Timebends (3 page)

On the personal level, if I were to start again—(perish the thought!)—I have the feeling I could write another, quite different, autobiography covering the same years as this one. For I had to leave out a lot for space reasons, and to keep some order in the proceedings.

I would have wanted to dwell more on unimportant matters that are not, however, insignificant: like my adolescent lust for sports, especially playing football on the vacant lot on Avenue M and Gravesend Avenue in Brooklyn in the early thirties when the crisp fall air helped drive us headlong into each other's scary elbows and hard-pumping knees, without helmets or shoulder guards on a “field”—an empty lot bordered by sidewalks—littered with the shards of bottles tossed there by passing drunks. (Or the touch football games in the streets with the tall and skinny Epstein twins, my seniors by seven or eight years, a couple of
oddball jokesters who I seem to remember did not graduate from high school, in a hurry to get to Hollywood, where they would one day write the penultimate script for
Casablanca.)
And the dramas of the ice-skating rink on Ocean Parkway, where you had to pay a grim, hard-earned quarter to get in to show off to girls, and hang out till closing time to get your money's worth, half starved though you were by then. Books—a few—certainly did matter; obsessed with sports, I was also trying to puzzle out Gertrude Stein's “A Rose Is a Rose,” handed me by a two-hundred-pound Colgate University tackle desperately trying to write poetry. But no doubt the most important thing in the world to boys were games and arguing about them.

The mind could be mesmerized by a Hemingway paragraph, but beside it hung the gorgeous memory of a long pass miraculously caught for a touchdown. To have stood up to Whitey, our fastball pitcher, despite one's terror of being hit in the head by that rock-hard ball, did something to one's confidence; and to have failed to make the long catch or to keep both eyes open as Whitey's ball slammed past your face—the resulting conflicts were ultimately moral ones and surely helped mold one's self-esteem or lack of it. Still, it is hard not to blush recalling the screaming arguments about the relative talents of a Yankee catcher or a Giants left fielder, a Red Grange or a Gehrig or Musial—these fruitless clashes, nevertheless offered a handhold on a spinning universe like nothing else, as I am sure they still do.

I imagine that what lies behind all this is the young man's search for an identity. For some unknowable but imperious reason I thought of myself as second baseman. Not first, not third, not pitcher or catcher or outfielder, but second base. To contemplate this kind of absolute compulsion and to confess its inscrutable brainlessness can be an illuminating exercise. To become aware that one's identity once depended upon loyalty to an abstraction and a conviction with little or no real content can open the mind to precisely the kind of thing in human affairs that causes more bloodshed than anything else.

I would have liked to have talked more about the Bible, which has been another unsolved mystery for me. I frankly don't know what to make of God, or rather a god who would be interested, for example, in my little life. I believe the closest I ever came to actually visualizing a god was at the age of seven or eight when, helped by an aged Hebrew teacher, I puzzled through the Hebrew
to learn that God created everything, including something called “the firmament.” This wasn't quite the same as the earth, according to my white-bearded teacher. Then what as it? “It's the whole thing,” he explained impatiently, going on to make clear that the earth was flat and the sky a solid blue vault, something you could prove by riding down the street on a bicycle. With this sensible architecture I could easily visualize an old man seated on top of the vault watching what was going on below. It was rather like a theater, come to think of it, and had a certain plausibility that a round earth has never gained in my mind, primarily, I suppose, because with the thing spinning around it left no place for God to sit down with any dignity.

I don't recall ever thinking God loved or didn't love me; having definitely created the world, he seemed to have disappeared into the synagogue, where he dealt mainly with old men about serious matters and ruled over weddings and the dead. When much later I learned that George Washington, Jefferson, and other founders were deists, who saw the world as a clock that God had wound once and then gracefully retired from, it struck a chord.

However, there have been moments when rationalism collapses and I am at the mercy of what some would call superstition and others insight. It is impossible, for me anyway, to understand the durability of the Jews without stepping into the circle of mysticism, a dangerous area where everything is possible and nothing, therefore, exists. Where are the Canaanites, the Moabites, the Philistines, the other great clans and tribes contemporaneous with the biblical Jews? Why did they not enter Western culture as the Jews did?

