Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  Once I had accepted the fact of my impotence when it came to single-handedly bringing about world disarmament, I could also accept a return to the writing of fiction. I began a new novel, its setting (strangely enough) at an automobile plant in a conservative Midwest city. I waited each morning until my parents were gone to work, then got out of bed, went downstairs for the Times, returned, ate breakfast, began work. Robert was living in Manhattan at the time, and I had the apartment to myself; my desk, tucked now in the corner of an eight-by-ten-foot bedroom, was the old kitchen table from Brooklyn.

  I established a routine: writing in the mornings, playing ball and visiting neighborhood bars in the afternoons, leaving the house before my parents returned from work, spending the evenings with girls, with friends, drinking. The writing didn’t go well. It went more slowly, in fact, than first-draft writing had ever gone for me. The problem, I realized after a month or so, was that the emotions which had been with me during the preceding months were still sloshing around inside, and they threatened, I feared, to turn my novel into an allegorical rendering of the letter to Kennedy.

  If, a few months before, I’d had to do away with my desire to write fiction in order to be political, now, I felt, I had to do away with my desire to be political in order to be a novelist. I settled on a plan: I would write an essay about the letter, and about what (at GM) had generated it, thus exorcising the political emotions.

  I put the novel aside (I knew already that it would concern a 1955 wildcat strike—and that this strike would be set against a background of the workers’ memories of real strikes from the early days of union organizing) and began the essay. The essay grew. Before long it was concerning itself less and less with what, in my GM experience, had brought me to write the letter. It became, increasingly, section by section, a detailed explication and proof—a justification of the letter, a book—one which was, in brief, a polemic against war, racism, industrialism, militarism, capitalism, totalitarianism, imperialism, and inertia.

  On the title page I placed, as an epigraph, Newton’s first law: “Every body persists in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled by external force to change that state.”

  I reprinted the letter to Kennedy in the first chapter—and discovered that I still believed in it. If only others could be made to see the truth of what I had seen, then perhaps there was still hope. To give body to my arguments I read everything I could on the arms race, on civil rights—I visited the offices of SANE, of civil rights groups—and my researches confirmed the worst fears I had carried with me from Indiana: America was deeply and fundamentally conservative, the arms race would inevitably kill us all, men were not free.

  The process of writing the book, however—despite my apocalyptic prophecies—seemed to remove most of my own fears. Having to write about what I thought had caused me to write the letter seemed to free me from those very things. The generalizations I put forward about the world invariably described my own state; and the way in which I described fear as being at the center of things was a just (though, at the time, unacknowledged) description of my own condition. Though my insights were neither very new nor very precise, I wrote my way to them as if nobody before me had ever experienced them. In my abstracted condition—as I relived my eight months in Indianapolis—real things seemed to dissolve, and it was the very insubstantiality of the enemy which became his secret and most terrible weapon. Thus, I concluded a long analytic discussion of the causes of the world’s ills by revealing my discovery that fear “coerces, controls, destroys, dictates, and enslaves more powerfully when it is the result of an invisible force.”

  Although my resistance movement included only myself, my prose carried me away and within three months the book was finished. It ended with a call for massive resistance to the military—and every sentence of it was written in a style which, when I’d look through the book in the years since, would always cause the same reaction: My God—did I really write this? (I liked to think I’d outgrown this style, but often, noticing the capsule sermons which would materialize mysteriously on pages I’d written, I’d have to wonder.) I took on the voice of one who spoke for my generation, and I ended with a flourish, feeling I had found a genuinely new voice, unaware of how closely my rhetoric resembled the President’s, of how much it resembled the speeches in the “I Speak For Democracy” contests of my grade-school days:

  And if I presume to speak not only for myself, but for other young people with similar doubts and emotions and fears and hopes and faiths, let me say that we know these things:

  We know that in this nuclear age, where war will mean killing civilians en masse, where biological and chemical and radiation warfare may already be more advanced than killing by bombs, in this age we cannot give our commitment blindly. We will not let others do our thinking for us. We must ask questions and be answered. We know that the problems are difficult and that there are no sure or easy answers. But we also know that the present methods of dealing with reality seem worse than useless—they seem hopeless. We will not aid in the destruction of man. Hard work must be done if we want to survive, if we want to enjoy peace and freedom. We will gladly help in that work.

  My fourth book was done (I was twenty-three), and I brought it to the SANE office, where the National Director read it, praised it, and sent me to Norman Cousins. Cousins was then Honorary Chairman of SANE, and editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review. I had relied, for some of my information, on his book, In Place of Folly, and to have a direct introduction to him made me feel that I was getting somewhere.

  I did not, in fact, ever see him or hear from him. A month later, the editorial assistant who had taken the manuscript from me, returned it, telling me that it was “the most incredible piece of political writing” by a young man that she had ever read. She was probably right.

