Timebends (47 page)

As the obverse side of his confidence in the world, Louis seemed not to know what guilt was. The only self-recrimination I ever heard from him was once, in his nineties, when he suddenly said, “I wrote too much,” and presumably too often superficially. I suppose his innocence was what left him so unprepared when one day he arrived as usual at the television studio an hour before the program began and was told by the producer that he was no longer on the show. It appeared that as a result of his having been listed in
Life
magazine as a sponsor of the Waldorf Conference, an organized letter campaign protesting his appearance on
What's My Line?
had scared the advertisers into getting rid of him.

The producer had actually been one of Louis's students in a literature course in years past and was unhappy at having to fire him, especially when it had been his idea to hire him in the first place. But as Louis quoted him years later, after he had recovered
from the experience, the producer said, “The problem is that we know you've never had any left connections, so you have nothing to confess to, but they're not going to believe that. So it's going to seem that you're refusing to be a good American.”

Louis went back to his apartment. Normally we ran into each other in the street once or twice a week or kept in touch every month or so, but now I no longer saw him in the neighborhood or heard from him, and when I did call, Bryna always answered and talked obscurely about him not wanting phone conversations anymore, preferring to wait until we could all get together again. But that didn't happen. As a very infrequent television watcher I was still unaware of his absence from the program and figured he would call me when he felt like it.

Louis didn't leave his apartment for almost a year and a half. An overwhelming and paralyzing fear had risen in him. More than a political fear, it was really that he had witnessed the tenuousness of human connection and it had left him in terror. He had always loved a lot and been loved, especially on this TV program where his quips were vastly appreciated, and suddenly he had been thrown into the street, abolished. This was one of the feeds that went into the central theme of
After the Fall,
a play I would write more than ten years later.

A man like Louis Untermeyer broke down not, I think, for purely personal reasons but for historical ones too—the reassurances of the familiar past had suddenly been pulled out from under him. The question is whether there ever were such reassurances.

In the thirties, one of Ann Arbor's small-town charms for me was its reassuring contrast with dog-eat-dog New York, where a man could lie dying on Fifth Avenue in the middle of an afternoon and it would take a long time before anybody stopped to see what was the matter with him. A short ten or twenty years later people were looking back at the thirties nostalgically, as a time of caring and mutuality.

Whence came the notion that solidarity had once existed and that its passing was sinister? It often seems that the impoverished thirties are the subliminal fixed point from which all that came afterward is measured, even by the young who only know those years from parents and reading. It was not that people were more altruistic but that a point arrived—perhaps around 1936—when for the first time unpolitical people began thinking of common action
as a way out of their impossible conditions. Out of dire necessity came the surge of mass trade unionism and the federal government's first systematic relief programs, the resurgent farm cooperative movement, the TVA and other public projects that put people to work and brought electricity to vast new areas, repaired and built new bridges and aqueducts, carried out vast reforestation projects, funded student loans and research into the country's folk history—its songs and tales collected and published for the first time—and this burst of imaginative action created the sense of a government that for all its blunders and waste was on the side of the people. Hemingway would write, “A man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance”—amazing recognition from a professional loner that a new kind of hero had walked on the scene, a man whose self-respect demanded solidarity with his fellow men. For a while in school every other guy seemed to be studying to be a social worker.

By 1936, in my junior year, I had had more than a taste of life at the bottom, and there was no room for sentimentality there. Pushing hand trucks in the New York garment center—one of my summer jobs—you had to fight to hold your place in the post office line against chiselers breaking in to beat the closing time for mailing packages; my nine-hour days driving Sam Shapse's truck through city traffic had been a ceaseless struggle for parking spots and entries onto bridges, lined with spikes of anxiety that the truck would be rifled while I left it to deliver or pick up parts. The bathos of the popular songs and plays and movies of the day seemed weirdly misplaced even at the time. A scene in Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
in which a storekeeper lets a hungry family keep a ten-cent loaf of bread without paying for it might be inspiring, but it was an amazing departure from any reality I had experienced.

So that by the time I went up from Ann Arbor to Flint, Michigan, on New Year's Day 1937, to report for the
Daily
on the outbreak of sit-down strikes in the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number 1, I identified with the workers in no abstract way; in fact, my work experience may account for my amazement at their new solidarity. It was nearly incredible to me that hundreds of ordinary factory workers, a large number of them recruited in the southern states, where hostility to unions was endemic, had one day simply stopped the machines, locked the factory doors from within, and refused to leave until their union was recognized as their bargaining agent.

I arrived at midday after getting a ride up from Ann Arbor with a young test-driver for Ford, whose job was to put mileage on a new model coupe to be introduced in two years, and to report to the factory in Dearborn by telephone when something in the car went wrong. Ford, of course, was the most violently anti-union shop of them all, and this southern boy, happy for some company as we drove north to Flint, talked about the tear gas that everybody knew Henry Ford had pumped into the factory's sprinkler system in case his workers decided to pull a sit-down. “Man, they pull a strike in Ford's and I'm headin' back down home, ‘cause somebody goin' to get killed in
that
place,” he said, laughing. The spirit of fascism had alarming vitality in the world then, and the scene in Flint seemed to stand in direct opposition to it.

