystic element was usually elided, I imagine, because to share Marx was to feel contempt for all irrationality. It was capitalism that was irrational, religious, obscure in the head, and Hitler was its screaming archangel. Pride lay not in what one felt but what one was capable of analyzing into its class components. The story went around that Wall Street stockbrokers were calling Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party, for his analysis of the economy. A communist knew, had glimpsed the inevitable.
Similarly, the movement in the Sixties was hermetic and, like its ancestor, was unable to penetrate the national mind with anything more than its crude, materialist side. To the man on the street, it was merely a generation lying across the road of Progress, crying out F—— Work. And its worst proponents so defined it, too. In the case of both “revolutions,” a redemptive thrust, without which such movements are never propelled, could not be transmitted beyond the ranks, and both revolutions appeared to the outsider as contemptuous of man’s higher ideals, spirituality, and innate goodness. To most supporters of the Spanish loyalists, their struggle was far more profound than any politics could embrace; the Spanish civil war was a battle of angels as well as the lowly poor against the murderous rich. When the dark spirit won, it was not only a factional victory but the shaking of Inevitability, human future itself had been overwhelmed. While Picasso painted Guernica, the State Department, business and religious leaders, and most of the press were oddly hesitant about saying unkind words about Hitler and Mussolini, the law-and-order boys behind Franco. Of the minority of Americans who even knew a war was going on in Spain, probably half were on the side of the Church and fascism. To these people, the republic stood for license, atheism, radicalism, and—yes, even the socialization of women, whatever that meant. So for me the commonly held attitude toward Sixties youth had echoes. The country was fixated on the body of the new revolt while its spirit went either unnoticed or was mangled by the media or the movement’s own confused reporters.
The Thirties and Sixties “revolutions,” for want of a better word, show certain stylistic similarities and differences. The earlier radical took on a new—for the middle class—proletarian speech, often stopped shaving and wore the worker’s brogans and the lumberjack’s mackinaw: his tailor, too, was the Army-Navy surplus store. He found black jazz more real than the big band’s arranged sentimentality, found Woody Guthrie and Ledbetter and folk music authentic because they were not creations of the merchandiser but a cry of pain. He turned his back, or tried to, on the bounds of family, to embrace instead all humankind, and was compromised—when he found himself lifted up the economic ladder—in his effort to keep his alienation intact. When he married he vowed never to reconstruct the burdensome household he had left behind, the pots and pans, the life of things. The goal was the unillusioned life, the opposite of the American Way in nearly all respects. The people were under a pall of materialism, whipped on unto death in a pursuit of rust. The list of similarities is longer than this, but the differences are the point.
Once nipped by Marx, the Thirties radical felt he was leading a conditional life. He might contribute money, or himself, to help organize a new union, but important as the union was, it paled before its real, its secret, meaning—which was that it taught the worker his strength and was a step toward taking state power away from the capitalist class. If the Thirties radical viewed a work of art or a friend, the measure of value came to be whether socialism was being brought closer or pushed farther away by that art or that friend. And so his life moved into a path of symbols, initially ways to locate himself in history and in society, but ultimately that which ruled his mind while reality escaped.
The Thirties radical soon settled into living for the future, and in this he shared the room of his mind with the bourgeoisie. It could not have been otherwise. Capitalism and socialism are forgoing systems; and you cannot tend the machine, on which both systems are based, whenever the spirit moves you, but on time, even when you would rather be making love or getting drunk. Remember the radical of the Thirties came out of a system that had stopped, and the prime job was to organize new production relations that would start it up again. The Sixties radical opened his eyes to a system pouring its junk over everybody, or nearly everybody, and the problem was to stop just that, to escape being overwhelmed by the mindless, goalless flood that marooned each person on his island of commodities.
The Sixties people would stop time, money time, production time, and its concomitant futurism. Their Marxist ancestors had also wanted man as the measure of all things but sought to center man again by empowering the then-powerless. What came of it was Russia and, at home, the pork-chop trade-union leaders and their cigars. So power itself was now the spook, and the only alternative, if humankind was to show a human face again, was to break the engagement with the future, with even sublimation itself. You lived now, lied now, loved now, died now. And the Thirties people, radical or bourgeois, were horrified and threatened by this reversal because they possessed the same inner relation to the future, the self-abnegating masochism that living for any future entails.
Dope stops time. More accurately, money time and production time and social time. In the head is created a more or less amiable society, with one member—and a religion, with a single believer. The pulsing of your heart is the clock, and the future is measured by prospective trips or interior discoveries yet to come. Kesey, who found his voice in the Sixties, once saw America saved by LSD, the chemical exploding the future forever and opening the mind and heart to the now, to the precious life being traded away for a handful of dust. Which leads to another big difference between the two generations and something that I think informs the antic jokiness in the Sixties radical style.