  I returned home and the next day I was back at work on my novel; I had dealt—in a tangible way—with the guilt that bound my fiction to my politics. The political book was there; in fact, by having turned my political emotions into a book, I had made them into something that was doubtless more real to me than anything else could have been. While I waited to hear from Saturday Review or any of the other magazines and publishers I would submit it to, I could justify what I felt a need to justify (would always feel a need to justify)—the fact that I was no longer working full time to save mankind.

  I had, I even began to see, been somewhat excessive in my politics—perhaps, I admitted, even slightly paranoid. Certainly I had been unrealistic. Now, however, things were different—I was writing again, I was away from Indiana, from The Meadows, from General Motors. The letter to Kennedy had been a silly, misconceived scheme, and I was, I would tell friends, embarrassed by the fact that I could have gotten so insanely involved in it, in the idea of the campaign which would surround it.

  My new manuscript, on the other hand, I would point out, once it was published as a book, would be able to do what I as an individual, and what the letter alone, could never have done.

  This new, more “realistic” view of things had other effects. Although I felt more certain than ever that I would have chosen jail before military service, I now saw no reason for precipitating the need for such a choice. The practical thing to do was to use the freedom I had in order to work for the policies in which I believed—and so I became involved in my first actual political activities.

  There were, in New York, people who were fighting the same enemies I had been fighting, and this now seemed to me a reassuring fact. If those who had already risked their jobs and lives, as many in the civil rights movement had done, could continue to do so—and could continue to commit their time and energies to mundane tasks which didn’t seem to promise any imminent apocalypse, who was I, who had done nothing but write down my feelings, not to join my cause with theirs? The isolation in which I’d been living became less necessary; it had already become less pleasurable.

  I began, then, in whatever time I
had left over from writing and in whatever ways were available, to work with whatever particular political group or cause seemed current, just. And the work I did—stuffing envelopes, standing in at UN vigils, collecting clothes for CORE—had its own rewards: for there I was, I could tell myself, the person who had written the book that would electrify and change the nation, the world—and nobody knew it. To those who struggled alongside me, to those who watched me—I was just another ordinary human being, doing my little bit to make the world a better place to live in.

  I participated that spring in my first act of civil disobedience. I was on the Columbia campus on a Friday, and was given a handbill announcing a sit-in on the steps of Low Library during the hour when everybody was required by law to take shelter as part of the civil defense program. When the sirens began wailing at noon, I sat down with several hundred other protesters. About fifteen minutes after the drill started two police cars raced across the campus, but they didn’t stop, and when the all-clear signal was given forty-five minutes later, we got up and went our separate ways. Nobody was arrested.

  Still, the experience was exhilarating. That hundreds of people would risk jail, would sit silently in moral witness, would sing together at the end (“We Shall Overcome”)—seemed to me good, noble, thrilling. I was able, in the flush of having finally “done something,” to strike up a conversation with a girl who had sat near me during the drill. She wore a peasant’s blouse, slipped down across her shoulders. She had a large mouth, a straight white smile, long blond hair that spilled down her back. She smiled at me, and when I looked into her face her eyes didn’t waver—she was, in short, a radical New York Jewish boy’s dream of an Aryan princess: a blond aristocrat committed to left-wing causes. I was able, within five minutes, to let her know that I was an unpublished novelist, that I had already written a political book on massive resistance which was probably going to be published, that I was on the campus because I was having drinks later that afternoon at the Faculty Club with Richard Chase (she was in the Graduate English Department). She extended her hand. “It’s been good talking with you,” she said as we shook hands. “I have to meet my husband now—he’ll be getting out of class…”

  By the beginning of the summer, my new novel was past the halfway point, and the money I’d saved at GM was almost gone. For July and August I took a job helping to run a summer recreation program for muscular dystrophy children; we took wheelchair patients on outings several times a week (I drove the VW microbus)—to ball games, parks, movies, Coney Island, Jones Beach, etc. Since the outings were, most of the time, in the afternoons and evenings, I was able to retain most mornings for writing.

  In my “realistic” frame of mind I also decided to file an application with the Columbia University Placement Office. I would become a teacher.

  I knew I couldn’t leave myself adrift for the fall, dependent on my parents; I knew (said that) it was foolish to think that the next day’s mail would bring an acceptance from a publisher of one of my books; I didn’t want to return to graduate school, and I went weak at the thought of being drafted. Teaching would give me money, a deferment, and time for writing. I would be finished by three o’clock every day; I would have summers and vacations free.

  In late June I flew out to Indiana. As I suppose I’d known when I’d left Bloomington, things had gone badin letters, phone calls—with Ginny, and, suddenly realizing I would lose her, I discovered I didn’t want to. I stayed in Bloomington for a week. I brought my new manuscripts with me (the political book, half of the automobile plant novel) and Ginny read them, but she didn’t—as with other things—have much to say. This hurt most of all. I tried to get her to comment on various sections, ideas, characters—but she let me know that if she did, I would feel even worse than I was feeling, something which hardly seemed possible.

