Timebends (20 page)

One evening after midnight, as I was walking with some students, a young soldier in uniform who had been enrolled here until his service in Vietnam came up to me and walked along under the trees with our group. “You people are wrong, you know. The war can be won. It really can be.”

Since this was what I had been privately saying to Oglesby and Jean Lacouture—that they were underestimating America's stomach for this war—I was curious to know what this young veteran thought. “All you have to do is put one million men in there.” The other students laughed—a million men! The veteran grinned with cool irony. “A million men could do it, and I wouldn't kid myself that they won't try. I don't think the administration knows it now, but they will sooner or later. But short of a million, it's no go.”

It was so like the thirties: the alienated had the prophecy but not the power. In '36 and '37 we had been certain that if Franco could only be defeated a new world war might be averted, since a democratic Spain on Hitler's flank would act as a brake upon him, while a fascist ally would surely bring on a general European war. But the British and French had sold themselves on the democracy-is-Communism-in-embryo idea, and Roosevelt had kept hands off, and Franco ended up in Madrid declaring his solidarity with the Axis powers, and it was merely a matter of time before the big bang sounded. In a hundred ways Spain was the matrix for the next half-century's Western dilemma. The central unadmitted falsehood then was that the lesser breeds like the Spaniards, and later on the Iranians and the peoples of the Middle East and Latin America, were perfectly satisfied with right-wing dictatorships,
while democracy was the proper mode only for the old Western European states and the United States. Thus, any local threat to the right had to be an opening wedge of the Communists, for an authentic democrat rising out of a poor country was simply not conceivable and his claim to being a democrat was a mere disguise and a fraud.

Of course it was impossible to predict in 1965 that before the Joint Chiefs, the Congress, the president, and the majority of the American people could be awakened to the facts presented so lucidly in that teach-in, some fifty-eight thousand Americans would have to die and our society be brought to its knees, an alienation unimaginable in its depth and scope having overwhelmed a generation of youth because of the war. Nevertheless, even in those three days and nights one understood that this was not going to be a repeat of the thirties. I walked past 411 North State Street, the house where, thirty years before, I had written my first play, and past a little pizza joint in the center of town where, a dozen years ago on my visit for
Holiday
in the McCarthy time, I had sat talking with students who were afraid of speaking up without plenty of cautionary thinking beforehand lest they be branded radicals. The atmosphere of the teach-in was a new and quickened world, with professors addressing full classrooms in the middle of the night, openly explaining that the United States had thwarted a national Vietnamese election that would undoubtedly have made Ho Chi Minh the president of the country, and that Americans were now being called on to frustrate the Vietnamese people's will.

The organizers of the anti-Vietnam War movement, which was born in those days and nights in Ann Arbor, would one day believe they had failed because the war, regardless of everything, continued for ten more years. Still, I saw the teach-in as the exploding moment of alienation, the time of the opening of the eyes to the corruption of the soul in high places. In this it was much like the Crash of 1929. Lying in bed in the Michigan Union, where I had spent my first night at college thirty years before, I wondered how many times a country could be disowned by a vital and intelligent sector of its youth before something broke, something deep inside its structure that could never be repaired again. The systole and diastole, the radicalization and the return of cautionary thinking, the bursts of idealism followed by equally quick swerves back to skepticism and the acceptance of things as they are—how many times before memory catches up with the latest swelling of the ideal and squashes it with cynicism before it can mature? In a word,
how long is freedom? Is this the way America grows, or is this the way she slowly dies? Are these the spasms of birth or of death?

The Man Who Had All the Luck,
my first professionally produced play, hardly seemed a Depression story, but it was, with its obsessive terror of failure and its guilt for success. By 1941, when I began writing it, despite every outward sign of failure my secret fate was full of promise. The two Hopwood Awards were still my encouragement, along with the far more important imprimatur of the Bureau of New Plays Prize, twelve hundred and fifty dollars given by the prestigious Theatre Guild in New York after a nationwide collegiate competition. One of the other winners was a fellow from St. Louis with the improbable name Tennessee Williams, whom I envisioned in buckskins, carrying a rifle.

