Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  He is for the death penalty. And although he says he has stayed away from the abortion issue, he admits he is somewhat against it, somewhat for it. “I believe in abortion for rape, incest and mother’s safety cases.” He is against the abuse of booze and drugs by Albany students. He is against letting television cameras into the courtroom. He is for tolls on the Barge Canal, ever since he became aware of million-dollar yachts with white-jacketed waiters on them cruising the canal toll-free. He is against politicians using state autos in private matters and has spies everywhere noting state license plates on cars out for Sunday drives. He has long been against snowmobiles, “the most emotional thing I ever touched on.”

  “I had members of the Snowmobile Association come to the paper and threaten a boycott because of my attitude,” he recalled. “Everyplace I’d go, they’d attack me.”

  He egged them on by recalling that a psychiatrist once told him the snowmobile was a compensatory sex symbol used by people with a lack of sexual ability. “All you got to do is say that in print …” Fowler said with a Freudian wink.

  He is also responsible for what has been alternately called the “Million-Dollar Outhouse” and the “Fowler Sanitation Spa” on the Northway. He campaigned relentlessly for a comfort station on his route between the newspaper and the North Country animal territory.

  He also campaigned against boats discharging sewage into state waters, viewing the boat owners of the state as captains of “floating toilets.”

  “It’s the kind of thing that irritates people,” he said. “A man pays thirty thousand for a boat and opens up the paper to see it called a floating toilet.”

  Fowler has also campaigned to have the SUNY campus police armed to keep down muggings of students, has plugged diligently on behalf of the beleaguered Adirondack Park Agency (which, peripherally, is concerned about bears), and remembers fondly the time he campaigned against feminism in a debate with Betty Friedan in Albany.

  “I think that was the funniest goddamn thing that ever happened to me,” he recalled. Members of a women’s press club in Albany had been reading his antifeminist views and invited him to debate somebody. The somebody they chose turned out to be Ms. Friedan, and a full house turned out to see them tangle.

  “I was certainly not against women as such,” Fowler said, “but I didn’t like some of the things they were asking for.”

  His views, more than once during the debate, caused Ms. Friedan to yank the microphone out of his hand. “I told her I was trying to act like a gentleman and I wished she’d try to act like a lady,” he recalled. Ms. Friedan called him a male chauvinist pig.

  “I picked that up,” Fowler said, meaning he used it in his column. “I rather liked it.”

  How does it feel, he was asked, to be a provocateur?

  “If you’re geared for things, you can smell controversy a mile off,” he said. “I’ve been in this business long enough to know that you’ve got to provoke something; so in turn you provoke thought, and you get two sides to it.”

  His attack on the university began when some of his informants (“A lot of my stuff came from the cleaning and maintenance people,” he explained) found, back in the 1960s, some disheveled sections of the campus during sit-ins and other protests. That’s when Dirty Doodleland was born in the imagination of Barney Fowler. He carried the campaign on for years and vented his wrath against administrators who refused to impose discipline on students who wrecked furniture, burned holes in carpets and left garbage in their wake. To get a first-hand look at campus damage, he disguised himself as a painter, stuck a paintbrush in his overalls, and walked through the campus carrying a bucket of water. What he saw, he didn’t like.

  “Seriously, I began wondering why they didn’t start weeding out some of these characters. If this had happened when I was younger, I would have been expelled forthwith. This whole damn thing just keeps going and they accept it.”

  Does this mean Barney Fowler condemns the entire student body, administration and faculty of the university? Not entirely. Last year he praised the administration for seeing fit to cancel a Drink and Drown Party that students were planning.

  Also, he appeared on campus once and debated students (“They’ve got active minds, let me tell you”) on the issue of student flogging. He said he believed in it only in certain cases, and not in cases of damaged furniture.

  He has campaigned against exposing the students to speakers like Abbie Hoffman, and once, when he called the Albany Student Press to ask for a subscription, an editor hung up on him. From then on he referred to the paper as the Campus Rag.

