Timebends (88 page)

The surreal had its citadel in the Chelsea long before its spirit was lifted by the Vietnam War into radical protest. To get to breakfast in the old Automat near the corner of Twenty-third and Seventh, I stepped carefully over the bloodied drunks sprawled on the sidewalk and had a Danish with Arthur Clarke, who lived half the year in Sri Lanka, which he thought the world's garden, and half in the Chelsea, its compost bin, whose nutrients, however, were far from wasted on the resident creative types. Clarke, surrounded by bag ladies nursing cups of coffee under broken noses and night workers with eyes glued to racing forms, excitedly confided that according to the most recent computations, vastly increasing carbon dioxide pollution threatened earth's end much sooner than was previously predicted. In the Automat ambience this news seemed perfectly inevitable.

The Chelsea, with all its irritants—the age-old dust in its drapes and carpets, the rusting pipes, the leaking refrigerator, the air
conditioner into which you had to keep pouring pitchers of water—was an impromptu, healing ruin that reminded me of William Saroyan's superbly American sentence spoken by an Arab in a saloon, a sentence totally forgotten by the sixties revolutionaries busy inventing a new nonsociety that would outlaw memory of all that had gone before: “No foundation all the way down the line.” In his Armenian pursuit of amiable chaos, Saroyan had smelled the future way back in the forties and, posing as an uncultured minor comedian, had announced the authentic American optimistic absurd rather than aping the morbid European brand. Saroyan laced the absurd with the dark outsider-immigrant's unquenchable hope of finding his very own pillow on which to take his ease amid the rocks of the sunny American landscape.

I watched the new age, the sixties, stagger into the Chelsea with its young bloodshot eyes and made a few attempts to join the dance around the Maypole, but I could not help myself: to me it all felt self-regarding, self-indulgent, and not at all free. That included the Beats, who looked to be rehearsing a latter-day Lost Generation moan, for until Vietnam began to murder them, their complaints seemed to lack Necessity. The dope was a pure destroyer to me, not social protest, a mournful pleasure that would not lay one brick of the new church for whose absence they were making lamentation. It was their assault on sexual prudery that won respect, but otherwise they were part of the self-destruction that I was seeing everywhere, not least in myself and my life. America's unacknowledged religion was self-destruction, both politically and personally, and I spent my time in the Chelsea groping for a concise paradox that would hold a play in place on that theme.

It was not only Marilyn on my mind; in this very hotel in the early fifties, I had sat in one of these tall gray rooms trying to fathom Dylan Thomas as he methodically made his way out of this world, a young man who with a week's abstinence would have been as healthy as a pig. Much later, when I read his confessional about his father, it seemed to me that he had been throttling himself for having conquered fame with his art while the sweet father, a writer-teacher, remained an unknown, failed man. Thomas was making amends by murdering the gift he had stolen from a man he loved. I knew about that transaction, the struggle to hold off the guilt of power in the face of a father shorn of it. Patricide came with the territory as an urge; the question was how to live with it. Or how not to.

Later there was another who came to the Chelsea to die, the
Borstal boy himself, Brendan Behan, on his last legs then, asking me to come to the room where Katherine Dunham had put him up for a couple of nights to help him make it through the week. He sat there, his wet hair haphazardly plastered down, his face blotched, lisping through broken teeth, laughing and eating sausages and eggs while black dancers moved in and out of the room not knowing how to help him or whether even tenderly to try, and he said with his fixed uneasy chuckle, “I'm not really a playwright, you know—and you'd know that, of course—I'm a talker. I've a room upstairs where I'm talking a book to a secretary the publishers keep hounding me with. I've done a good bit of it in the hopes they'll empty another purse over me head. … But I did want to say hello to you, Art'r …” Hello and goodbye, that was clear; he was on his way out of it.

He would hold forth on the sidewalk outside, the vomit coming up and dripping on his tie as he joked and told his stories and sang a few ditties, rustling meanwhile through a
Post
to see if he was in Leonard Lyons again today, the columnists delighting in him now that he would soon be gallantly supplying them with the story of his rousing poet's death. There were so many ways you could help them kill you.