I feel sure nobody knows the answer to this, so I look within myself for one. I may have forgotten the little Hebrew I knew as a child, I never go to synagogue, and even find it troublesome to accurately remember which high holiday is which and what they signify, but something in me insists that there must continue to be Jews in the world or it will somehow end. There must also be at least one righteous man or the whole human city will go up in smoke, one whistle-blower, so to speak, or our conventional lies will sink everything, and I think I believe this. I recognize that like every other ethnic group Jews feel their own sufferings more than they do those of others, and have more pride in their own victories than in others' victories, and I wish everybody could feel others' pain as much as their own, but despite this high-mindedness I know I am more deeply hurt by a bomb explosion
in Tel Aviv than perhaps another city elsewhere, and take just a little more pride in a Jewish Einstein than if he were of another persuasion. This identification has nothing to do with virtue—Jews are average in that respect, neither better nor worse. In fact, I have to face that it has nothing to do with anything, it simply is.

I am not the only writer, Jew or Gentile, who does not want his plays or novels to end in utter despair, even when objective events seem to demand precisely that conclusion—a Holocaust story, for example. But my resistance to despair seems to have something Jewish about it; some vagrant cell floating through my blood seems to demand that however remote and unlikely ever to be found, a ray of light has to remain after darkness has closed in, a glow of redemption must appear up there at the rim of the pit or the tale is something less than true.

Job is the only play in the Bible, and its most contemporary chapter. If it were ever taken seriously, half the church-going in the United States would grind to a stop. Job assures you that if after a lifetime of decent acts and goodwill toward others you lose everything you possess for absolutely no discernible reason,'you have no cause to complain. Job says you've got to believe, not only without reward in this life but with the most severe punishment. Job is the perfect message for the concentration camps, it is purest God-contemplation, love without reciprocation. It is religion without magic, without its open or implicit attempts to bribe God. Job is a church-closer. But would the world be better off without Job, that thinnest possible thread to the stars?

I might have written more about sex but for the feeling that it is a subject about which nothing new can conceivably be said—or even thought—even as it is the inexhaustible source of more income than any other single idea. In Brooklyn, one did not normally connect sex with love; if anything, they were opposites. You loved your mother, your sister, your aunt, but sex with them? Never. As for women, they did not think about sex because they were fully occupied with dressing up, cooking, making ends meet, and encouraging their husbands. In this respect we were in a condition approximating Mark Twain's Missouri frontier characters, American exemplars, whom he described doing a hundred different kinds of things except, as adults, falling in love.

I also neglected to plumb the depths of my early fascination with entertainers, singers, actors, and their careers. I was one of the more naive audiences for the pop culture of the twenties,
thirties and forties, but I also recall being critical; when they first appeared I was badly split between Russ Columbo and Bing Crosby. Frank Sinatra at first was merely for girls, by all accounts an enviable, singing sex machine who took me a while to appreciate—he sounded gooey in the beginning. I somehow could admire but not really enjoy Fred Allen while falling in love with the Marx Brothers and most but not all of Jack Benny's sketches and Amos ‘n' Andy. (Amazing, is it not, how these people have lasted.) No audience is more critical than the pop audience; unlike the more cultivated and hip they don't go on listening because they're “supposed to,” past the point when they are being reached. When it no longer works for them they turn it off.

I have trouble with contemporary pop, which seems so unbearably repetitious and falsely naive. How performers who do commercials continue to have singing careers is baffling. When a man or a woman wails in precisely the same way for a lost love and a brand of shampoo it is hard not to suspect a certain cynicism, which is bound to spoil the effect when he or she turns to serious artistic efforts. I can't recall Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Hoagy Carmichael, or any of even the lesser ones selling, but maybe it was just for the lack of opportunity. It seems to these old ears that there is an awful lot of automatic thumping and metronomic drum-bumping going on now, and stamped-out Broadway plainsong whose every note and lyric seem aimed rather too obviously at the bank. It is possible that memory is gilded by my youthful emotional investment in the music and lyrics of Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn, Rodgers and Hart and the rest, and the playing of Benny Goodman, Fats Waller, and their cohorts. Those people were doing a sort of intimate private sex as opposed to the current kind, which is all public, like stuff coming out of a gum machine. But before the mystery of the tastes of the young, the old ought to shut up—now and always.