  He also entered into an exchange with an Albany professor who “analyzed my writing and found it ‘clumsy and archaic.’ I never forgot the word archaic because I didn’t know what it really meant.”

  For all those on campus who united against him, if indeed they did, a much larger number off-campus united behind him, not just on the university issues but on all the controversies he provokes. His mail, he said, runs about 80 percent positive, 20 percent negative, a nice balance, in his opinion. He once mentioned the availability of a set of plans to make a bluebird house and received six hundred requests in the mail. “One of the most popular things I ever did,” he said.

  His attacks on the university have diminished of late, but does that mean the skirmishing is over? “I reawaken the thing once in a while,” he said, “just to keep it going.”

  Fowler understands his audience the way Louis Armstrong understood his trumpet. He strokes them six times a week with his ursine and his bullish invective, giving them the news they want to hear. He will take the pornographic mockery and pie in the face from Albany students, but he also knows that when he translates the pie story into a column item, the students will get the raspberry and he will get the mail.

  And when it pours in, lavishing love on the columnist, Barney Fowler will scratch his bald head in glee, light up another Camel and start shaping yet another set of plans designed to entrap that curmudgeonous creature of thin air, the Bluebird of Fowlerian Happiness.

  1981

  Radicalism and Dwight MacDonald:

  Not What They Used to Be

  Radicalism isn’t what it used to be.

  It’s as different as Dwight MacDonald is from Kenneth Pitchford—in the clothes they wear, in the cut of their beards, in how far they will go to change America. The difference is also between youth and age, for even though Pitchford is not a youth—he’s thirty-seven—he considers himself “an honorary youth,” and he looks, acts, talks, poeticizes and loves the world like a hippie.

  MacDonald, on the other hand, dresses like a rumpled fugitive from Weber and Heilbroner, and while he exudes intelligence, sardonic wit, political perspicacity and excess acidity over Lyndon B. Johnson, it is clear that he is a victim of tradition. He believes America is worth saving.

  Poet Pitchford feels it is only worth abdicating.

  Their ideologies clashed Thursday night at Albany State University during a lively teach-in on the Vietnam War. The teach-in was a prelude to Friday’s “strike” by students and some faculty to protest America’s involvement in the war. About two hundred people, mostly dressed anti-flamboyantly (which made Pitchford’s oversize rings, love beads and rainbow shirt all the more exceptional), hooted and whistled and applauded the speakers as they expressed the various ideologies on the left—from socialism to pacifism, from nonviolent liberalism to what MacDonald called “infantile ultra-leftism and mechanical Marxism.”

  The students were the listeners at the outset as MacDonald—longtime radical journalist, former editor of the magazine Politics, erstwhile writer for Fortune, now a columnist for Esquire and occasional writer for The New Yorker, and certainly one of the most omnipresent critics of America’s war stance to be found between oceans—expounded on the condition of politics at the moment in the United States.

  He abhorred Johnson—“the most catastrophic president we’ve ever had.… He’ll go down in history beside Herbe
rt Hoover, a little lower”—and he was for Senator Eugene McCarthy for President. He urged the students to be cautious about accepting the Johnson announcement that he will not seek reelection. “Don’t let down your guard,” he warned. “I really don’t know what he’s up to.”

  He saw the McCarthy victory in the New Hampshire primary as “a turning point in the history of this country—it led to the exit of Johnson.” He talked of how young college students shaved their beards and lengthened their skirts to campaign door-to-door for McCarthy and he found this to be probably flattering to the people who were canvassed by these kids. “They probably were flattered to be paid so much attention by young, intelligent upper-class youths,” MacDonald said. He also lamented for Senator Robert Kennedy: “Poor old Bobby has got all the money. But he hasn’t got these kids.”

  MacDonald wore his badges proudly. He had been a 1930s radical. He cited his Trotskyist affiliation way back then and even told a joke at his own expense: “Trotsky said of me that everybody has the privilege of being stupid, but MacDonald abuses the privilege.”