And the surest was to blame the system or somebody else; even if it was true, you dared not believe you had no part in it, or you would finally accept the victim's role and die too young. The part one played in one's own destruction was the mystery under the beauty of the American sky.

These men dreaded to hold the power they had won, and found the only way to be freed of it.

Charley Jackson, a bald-headed waif, would offer his tender smile of greeting whenever we passed in the lobby—a long time now since the power of
The Lost Weekend
had swept him up to a quick view from the amazing top of the wave. On the wagon now, he was clearly trying to walk the center line. Until it got so terribly narrow that he stepped off into a permanently liberating sleep in the Chelsea bed with the pill bottle beside him. He was nothing but kind, except to himself.

There were other casualties of the ceaseless Chelsea party that went on celebrating something no one could name. In the lobby once an angry young woman stood handing out mimeographed statements in which she described her intention to shoot a man, no one in particular, just one of the persecuting species that had ruined her life. People accepted the leaflets and then stood there
chatting pleasantly with her. I heard one man disputing a point of syntax with her. I said to the management that this woman was going to kill somebody and maybe something ought to be done about her before she exploded, but she was a member of the party, it seemed, and it wouldn't do to be too square about it. She found Andy Warhol one day and she shot him, reportedly in the groin; the party slowed for a moment, but it soon picked up again.

Ever since Hiroshima I had been thinking about a play that would deal with the atom bomb. Now, fifteen years later, it was less a feeling of guilt than of wonder at my having approved the catastrophe that moved me to try to investigate firsthand how the scientists themselves felt about what they had created. The accounts of their struggles to convince President Truman to first drop a demonstration bomb at sea off Japan suggested that they had qualms at taking responsibility for so much death. Through Jim Proctor's friendship with a Cornell physicist, I gained an introduction to Hans Bethe, who had designed the lens without which the bomb could not have been detonated. I set out for Ithaca one misty fall day from the Roxbury house, with no inkling that in fact I was actually preparing to write quite a different play,
After the Fall,
but one with a related theme.

The murderous ironies in the story of the atomic bomb were familiar by this time. The German refugee scientists who were the main engine of the Manhattan Project had been afraid that Hitler's capable scientists, whom they had known in Germany as colleagues, might develop an atomic weapon with which to hold America hostage and change the course of history. But by the time they had the American bomb ready Germany had been beaten, and there turned out to have been no serious atomic project under way in the Third Reich. In that sense the bomb had been unnecessary.

Many of these scientists were Jews, antifascists, leftists, and a few were actual Marxists, and with the war's end they saw their weapon being brandished at the Soviet Union, their onetime spiritual home. In the supreme irony, J. Robert Oppenheimer was shadowed by U.S. security services as a radical while he was the very soul of the new power being forged for American dominance of the postwar world.

Some fifteen years after the successful explosion of Fat Man, Hans Bethe was a fit-looking fifty-five, a squarely constructed man, the Alpine type who loved taking long hikes in knickerbockers and
sturdy shoes. The house was fit for a monk, with a small Oriental carpet in the middle of a large, dark living room almost bereft of furniture, and a glassed-in porch with a single table and chair standing in the gray light of an Ithaca afternoon.

Once a week an army plane still flew him to Washington for consultations. He had a somber curiosity to which some sadness clung, and I hesitated to wound him further with my main question. His world, I assumed, had become brutally ironical, due in no small part to his own inventions at Los Alamos; how did he deal with this? I knew there was no concise answer to such a question, but it was the surrounding emotion I was after, for it was the same question I was asking myself. I had created my own life dilemma, that much was clear; how to go on without a crippling bitterness?

He seemed a decent, feeling man, and I knew that he had strongly opposed dropping the bomb on living people but had failed to dissuade Truman. He had worked desperately on the Manhattan Project to preserve life against the Hitlerian death. Somewhere in the air must be an inexhaustible laughter now. As a physicist he had happened to stand on the burning point where the pure search for truth was touched by the hot iron of political and state power.

