Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  My desire to write was in imminent danger. As with other Americans, so with me; the impulse to preserve one’s property and one’s way of life was the most powerful and conservative of forces: I did what I had to—the only thing I could do—I decided to take the advice I’d written in the margins of The Organization Man.

  One morning, a week before Christmas, 1960, I went in to see Ralph and I told him that I was, as of that day, resigning. I decided ahead of time that I would not give him any of my new political theories, but that I would try—as I did—to let him think that it was simply that some people were “cut out for the business world,” and that others were not. I cited my liberal arts background, I revealed to him the fact that I was an unpublished novelist. He was disappointed in my decision, sympathetic; he told me that I was due for a sizeable raise in salary in another week, the end of the first six months of the training program, and that another even larger increase would come at the end of the year. He urged me to reconsider, told me how much I was liked by everybody, tried to find out why I felt the way I did, why I’d made the decision.

  He seemed honestly puzzled, sincere—and I felt, inevitably, some personal loyalty to him for all he’d done for me. I started to try to explain some of the feelings I’d experienced during my six months at Chevrolet-Indianapolis. I wanted him to understand—but when I mentioned the lack of personal satisfaction I felt due to the fact that I helped to make only one part of a truck, due to the fact that I’d had no say in deciding what kind of truck it was that I helped make the part for, he became bewildered.

  What happened next seemed surreal: he looked out the window, and as he did a Chevrolet car was passing by—Ralph smiled, pointed to it, nodded affirmatively: “Whenever I see a car go by that has a part in it that came out of our plant, Jay,” he said, “I feel a tremendous sense of pride—”

  The discussion seemed, already, to be taking place somewhere else; but he asked me more questions and I answered them. I told him, as briefly as I could, trying not to seem strange or to hurt his feelings, about my reactions to assembly lines, to stamping presses. I had prepared the sentence ahead of time: “I guess I just can’t be the one—the agent—that tells the men to press two buttons all day long as efficiently as they can.” To which he replied, as I must have known he would, a slightly puzzled expression on his face, a question (which proved the justice of all my analyses, of all my theories) implicit in his statement: “But if you don’t do it, someone else will anyway—”

  I didn’t—couldn’t—argue. “The way I look at it, Jay,” he went on, leaning toward me, “we’re making life easier for them. They’re happy. Most of them aren’t fit to do anything better anyway….”

  FOUR: A Letter to Kennedy

  Once when Mary George was thirteen and he was five, she had lured him with the promise of an unnamed present into a large tent full of people and had dragged him backwards up to the front where a man in a blue suit and red and white tie was standing. “Here,” she said in a loud voice. “I’m already saved but you can save him. He’s a real stinker and too big for his britches.” He had broken her grip and shot out of there like a small cur and later when he had asked for his present, she had said, “You would have got Salvation if you had waited for it but since you acted the way you did, you get nothing!”

  —Flannery O’Connor. “The Enduring Chill.”

  Walking the aisles of the factory, keeping to myself at The Meadows, driving back and forth to Bloomington—I became as fiercely moral and absolute as the most fundamentalist of Midwest reactionaries. I was alone—and different; different from all those around me because what I desired derived from something other than self-interest. My reasoning traveled its own circuit: novels were useless because major political changes were necessary; but the emotions which told me that these changes were necessary were not themselves political, they were moral and human. Precisely because such emotions should, in the forms (in the environment) I was experiencing them, have been the basis for fiction, I could not, in conscience, make them the matter of my novels.

  Novels were a luxury suited to another era: I had a moral duty, I felt, to give up my fiction, and to devote all my energies to changing the conditions of the real world which surrounded me… I had to do this, in fact, so that a sacrifice such as mine would not, in some future time, be necessary. I convinced myself, in short, that I had to give up novels for politics; that such a decision (such a sacrifice) was necessary, I told myself, was the clearest sign of the urgency—and tragedy—of the times.