  At the end of the summer, she came to New York for job interviews, and we met twice. By this time I’d accepted a position at a private school in Saddle River, New Jersey, and things seemed to be going well: I was involved with several girls (my political activities had led me to places where I’d discovered relatives of the girl I’d met on the steps of Low Library), the first draft of the novel was almost done. Still, when we said good-bye for the last time—we’d gone together for almost two years—I felt shattered, drained.

  I felt, in fact, almost exactly the way I’d felt during my last month at Chevrolet-Indianapolis. I was unable to do any writing, I talked to myself, I felt sorry for myself, trapped. The week in which we met for the last time was the week I moved to Saddle River.

  The school was set on a beautifully landscaped estate of several hundred acres, and the headmaster gave me a rent-free room in back of the school in what had been, previously, the servants quarters. Outwardly, as at GM, I must have seemed happy, assured, untroubled. The school, in its second year of existence, had less than a hundred students, from fourth to twelfth grade, and the atmosphere was peaceful, intimate, friendly. I got along well with my students, the other teachers, and with the headmaster, despite the fact that he called me into his office during the first week of classes to “recommend” that I not wear plaid shirts with ties.

  When the school emptied each day, and the headmaster had gone home, I remained on the estate, sharing it with one other person—the gardener. His name was Stiney, and according to the deed, whoever bought the property had to agree to take care of him, to let him stay on as gardener. He was in his fifties, wore his hair to his shoulders, tied Indian-style, his shirt was open to the waist, and he spoke with birds and animals. He was a strict vegetarian, and a suspicious one: he refused to allow anyone in the school to give him food, or to fix his meals for him. The FBI, he told me, was sending agents into Saddle River to kill him. In his room, down the hall from mine, he kept stones on top of all the electrical wires to stop the electricity from jumping out when it had to turn corners. In his closet he had jars of alcohol which prevented lightning from coming down the chimneys and setting the school on fire.

  He kept several trunks in his room; they were locked and I became one of the few people ever to see their contents. They were filled with rocks, and the cracks on the rocks represented, if I understood him correctly, maps of various countries in the world; the maps possessed magical properties and Stiney, by interpreting them, was able to predict the future.

  Sometimes he would visit my room at night to tell me stories, most of which I couldn’t follow. He often spent his afternoons changing his money from bank to bank, and the reasons for this, which he explained at length to me, involved secret cameras, FBI agents, the Russian government, Indians, the harmful effects of eating meat, and—I could only nod my head—the invention of the automobile. We shared the upstairs servants quarters for several weeks (our rooms were about ten feet apart and the lock on my door was broken), and, when the estate was deserted at night, despite the fact that he trusted me, I had a hard time falling asleep—I thought of my writing, my books, Ginny, the school, my future, and, most of all, I wondered if I would wake in time on the night that Stiney slipped down the corridor, his hair flowing, his chest bare, a rock in his hand.

  The headmaster gave me the school limousine, a 1941 Chrysler nine-seater, to use until I bought my own car, and on my way to New York one weekend, just before I reached the George Washington Bridge, it broke down. I had it towed into a repair shop, where, when I stepped on the accelerator, the oil tank exploded, nearly killing the three mechanics whose heads were looking in under the hood. I trembled all weekend.

  Though I was able to get through each day of teaching—I helped coach the football team in the afternoons, and enjoyed this—though I seemed to be functioning in a real world, my spirits were lower than ever and my novel remained unfinished. Once again, as at GM, I projected each day of work twenty and thirty years ahead. I would, I became convinced, be an unmarried teacher in a rich man’s school, correcting grammar exercises nightly, for the rest of my life.

  That I got on easily, succe
ssfully with my students—more easily than with people my own age; that some of my students were the same age as girls I saw on weekends—such things confused me. I waited (again, as at GM) for the weekends, but they were no help. I found, when I drove on highways and country roads, that I was now playing games: not pulling to the side of the road when tears, there for no apparent reason, would blind me so that I couldn’t see where I was going; veering from lane to lane; seeing how long I dared drive without touching the steering wheel. Robert outdid me, though: he came to New Jersey several times to spend weekends with me, and during one, while we were driving from Saddle River to Teaneck along Route 4 late at night, he suddenly swung open the door of the car and threatened to jump.

  FIVE: Pictures from an Institution

  For cooping up all these lunatics in this old cloister becomes, I think, a dangerous thing, in which you risk losing the little good sense that you may still have kept. Not that I am set on this or that by preference. I am used to the life here, but one must not forget to make a little trial of the opposite.