In Europe, he explained, as well as here in prewar times, a physicist was a lonely man. Who in his right mind would go in for this science, which had hardly any practical application and therefore held no prospects of financial or other advancement? The physicist was the priest of science, a pure inquirer likely to be recognized by a few others of his kind, no more. I asked him how he worked.

“Well, I come down in the morning and I take up a pencil and I try to think, to put things together in a new way. Sometimes something happens, most often not. This can go on for months, years sometimes. Then one might trip on a curb, and a connection is made in the brain. Or perhaps nothing comes at all. It is very lonely work, walking the edge. Or it was, before the bomb and all the developments.”

He was describing a writer's work exactly—before the movies and mass entertainment, before truth had to be “useful.” I realized after a few hours that it was all as mysterious to him as to me, that we were not to transcend the prison of irony into which we had rationalized ourselves in our time. One did what one did not intend. One did not intend what one had done. And yet one was responsible, if only because someone had to be.

Why was one responsible if one had no evil intention?

But if one had no evil intention, then where did the evil come from?

Could there have been, deeply concealed under monkish ideals, a nerve that tingled when Power passed by? Was this his mortality, his equality with the least of us, the stupidest, the most vile of us?

Where was the heart of evil if not within us?

I went down to Princeton and found in Robert Oppenheimer a gaunt, obviously depressed man—indeed, he would be dead in not too many years and may have known it then. This, of course, was long after he had been barred from government work as a security risk despite having fathered the atomic bomb. We talked in his unadorned office, and I was reminded by it and his tweed jacket and pipe that he was an academic, though I had always connected him with power and war. Unlike Bethe's Spartan home, Oppenheimer's, as I recall it now, seemed to befit a renowned singer or artist who had surrounded himself with mementos, photos, statuettes, carpets and honors and gifts from around the world. It had once been a comfortable, unpremeditated house that spoke of the triumphant years when all was promise and the great had come from everywhere to pay him homage. But there was an aura of devastation now. His dying wife, Kitty Dallet, a fragile, petite woman in a tweed suit too large for her wasted frame, was still remarkably pretty, her face not at all aged. But her air of alert anxiety brought to mind the grueling governmental inquiries that had hammered her for her past radical connections. Even ill and scared, she looked like she'd had a lot of zip once. At a small gathering of university people she kept watching me with some fearfulness, I thought, and I sat beside her to reassure her that I was not searching out a new angle with which to torture them all over again in yet another magazine piece or television show. There was something pert about her, reminiscent of the aging Dorothy Parker and her forlorn wit. The air of the house was darkened by the shadows of better days.

It was emphatically not mere blame or guilt I was interested in but the scientist's connection, or the absence of it, with his own life. Looking back, I could not altogether find myself in my own romantic pursuit of something like total personal expression, my determination to find an absolute truth while blinding myself to facts. Had these idealizing scientists experienced a similar discontinuity? On an absurdly lesser scale the same human dilemma might reveal itself: I had changed the lives of others, my wives and children certainly, and maybe even people across the world in the audienees
of my plays, and yet I could only dimly glimpse myself in my work, as the physicists might be denying themselves in theirs. It seemed impossible to evolve at all without a more complete, more living vision of one's responsibility for oneself, a surgically painful investigation. I did not see it as a moral question but almost as a biological one; as always I began with behavior, and there was something wraithlike and frustratingly disembodied in the way most people managed to live to one side of their lives, as though there were two of them, one that acted, the other condemned (or was it privileged?) to stand apart and observe, thirsting to participate in his own existence, and afraid of it too.

I even wondered if this split underlay our common fascination with violence, the commercialization of sex by separating feeling from it, and the limitless desire for entertainment—the country's purpose sometimes seemed to be a massive, swarming search for new diversions. The past was no longer a guide in such matters, now that the impersonator of other humans, the movie star, was the most envied, most celebrated, and best-paid person in the country and his triumph, a fabricated escape from the self, was apparently the goal of life. More and more certainly now, the widely accepted virtue of the drugged life seemed an aspect of the same urge, the urge to fuse, however spuriously, the two sides of man into a single unity of action and consciousness, if not in social reality, then only inside the head, by substituting a chemical unconsciousness that would shut out the world and manufacture a transcendence without values.