  By the time I’d left GM, I’d convinced myself that I had to fight not only against everything the factory and corporation and The Meadows represented, or against Barry Goldwater and the News and Star—but against a greater danger, one which I perceived as flowing from the same force of inertia as the rest—I had to fight against the possibility of nuclear war.

  I don’t remember exactly when my mind made this leap, shifted its focus in this way. Perhaps it was simply that I noticed that those who supported the things I found most vile in my immediate environment, also seemed willing, always, to risk everybody else’s life in order to maintain such things. There really were millions of ordinary, reasonable Americans who loved their own children and hated the children of others, and who believed, and were ready to act on the belief, that we were all better dead than red.

  Like the News and Star, nuclear war was an impersonal target. I could be moved by the views or the plight of an individual I knew, or by the death, in a southern church, of black children I did not know—but how did one relate personally to the possibility of hundreds of millions of simultaneous deaths? One related, as I was soon to discover, with passionate abstraction.

  What was clear at the time was that all other problems were insignificant when compared to the prospect of nuclear war. To work on a novel, to argue against a racist, a newspaper, a politician—these were luxuries suited to less dangerous times.

  If you didn’t work, what could you possibly do with yourself? In the days immediately following my resignation from Chevrolet-Indianapolis, the sentence from the GM pamphlet haunted me: I slept later and later each morning, I watched television, I made telephone calls, I wandered around The Meadows Shopping Center, I wrote a few letters to friends telling them I’d quit my job, and, as before, I bided my time, waiting for the weekends.

  An editor at a New York publishing house wrote to say she was holding the manuscript of my last novel (which she thought publishable) during a turnover in company management; she was hoping that the incoming editorial board would be more receptive to new fiction—and so I watched the mailbox daily for good news, but none came.

  Within a month—by the second or third week in January (1961)—I was writing again, working not on a novel, but on a long letter to the new President, a letter which I conceived of as being the basis for a political campaign which would be national in scope, international in effect. I worked on the letter every day, all day—and at the end of January I moved out of The Meadows and back to Bloomington—to be near Ginny, to continue revising the letter, perfecting my campaign.

  When the letter was finished, my campaign would begin; I would send copies of the letter to every major newspaper, magazine, TV station, radio station, and public official in America. Once the letter was publicized, Kennedy would be pressured to answer it publicly. Since my conclusions followed directly from his assumptions, he would either have to acknowledge the validity of my position—or evade my questions. In either case, the furor surrounding my letter would arouse young men all around the country to refuse—in massive numbers—to serve in the military.

  This plan had had one earlier counterpart. My first novel (Joel Campus: College Prophet), written when I was a sophomore at Columbia, had told the tale of a college student, who, believing he is about to die, has a visionary experience. He delivers his vision—his “message”—to the mass media, they publicize it, he becomes a national hero, the center of a new cult, the savior of
millions. I was aware of the parallels between what I had written and what I was doing; the novel, however, had been a satire. It had made fun of America’s penchant for heroes, messages, messiahs. It seemed impossible that I could ever be as ridiculous as the hero of my first novel had been. The novel ended, the first time around, with the hero discovering that he is not, in fact, going to die, and that his message, therefore, is without basis; thus, he must invent a way of committing suicide which will sustain his myth and the actual good it has done. In the second version of the novel, written during my senior year at Columbia, the hero jumps off a cliff.

  I had made my own decision to apply for C. O. status shortly before I’d left GM. By the time I arrived in Bloomington I was equipped with an arsenal of pacifist arguments. I was in possession of the Handbook for Conscientious Objectors, and I could defend my position on moral, practical, historical, and religious grounds. I could point out, for example, the distinction between personal violence and organized violence, thus retaining the right to defend my wife and grandmother against armed rapists. The central fact remained nuclear: the possibility that any war could now become the last war was all important. While I might admit, in arguments, that nonnuclear war was sometimes justified if it defended men against some absolute evil (Hitler, Nazism), I would never admit that nuclear war was justified in the defense of relative goods against relative evils.