  MacDonald concluded his talk by saying that among Johnson’s many mistakes was the arrest of Dr. Benamin Spock and four others for antidraft counseling. “It’s given a great shot in the arm to the whole peace movement,” he said. Then he wished the students luck with their “strike” and concluded: “Up the resistance!”

  It was altogether an affable, witty and fairly tough speech. He drew sustained applause and in no way prepared for what was about to happen.

  The first sign was when George Hein, a chemist from Newton, Massachusetts, who is a worker for Resist, an antidraft organization, began the antipolitical line that would explode into verbal hippie bombs subsequently. Briefly the line is that traditional politics is useless as a way of making change in American society. “So,” he said, “I would suggest alternatives outside the system.… Get people to ask: can you have alternatives to the system?

  “A year ago,” he said, “burning draft cards was for kooks. Today it’s not. Very respectable people do it.”

  When he said that the edge of civilization was not—as Dwight MacDonald joked, where you can no longer get the morning New York Times—but that it was “where people act out of conscience,” the applause was loud and long.

  Somehow MacDonald was made to seem in the wrong. Vaguely. But somehow.

  Then David Mermelstein, an economist who teaches at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, opened the soft salvo at MacDonald. He said he didn’t like MacDonald’s reference to “Red China,” and said: “I think it’s time all of us get over the cold-war talk and make it just plain China.” Then he attacked MacDonald with his big guns: talking about Herbert Hoover the way MacDonald did made it seem that there was something better about Roosevelt, something good about Democratic liberalism and bad about Republicanism.

  For a split second Mermelstein sounded like a disconsolate Republican, but then quickly he made it clear that he thought, like Hein, that politics was irrelevant, and never touches the true seats of power in America—the Pentagon, the federal bureaucracy, the State Department. “We better not rely on liberal politicians to save us,” he said. “I have no confidence that Robert Kennedy and McCarthy will not use napalm against guerrillas should other wars break out in Latin America.”

  MacDonald took the microphone with a funny smile and commented: “I really must have a word.”

  The audience had somehow—vaguely, but somehow—turned on him, applauding Mermelstein so enthusiastically after applauding MacDonald so enthusiastically. (Actually the audience applauded everybody enthusiastically, just as long as they were emotional and left of center, which everybody was.)

  MacDonald termed Mermelstein’s view “ultra-leftism that says don’t worry about politics, because it won’t solve our problem.” He said there was no chance for a real revolution in America under present circumstances, and therefore: “I think we should do what we can do.”

  Mermelstein answered back, MacDonald added a quip or two. Then Hugo Bedau, professor of philosophy at Tufts University, took the microphone and told the audience that “You may think there’s a bunch of drunks up here tonight. But what you’re watching is the left in disarray.”

  The discussion moved back and forth over the organization Resist, over the role of blacks and whites on the Left, and when Mermelstein said: “It doesn’t make any difference who is President—Nixon or McCarthy, the N.L.F. will push us out of Vietnam,” then MacDonald told him: “I think you’ve added mechanical Marxism to infantile leftism.”

  But MacDonald’s push for activism within the framework of the existing social and political structure was beginning to grate upon the students. A young blonde predicted a successful socialist revolution in the United States, and then Kenneth Pitchford made his presence heard for the first time. He angrily told MacDonald: “We’re against your old-fashioned, leftist, brainwashed ideology. Just today Long Island University and Columbia have gone up and there’s another group that’s going to liberate N.Y.U. What we’re for is un-hung-up sexual freedom, we’re for love, we’re for sharing, we don’t want any of this (obscenity). We want freedom and we want it now!”

  The applause was enthusiastic.

  Said MacDonald: “This figure is irresponsible. He’s doing the job for J. Edgar Hoover and L.B.J.”