In any case, here are some of the colors of memory, at least the hues that time has not blanched out, for I am sure I have forgotten most of what I have seen, dreamed, and thought.

The view from the floor is of a pair of pointy black calf-height shoes, one of them twitching restlessly, and just above them the plum-colored skirt rising from the ankles to the blouse, and higher still the young round face and her ever-changing tones of voice as she gossips into the wall telephone with one of her two sisters, something she would go on doing the rest of her life until one by one they peeled off the wire and vanished into the sky. Now she looks down at me looking up at her from the foyer floor, bends over and tries to move me clear of her foot. But I must lie on her shoe, and from far up above through skirt and darkness I hear her laughing pleasantly at my persistence.

Then, later, a slightly more elevated view, from about two and a half feet above the floor: she sits at a sixth-story window that overlooks Central Park, her profile emblazoned against the afternoon sun, hair still long but gathered in a bun, her full arms pressing against the gauzy cotton of her shirtwaist sleeves above a shorter skirt now and velvet pumps. Both hands rest on an open book in her lap as she listens intently to a young man with a pipe, thick glasses, and a short beard, a student from Columbia to whom she pays two dollars an afternoon each week simply to come and talk with her about novels. She knows hardly anyone in or out of the family who has ever read a book, but she herself can begin a novel in the afternoon, pick it up again after dinner, finish it by midnight, and remember it in detail for the rest of her life. She also remembers the names of the entire British royal family and their German cousins. But her secret envy, made evident by her contempt,
is for Madame Lupescu, the Jewish paramour of King Carol of Rumania, and also, she believes, his brains.

Still later, there is the view from about five feet above the floor: from here she is in high heels with rhinestone buckles, a black beaded knee-length dress, and a silver-and-black cloche hat over her bobbed hair. Her lips are red with lipstick. She is high-busted and round-armed, already in the habit, whenever she dresses up to leave the house, of drawing her upper lip down in order to slim her pudgy nose. There are diamonds on her fingers, and she trails a silver fox across the floor as she promises to bring home the sheet music of the show they are off to see, Kern or Gershwin or Herbert, which she will play the next morning on the Knabe baby grand, and sing in the happy, slightly hooting soprano so proper and romantic and fashionable. She is holding her head high to flatten the double chin but also out of the insecure pride of moving alongside him, a head taller than she, blue eyes and skin so white it is nearly translucent, reddish blond curly hair enhancing his innocent alderman's look, a fellow whom policemen are inclined to salute, headwaiters to find tables for, cab drivers to stop in the rain for, a man who will not eat in restaurants with thick water glasses, a man who has built one of the two or three largest coat manufacturing businesses in the country at the time and who cannot read or write any language.

A still later view: in the little Brooklyn house where she shuffles about in carpet slippers, sighing, cursing with a sneer on her lips, weeping suddenly and then catching herself, in the winters feeding the furnace with as scant a shovelful of coal as will keep it burning, making meal money at high-stakes professional bridge games all over Midwood and Flatbush, which are sometimes raided by the police, whom she talks into letting her go home to prepare supper. She had arrived at the bottom of the Depression, when to get arrested for trying to make a buck was not the total eclipse of respectability it so recently would have been. My mother moved with the times.

This desire to move on, to metamorphose—or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary—was given me as life's inevitable and rightful condition. To keep becoming, always to stay involved in transition. It was all she and my father had ever known. She was born on Broome Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, her father, Louis Barnett, a clothing contractor, one of the struggling mass down there climbing over each other to grab the brass ring as it went by. Like Samuel, my father's father, Louis came from the
Polish hamlet of Radomizl, and they were probably distantly related, I have always thought, because they so resembled one another: both were very fair-skinned, stolid types—though Grandfather Samuel with his severely curved spine was a tiny man whose wife and sons, very exceptionally at the time, were over six feet tall. They had all been transforming themselves since they were children in Europe, even before their emigration in the 1880s seemed possible, living as they did in a cultural twilight zone between the Austrian-German language and influence, the Polish peasantry, and their Jewish identity. The height of culture for them was anything German.