  Most important: all human beings, like all Organization Men, had the right (the moral obligation) to say No to something if they believed saying No was right. I could best serve my country and mankind by trying to stop it from continuing in its madness. When I doubted my own arguments, though, I was reinforced by something new—by the knowledge that I could not be part of any Army. Although I had never applied for a deferment and still felt loyal to the American GI’s who, in the schoolyard legends of my youth, had saved me from becoming a lampshade for Hitler, I now felt, without even seeking out the reason, though I remembered that, to my great unhappiness, my mother had forbade me to play with guns when I was a boy, that if I were drafted and if somebody were to put a gun into my hands, I would have smashed it to bits.

  At the time, my campaign did not seem strange or grandiose, total success did not seem impossible. Once I’d decided that I wouldn’t serve, and once I’d envisioned the consequences (I’d go to jail?—All right then, I’d go to jail), the Kantian imperative, strong in me always, went to work. My decision to refuse military service was too important to be left personal, to be wasted on my individual and unpublicized life.

  A year before, Norman Mailer had begun Advertisements for Myself with the following observation: “Like many another vain, empty, and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind….” In the privacy of my own mind, the presidency was merely an office whose influence I had to make use of in order to save all mankind.

  I took passages from Kennedy’s inaugural address—questioned them, analyzed them, refuted them. When Kennedy spoke about a torch which had been “passed to a new generation of Americans,” I noted that I was “of another generation, also born in this century, but knowing little of the actuality of war, knowing much more about the legacy of the last war…. As a member of a different and newer generation I see one paramount objective: the removal of the threat to existence.…”

  The letter went on like this for six typewritten pages and it repeated, often, the fact that the next world war would be the last one. Under the aspect of this eternity, all ordinary considerations faded: “It is not just a question of being freer than other societies, or defending my own particular nation,” I wrote at the end. “Such realities are relative realities. War will be absolute—the absolute annihilation of life…

  I speak only for myself in this letter, and I hope that you will consider it carefully. I would also hope for some answer—considering my position and the questions I have raised, what do you advise me? and why and for what? If I am blind to some considerations larger than any touched on, what are they? Can I, with “good conscience” and with “history the final judge” of my deeds—can I give my personal commitment to any war or defense effort?

  The depression which had enveloped me at GM was suddenly gone—in fact, while I worked on the letter, inquired about mimeograph machines, made lists of newspapers and politicians, TV stations and magazines, I was happier than I’d been in a long time—happy, in fact, in the way I’m happy only when the first draft of a novel is going well. (The slightly high feeling I experienced in the midst of working on the letter would return, in the years after this, whenever I plunged into political activity—feeling, always, despite what I knew, that what I was doing had a chance to actually change things. Even now, it seems, almost ten years after GM, I still throw myself into political activities and battles with the same energy and expectations that are with me when I work on a novel—i.e., with the feeling that when I am done something new will exist, something which had no existence before I helped give it existence. Though I like to think I do whatever I do without illusion, and without the naive and laughable fury which drove me in the months after GM, I have not, after all, as even this narrative proves, changed so much.)

  When the letter was in its next-to-final form and my plans had evolved, I felt sure enough of myself to be politic, to compromise. “It was not until almost a month after his inauguration that I finished the letter,” I would write later that spring, accurately reflecting my state of mind at the time. “By then I had decided to send the letter—at least at first—only to President Kennedy, giving him the courtesy of a reply before I initiated any kind of crusade.”

  One thing did puzzle me, but only slightly: none of my friends seemed convinced that my letter would do what I said it would, or even get to Kennedy’s desk (“But don’t you see,” I’d point out, “if it appears concurrently as an open letter in hundreds of newspapers and magazines, he’ll have to answer it—!”) Ginny, Arnie, other graduate students I showed drafts of the letter to—they were all skeptical, unenthusiastic, patronizing.