The Thirties radical never dreamed the world could really explode. In fact, as Clausewitz had said and Marx would have agreed, war was merely politics by other means. If we hated fascism, it too was merely politics, even the clubbing of radicals and Jews. That even fascists could burn up people in oven
s was unthinkable. What the Holocaust did was posit a new enemy who indeed was beyond the dialectic, beyond political definition. It was man.
So that Apocalypse, as inherited by the Sixties generation, was not what it used to be, the orderly consequence of a dying system, but an already-visual scene in Hiroshima and Auschwitz whose authors were, in one case, parliamentary politicians. Oppenheimer-like humanists quoting the Upanishads, decent fellows all and, in the other, their tyrant enemies. Political differences and principles guaranteed nothing at all. What had to be projected instead was a human nowness, Leary’s turning on and dropping out, lest the whole dark quackery of political side-taking burn us all in our noble motives. The very notion of thinking, conceptualizing, theorizing—the mind itself—went up the flue; and many bourgeois governments, for a little while, backed up in fear not of an ideology but of a lifestyle—a mass refusal to forgo.
For myself, I knew this had no hope and not because it eschewed a political vision but because its idea of man was wrong. Because a man cries “Brother!” doesn’t make him one, any more than when his father muttered “Comrade.” The struggle with evil doesn’t cancel out that easily, as the fate of Marxists had shown. More, from where I sat, the religious accents of Sixties radicalism were not entirely apart from those of Thirties radicalism. Like the Christians, Marx had projected a Judgment Day on the barricades, an Armageddon out of which the last would rise to be first, then to direct the withering away of the state itself once socialism came to pass, the veritable kingdom where conflict is no more and money itself vanished in an abounding surplus of goods. You wanted a car, you just picked one up and left it when you didn’t need it anymore—a sort of celestial Hertz. If the last thing Jesus or Marx had in mind was a new fatalism, that was nevertheless what most human beings made of the stringent and muscular admonitions these prophets pronounced, and what most of the voyagers into the Age of Aquarius were making, I thought, of the punishing, disciplined yoga that had evolved this new vision. Once you have thought yourself into an alignment with Fate, you are a sort of Saving Remnant for whom mere reality is but an evolution of symbolic events, until finally you are no longer really anything at all except a knower—and thus your deeds cannot be judged by mortal judgment, so anything goes. Differences there are, of course, but Manson, Stalin and that long line of Christian crusaders join hands in this particular dance. How often have I heard survivors of the Thirties astonished that they could have said the things they said, believed what they had believed. A faith had been running underneath that newfound pride in objective social analysis, that sense of merging with the long line into the Inevitable, and a faith exploded is as unrecoverable to the heart in its original intensity as a lost love.
The latter-day Edenism of the Sixties had a sour flavor, for me at least: it was repeating another first act of another disillusioned play. I saw the love-girls, free at last, but what would happen when the babies came?
Most girls with babies are funny. They like to know exactly where they are. If only because babies reintroduce linear time and long-term obligation, high-flying anarchy must come to earth.
Kesey’s new book Garage Sale, a mélange of his own and his friends’ writing, is a sort of geologic section of some thirteen years in the wilderness. But his screenplay, which appears in this book, is the real surprise, a hail and farewell to the era. From the height of its final pages you can look down and begin to sense a form at last in the whole insane pageant. For Kesey had not merely taken a dive into his bloodstream and glimpsed, as it were, the interior of his eyes, but emerged into the ring where the Others are, the brothers and sisters toward whom a newfound responsibility flows, and toward the world itself. The time-honored way to make that discovery was the Hebrew-Christian self-torture—the near-dissolution of the body inviting God. Here it is otherwise, the enhancing of the senses and pleasure, the blending of the physicality of Eastern mysticism with the Mosaic injunction to serve the People, whose well-being is the measure of all truth. If responsibility can be reached through pleasure, then something new is on the earth.
Skeptic that I am, I could believe in this. My zodiacal friends tell me that in terms of an individual, the Great Wheel says the human race is now thirty-five years of age, and that’s when human beings are most creative, when Jesus gathered together all that he was and died. So Love is coming toward us, the Age of Aquarius. Scorched by an earlier Inevitable, I shy from this one, and I warn whoever will listen that the tension with evil has no end, or, when it does, the man within has died. Nevertheless, when I think back to what life was like in the Thirties and see from that long-ago vantage what is happening now, I stand in the glistening presence of miracles.