  MacDonald kept his cool. He pooh-poohed the campus takeovers during the past week as irresponsible also. The talk went on, but that was the peak moment. A Negro student defended hippies. A white student defended hippies. A white student trembled as he deplored violence and praised Gandhi. Then came the intermission, time for punch, time to gather into little knots and talk about all the talk. Somebody asked MacDonald if he supported Fred Halstead, the Socialist candidate for President.

  MacDonald laughed unkindly. “You think I learned nothing in the thirties?” he asked the student.

  “Do you get this kind of flack all the time when you speak?” MacDonald was asked. And he laughed again, generously.

  “The younger generation. Yeah, sure,” he said.

  The crowd dwindled to about seventy and milled around the punch pitchers and the leftist literature from North Vietnam, from the Socialist party, from American writers on Vietnam, and after a half-hour the teach-in reconvened for poetry readings.

  Muriel Rukeyser, the noted poet, was one of four who read. Both she and Harriet Zinnes read their own poems plus the works of others that impinged on the war. Robin Morgan, who is the wife of Kenneth Pitchford, read her own work, plus works by Vietnamese poets who have written eloquent antiwar poetry.

  But poet Pitchford was far and away the high point of the poetry hour, not from his poeticizing, which in itself is notable and has been well-received in the past by critics of repute, but rather because of his posture on America.

  “I’m tired of words,” he said. “I think poetry is dysfunctional.”

  He spoke of too much emphasis on literary conventions when black and white men are dying. And then he spoke of the essence of his revolt of the moment: “… the fight against white elderism.”

  “I’m talking to white middle-class kids,” he said, and he urged that “we declare ourselves a separate nation. We’ll have our own press, the underground press. We’ve got our own music, Country Joe and The Fish. We’ve got people who’ll do plumbing for us. We won’t recognize America. We might recognize Cuba. We won’t have any land so people who want to visit us won’t need passports.… This is a revolution of music, of sex, of drugs, of joy.… We’re now thinking about a Constitutional Convention and a Declaration of Independence. When in the course of human events one people can’t bear another …”

  The applause was enthusiastic.

  Dwight MacDonald was gone. In more ways than one.

  1968

  Requiem for a Lady at the Bottom of the World

  That fact that people die alike does not mean that they lived alike. A truism. Why say it? Because when you think of Jenny’s death you thi
nk of all the things that they will say about her. They’ll say she was a wino. And once they’ve said that they don’t have to say anything else. Because the people who are ready to believe that winos are all of a stripe, that they live alike and die alike, will toss Jenny into that wino bin of theirs.

  A mistake. Jenny wasn’t like the others. (The others weren’t like the others either.) But for the purpose of simplifying Jenny’s case we can admit that she was different in all the important ways from the wino folk around her. What they had in common was a façade, which is strangely vital at the bottom shelf of the world. Jenny had no façade.

  “I’m shy,” she said. “People scare me.”

  One of the underachievers; one of the psychological have-nots. The secrets of power in America, Saul Bellow the novelist once said, will never be revealed to innocents and underdogs. Jenny was the underdog. Also the innocent. What power could ever accrue to the likes of her?

  She had worked as a short-order cook. She had a talent for sewing. One woman who knew her had the sense she might have been a master seamstress if she’d been able to put her mind to it. She was proud of the athletic ability she had in her youth (she was 41 in September); captain of her basketball team in Virginia, she kept telling her friends. Status, of course; rather a sad status when at age 41 you must go back to your high school years to find a moment when you were somebody.

  She was a mother, indirectly but absolutely. Her husband, Connie, short for Constantine (such a royal name that mocked the decline he fell into), had found a child in a vacant lot. The child’s mother was still there when Connie found the baby, naked. “He didn’t even have no diaper,” Connie said.

  “You want that little ol’, thing, you can have him,” the natural mother told Connie. And Connie took him, and raised him. Brought him home to Jenny. They called the boy Jubjub; nicknames were a way with them: Jenny called Connie Moosie, and Connie called Jenny Little Girl.