  I had not, obviously, explained myself fully or clearly enough—for if I had, I was certain, everybody would have agreed with me. So I pressed on, day after day, searching for the precise phrasing, the key fact, the logic that would do nothing less than make everything clear to everybody.

  The first week in February I received a “Current Information Questionnaire” from my local draft board. It was the first correspondence I’d had with them since I’d registered at eighteen, almost five years before, and it seemed a real enough reason to abandon work on the letter. Such questionnaires normally preceded, by several months, notices for physicals, and the physicals preceded induction.

  Conscientious objection and jail, war and the military—such things were suddenly less abstract. When Arnie and another friend offered me a ride back to New York during intersession, I packed my things and said good-bye to Ginny. I was let off under an elevated subway line somewhere in the Jamaica section of Queens. I put my luggage into a taxi and arrived at my parents’ apartment in Flushing (they had moved there during my senior year at Columbia) past midnight, waking them. I had not told them I was coming home.

  I greeted my father with the news that he would, at last, be proud of me—I had finally become “politically concerned.” Though I did no more work on the letter or the campaign after I arrived home, I did show the letter to my father, informing him of my plans for a national crusade.

  He screamed. His temper, equal to my passion, made us incapable of sustaining a discussion on the letter, or on my new political views for five minutes before he was in a rage which made my mother rush to calm us both down. He seemed to interpret my attacks on America as attacks on him, though I professed at the time to find the analogy absurd.

  “I love America!” I remember him screaming several times, veins showing in his neck, his body shaking with anger. And with this sentence all arguments were included, all arguments came to an
end.

  My parents were, by turns, angry, concerned, worried. With my “mind,” and education I could have been “anything”—a professor, an executive—“anything at all.” Instead, I slept late, I talked of being a novelist, I involved myself in “mishugenah” fantasies. But I was, at last, if only in the four and a half small rooms of a Flushing apartment, important. My letter had the power to evoke from my mother and father what it evoked from no one else in the world—strong emotional reactions, and these soothed my deepest fears.

  A few weeks at home, a few battles with my parents—these quickly destroyed whatever desire remained to work on the letter. What I dared not admit at the time was, in effect, true: that they had the power—from the anger and worry I induced in them I could believe that it was I who had power over them—to stop me from sending the letter.

  I answered the “Current Information Questionnaire” and sent it back to my draft board. My feelings concerning Conscientious Objection remained firm, and I discussed these, too, with my parents, with friends. Without the letter to Kennedy attached, I found that people were more direct with me. In general, they voiced respect for my beliefs, for my courage, though I had, as yet, risked nothing except words—but they went on to conjure up the trouble my beliefs would create for me: I would not be able to get jobs, I would be involved in legal hassles, I would go to jail. The easiest, and therefore the best, thing to do was either to accept induction and try to get a desk job, to find an opening in a six-month National Guard Unit, or to get a deferment by going back to graduate school.

  I was determined to avoid all three possibilities. I had long discussions with friends who were in my position—unmarried, in their early twenties, eligible for induction—and my own solution, to apply for alternative service as a C. O., began to seem less eccentric. One high school and college friend, Arthur Rudy, in training in clinical psychology at the time, made me one of his first nonpaying patients. Whether we talked on the phone, during walks along Flatbush Avenue, or sitting against the fence in a schoolyard between games of three-man basketball, I was able to test my thoughts, my plans, unsure, half-formed, “different,” in discussions, arguments with him. “Noogie, be realistic—” was a standard response on his part—an introduction to a way of seeing what I was doing which allowed me, afterwards, to be just that: realistic. “The Noog in jail? What good would that do—?” (Five years later, when he was part of an Army medical team stationed in a village hospital in Vietnam, his wife and one-year-old daughter left behind in America, he would offer—without my asking—to write a letter in support of the C. O. application I was at last, at twenty-seven, filing.)