When
The Man Who Had All The Luck
reached Broadway in 1944, it managed to baffle all but two of the critics (New York had seven daily newspapers then, each with its theatre reviewer). It must be said, nevertheless, that whatever its shortcomings, in a different theatrical time this play might well have stuck to the wall instead of oozing down. But Broadway in the forties was in what might be called a “classical” phase, such as occurs in every art, when there were absolutely definite rules of play writing whose nonobservance brought failure. There was supposed to be nothing so impersonal as play writing; after all, with each individual character having his autonomous viewpoint toward the common theme, the author could only be a sort of conductor who kept order rather than a sneaky deviser of some meaning at which the play would finally arrive. This spurious objectivism was taken so seriously that as late as the sixties, even so perceptive a critic as Walter Kerr could declare that plays that developed social or moral concepts rather than seeking simply to entertain would ultimately drive the audience out of the theatres.
The Man Who Had All the Luck
was manifestly nonobjective in this sense, and therefore “unnatural.” Moreover, neither I nor its director, a dear fellow named Joe Fields, really understood its antirealistic thrust.

Joe's father had been part of a famous vaudeville team of the twenties, Weber and Fields. The brother of lyricist Dorothy Fields, he had written many successful musical comedies and seemed the last man in the world to be attracted to what in Broadway terms was an arcane work. But while his
Doughgirls,
a big, brassy farce, was raking in a fortune, Fields himself was spending much time in
art galleries or reading his favorite French writers, especially Charles Péguy, one of whose books was always in his jacket pocket. He believed in my play and enlisted the backing of Herbert H. Harris, founder of Charbert, the perfume company that supplied the money for the production.

Trying to explain their uneasiness, one after another of the critics latched onto what they considered the absdurdity of a baseball pitcher as great at throwing a ball as Amos Beeves being turned down by a big league scout merely because of his ineptitude at pitching with men on base. Surely he could have been taught this skill! On the other hand, the critic Burton Rascoe, a former sports reporter, wrote a long piece in the
World-Telegram
assuring his colleagues that he had known many athletes who had been destroyed by a single defect, and going on to predict great things for me. Even so, it was slightly embarrassing to win my first professional encouragement on the grounds that I did indeed know something about baseball.

A more important if mystifying boost came from a source I would have thought unlikely. John Anderson, the critic for the
Journal-American,
a reactionary and sensational Hearst paper, invited me for a drink at the New York Athletic Club to talk about my play. I had never laid eyes on a critic before. He was in his early forties, handsome and well tailored and very earnest. There was an un-clarity in the play, he felt, “but I sensed some strange shadow world behind the characters, a fascinating gathering of darkness that made me wonder if you have thought of writing tragedy. A doom hangs over this play, something that promises tragedy.”

I said that I didn't think I would write another play. “This is now my fifth or sixth, and I seem to have gotten nowhere.”

Anderson looked down at the floor. As I remember him he had wavy brown hair and a searching, deeply serious look. “You've written a tragedy, you know, but in a folk comedy style. You ought to try to understand what you've done.”

This was the first of perhaps three or four conversations I have ever had with critics, and though I did not return to play writing until three years had passed—during which I published my only novel,
Focus
—I nevertheless held his words dear. Only three months after our talk, Anderson was suddenly dead of meningitis.

One other question of Anderson's nagged at me, and still does. “Are you religious?” he had asked. Blind not only to myself but to what my work was trying to tell me, I thought the surprising question absurd. If anything,
The Man Who Had All the Luck
seemed an antireligious play about a young man who had renounced his own power to the heavens and could only be saved by recognizing himself in his work. But drama, if allowed to follow its premises, may betray even its author's prejudices or blindness; the truth was that the play's action did seem to demand David's tragic death, but that was intolerable to my rationalist viewpoint. In the early forties such an ending would have seemed to me obscurantist. A play's action, much like an individual's acts, is more revealing than its speeches, and this play embodied a desperate quest on David's part for an authentication of his identity, a longing for a break in the cosmic silence that alone would bestow a faith in life itself. To put it another way, David has succeeded in piling up treasures that rust, from which his spirit has already fled; it was a paradox that would weave through every play that followed.