Radical or conservative, we worshipped the big and the smoke from the chimney, and the earth was only there to chew up and drill holes in, the air a bottomless garbage pail. Now my ten-year-old daughter turns the key off when I am parked and waiting for someone. How miraculous. We got out of Vietnam because the Army wouldn’t fight it anymore. That’s the simple truth and how miraculous. Nixon—Billy Graham and prayer breakfasts notwithstanding—has revealed himself—and, really, by himself. As though the earth had squeezed up his roots and he rotted where he stood, this lawless man of disorder. How miraculous. The seed of the visionless has spent itself in him. How miraculous. In the early Fifties a Catholic university survey asked me why I thought there were so few of the faith in the arts or in the contentions of social debate. I wrote back that Irish Catholicism and Yankee Puritanism had combined in this country to sink the inquiring mind without a trace. Now? The spectacle of a Catholic priest demonstrating, leading the poor, is miraculous. Reporters stand up and yell at a presidential press officer, accusing him of having told them lies, and this in the White House, with the flag on the platform. How miraculous. The power company wants to run a high-tension line across my countryside and my neighbors, many of them having voted for Nixon, descend on what used to be routine, company-dominated “hearings,” and invoke beauty and demand their aesthetic rights as though they were poets. How miraculous. Notre Dame University invites me to read. How miraculous. The stock market drops at rumors of war and soars with signs of peace. Incredible. I speak at West Point. Not believable. And tell them, a week after Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, from where I had just returned, that it is a disaster, a disgrace, and will surely bomb the Cambodians into the communist camp. A sixty-year-old colonel, with a horizontal Guards moustache, ramrod fellow beribboned up to his chin, stands and says he was U.S. Military Attaché in Phnom Penh for nine years and that Mr. Miller has spoken the truth. How miraculous. Only one cadet stands to ask why I choose to undermine their morale, and he is the son of the union chief in Chicago. How miraculous. And afterward, on the porch of an officer’s house with a dozen colonels, all Vietnam vets, close-cropped and loose on scotch, they confide their mourning—for the Corps, the country, and a dwindling sense of honor. They talk of resigning, of being ashamed to wear the uniform into New York and, longingly, of Eisenhower’s Order of the Day to the legions about to storm the Normandy beaches because that order spoke of mankind, of lifting the yoke of tyranny, and one man exclaims: “Imagine those words in an order anymore!” Would they ever know a rightful cause again, in or out of war? They were acolytes in a sullied church, and if these men blamed the politicians for defeat, they were also no longer sure we had deserved to win. That ancient scorn for human circumstances was faltering, even here, in the cannon’s heart. Something is changing.
I suppose that in part I have been looking at Sixties radicalism from the Left Bank, from Prague and Red Square, as well as from my own home. It is always disappointing to American radicals to hear that things are worse abroad. Sounds like liberal smuggery. But I don’t mean conditions, only the spirit. Especially is this difficult to swallow right now when the tide has played out here, the revolution eddying, and indifference again prevails. Who has gained from it all except MGM Records and the department stores with their
new lines of eighty-dollar jeans? What came of the love-ins but fatherless children? And heavier contracts for the stars? And the sharp-eyed managers of perfidious guitars? What comfort that the cop looking for hash under the mattress has curls sticking out behind his helmet? The truth is that the fundamental demand of the French students in the 1968 revolution was that their universities be changed into the utilitarian American kind.
In 1968 I met with some thirty writers and editors and other hairy types in the office of Listy, the Prague literary magazine. They wanted someone from outside to know they were about to be jailed by the Russian toadies running the government. They asked me to come because I am an American, and only the Americans might respond to their disaster. These fellows had little hope, but it was all they did have. The Vietnam war was raging then, and they could read the New York Times and know we were imperialists and racists and lacked anything you could call culture, and yet the hope, what there was of it, pointed toward us. A few of them had been here and knew the score, had seen Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and our wrecked cities—compared to their Prague, barbaric, corrupt, incredibly hard places, and merciless to the unsuccessful. Yet it was as though from this insane country were the impossible help possible—from this armed place that was at the moment killing another struggling people.
Under the Kremlin wall one day I remarked to my Soviet interpreter, a bright chap, that there must have been some fast footwork in that palace. . . . To my surprise the fellow was offended and said, “It is not our business.” And the few who try to make it their business keep a bag packed with clean underwear, for jail. Those few, to my amazement, look to Americans as the free-swinging opposites of what their countrymen are. Not really to the American radical but to what they see as a man-centered idea still alive among us.
Collected Essays Page 47