The Fisher Plant stretched out along a broad avenue facing the General Motors administration building, where the office help and executives worked. The two buildings were connected by an enclosed overpass bridging the dividing avenue. Afraid of involvement in anything connected with unions, the Ford driver took one look down that street and drove off, leaving me standing there. And indeed, practically at my feet three National Guardsmen, two of them on their haunches and one sprawled on his belly on the sidewalk, were tending a machine gun on a tripod pointing up toward a two-story projection of the plant building. I learned later that they had fired at three workers taking the air on the roof, wounding one of them. Other soldiers moved around silently, rifles unslung, and a couple of army trucks filled with young troopers blocked both ends of the street. Two overturned police cars lay at odd angles, upended, I was informed, by a powerful stream of water from firehoses manned by workers who had connected them to hot-water outlets to keep police and soldiers at bay. To prevent invasion through the covered overpass, they had welded it shut with several Chevrolet bodies set vertically on end. This was the third day of the strike. There was a silence broken only by a muffled saxophone from inside the plant, where an improvised jazz group would periodically blow up a few numbers and then evaporate. At the moment the saxophonist seemed to be doing a practice solo. Jammed in a window on the second floor, many heads looked down as several wives appeared with boxes of food that the workers hoisted up on lines, chatting all the while and occasionally laughing at some remark; then the women waved and walked away. Inside, I was told, the men were sitting and sleeping on car seats but taking great care to cover them with paper; odd as it seemed, the rights of property were still quite sacred to them.

I found the union office in a side street and went up a flight of steps to a tiny room over an empty store, from which, so I had heard, a couple of brothers were running the strike. A young man wearing a baseball cap was staring out the window. He glanced at me and introduced himself as Walter Reuther (his brother Victor, who had made a trip to the Soviet Union, was rumored to be a Socialist). I asked Walter how things were. He was a pale and reflective man with red hair and a simple, direct quality of respectful attention to me, a mere student reporter from the university. I had expected a tough guy with no interest in what I was trying to do.

“Well, let's see,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I think we've got over three hundred members right now …”

Three
hundredl
An amazing number, I thought. There were many reports in the press that the whole thing was a fluke and would soon collapse, for it was a practically unheard-of attempt to organize unskilled workers rather than machinists, toolmakers, and carpenters, whose elite unions had been started at the turn of the century.

“But we're signing up more and more all the time.”

“Then you think you can win recognition? How long will they stay in there before they get sick of it?”

“I think they'll stay in.”

“Can I ask you why?”

He let a grin pass over his lips. “They've kind of got to like it in there.” We both laughed. “They've been through a lot together, you know. They've got their pride going now, and there's a lot of good feeling in there.”

Talking to Walter Reuther, I realized that he did not think of himself as controlling this incredible event but at best guiding and shaping an emotion that had boiled up from below. I had heard that some of the hard organizing was being done by the Communists, but no one seemed to know where I could find them, so I never found out.

I had to return to school before victory day, February u, 1937, when the company caved in and recognized the United Auto Workers. It made me feel safer on the earth, and as it did to others trying to write or make art in that time, it seemed to me a new beauty was being born. It would not have crossed my mind that a new power to coerce was also being created here, certainly not one that would often turn a cynical gangster face to the world and, incidentally, suppress a movie I had written—but that was a decade and a half later. It must be said, however, that the UAW itself remained remarkably democratic.

The twisting of meaning proceeds. It was the spirit of the thirties that Odets—unfashionably, by 1949—was trying to shout up out of its grave at the Waldorf Conference. When I recall the nuns with their scrubbed, frightened faces glancing up at me as I picked my way between them, and almost four decades later when I read about Catholic clergy in the Third World ministering to the poor and often leading revolution rather than serving as outriders of the rich, the world seems to be evolving. Now, too, a council of American Catholic bishops condemns the ruthless strain in a federal policy content to let illiteracy, racism, and hunger erode immense sectors of society, and I think of the hopelessness of trying to so much as discuss such matters with that line of kneeling sisters at the Waldorf entrance. They and I see the same world at last, but I have changed as much as they.

Finishing
All My Sons
after two years, I sent it to Herman Shumlin, who had produced and directed Lillian Hellman's plays. After three or four days I was told that he “didn't understand it.” Herman was as prestigious a producer as Broadway had, a rather severe man of terrifying principle, but gentle and extremely soft-spoken—until, so I was told, he lost his temper. Apparently he had lost it with Lillian, as she had lost hers with him, and they had parted company. Notwithstanding his great need for a new social playwright, my play was evidently beyond him. I could not imagine what it was that baffled him, and it was a crisis for me to be judged a failure after two years of the most careful work, especially since I had vowed to abandon play writing if
All My Sons
failed.

Mary and I and our first child, Jane, were spending summers in a rented bungalow near Port Jefferson, Long Island, where I had finished the play on the porcelain-topped kitchen table. I had given a copy to my old friend and summer neighbor Ralph Bell, who had been in my Michigan class and was a stage and radio actor now. His wife, Pert Kelton, older than Ralph, had been born into show business, had been in the Ziegfeld Follies, and was an opera singer as well as a Broadway comedienne. She became the first TV wife of Jackie Gleason on his
Honeymooners
show, the original Mrs. Kramden. She read my play and said it was a big one, “like an opera,” and that compliment, along with the wide-eyed look of wonder in her face, strengthened me against Shumlin's rejection. Pert, to whom Charlie Chaplin had presented his famous bowler and cane back in the twenties as tokens of his admiration for her
imitation of him in the Follies, had a raw backstage wit and a caustic laugh. She was studying Christian Science, trying to cure herself of epileptic seizures. In that summer of 1946 we couldn't have guessed that four or five years later, as the nationally known female star of the country's biggest hit TV program, she would be notified by telegram—in a Chicago hospital bed where she was recovering from a minor illness—that she had been fired from the show. As a long series of inquiries finally revealed, the cause was that Ralph had once participated in a May Day parade, many years before. Ralph, I knew, had had absolutely no leftist connections whatever but had simply thrown himself in with a gang of actors protesting whatever it was that year, and Pert had never even voted in her life.