Standing at the back of the house during the single performance I could bear to watch, I could blame nobody. All I knew was that the whole thing was a well-meant botch, like music played on the wrong instruments in a false scale. I would never write another play, that was sure. After the final performance and the goodbyes to the actors, it almost seemed a relief to get on the subway to Brooklyn Heights and read about the tremendous pounding of Nazi-held Europe by Allied air power. Something somewhere was real.

I suppose it is inevitable that the thought of religion should call up memories winding back to the first mention of Marxism I ever heard. On a clear fall day in 1932 I for some reason found myself rather hesitantly venturing into the Avenue M temple, looking, if the truth be known, for God. A few years before, I had made a terrific hit with my bar mitzvah speech, which had drawn highest praise from my father—“Ya sure put it over!”—and possibly because I was in the throes of a sexual explosion with no permissible outlet, my mind had made a connection between the synagogue and that sparkling day when I had successfully asserted myself, even if only with a speech. In any case, what I found inside the building, scene of my triumph, was three old men in an office smoking Turkish cigarettes, kibitzers who looked at me in mystification through watery eyes as I tried to explain that I would like to ask somebody a few questions about religion, a subject obviously far from their minds when they were no doubt swamped by building deficits and a falling off of attendance and other vital matters.

Since I was probably the only adolescent ever to ask such a question, especially in the middle of the week, they were dumbfounded. Recovering, they glanced at one another as though for inspiration until one of them came up with the suggestion that I return on Saturday and join the sabbath service. But I knew all about that rote exercise, which was really for people already certain about themselves, I thought. What I needed was something that would reach into my chaos and calm it and make me like everybody else.

So I wandered the two blocks to our house, my inner thirst as unslaked as it was undefined. The house meant much to me. Some rainy afternoons with nothing to do I enjoyed vacuuming the carpets, gluing a loose chair rung, or in spring planting tulips in the backyard—and digging up tin cans and old boots, for it was all filled-in land under a layer of cosmetic topsoil. At such times I had to work close to the ten-foot fence surrounding the kennel of Roy, the wolf kept by the Lindheimers next door. Roy would snarl and fling himself against the fence, his eyes red and his jaws lathering. He really
was
a wolf. Mr. Eagan, Lindheimer's father-in-law, who, in top hat and boots, drove a hansom cab stationed in front of the Plaza Hotel, would take Roy for his walks holding him by a heavy chain in one hand, a riding crop in the other. At Roy's slightest attempt to deviate left or right, the crop would hit him square across the eyes.

I was digging among my tulips one day when I noticed the quiet. Roy was not behind the fence. Straightening up to rest my back, I caught out of the corner of my eye the sight of Roy standing in our yard behind me, unchained, unaccompanied, empty space all around him, and he was looking up at me. I froze. We looked at each other a long, long time. I knew that if I so much as moved a finger to change my grip on the shovel he'd be at my throat. I doubt if I even blinked. After several months he turned, perfectly relaxed but looking rather baffled, and walked around their garage and back into his kennel area. Step by careful step, I managed to get into our house and phoned next door, and powerful Mrs. Lindheimer, a high school swimming teacher, came out and locked Roy's gate. A broad-shouldered woman, Mrs. Lindheimer always seemed unhappy. Mr. Lindheimer was a wholesale butcher, and they both seemed full of meat. They had recently bought a new Packard, a beautiful car and expensive, but it turned out to be hardly three or four inches narrower than the driveway. She had already gotten it stuck trying to back it out and had become nearly
hysterical, caught inside with no possibility of opening the door for rescue or escape. She finally inched it into the street, but not without cracking our stucco and gouging a streak along one shiny fender. She seemed to blame us for having our house so close to theirs, and I could never pass her on the street without feeling I ought to apologize for something. But I lacked the retaliatory spirit and never dreamed of her drowning.