Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  —Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, Theo. December 31, 1889.

  Near the end of my second month at Saddle River, after eating supper with Stiney in the school kitchen one night, I went upstairs to my room, took my typewriter from my closet, and carried it with me into the classroom building. I repeated one sentence to myself, again and again—a sentence from one of my unpublished novels: If you’re a writer, you write; if you don’t write, you’re not a writer. In the novel—the one I wrote during the year I cut graduate-school classes—the sentence is directed at a forty-year-old professor by his wife. He is in the midst of a crisis, brought on in part by the fact that he is a famous critic, a popular teacher, yet still yearns to be a novelist. At the point in the novel when she says this to him, he has just returned home from a brief and wild affair with a woman he had lived with in his early twenties, when he was trying to write novels. The former girlfriend is now a well-known poet and has been visiting the small New England college where he teaches, in order to give a poetry reading.

  I put the lights on in my ninth-grade home room, and waited. At the end of the second hour I began writing, and what I’d taken for the most severe crisis of my life was over—it had, in fact, lasted little more than a month.

  I was pleased with what I wrote—a satirical protest against bomb shelters written in the form of a letter from John F. Kennedy’s cat. What pleased and relieved me most was that I’d tried to deal humorously with something that I had, until then, been able to regard only with dead seriousness.

  I mailed the piece out that week, and it was quickly rejected by several magazines; I was, however, prepared for such an eventuality; a letter involving Kennedy and bomb shelters led directly to the mimeograph machine; making use of the school facilities one night, I ran off several hundred copies of the letter and mailed them to friends, magazines, peace organizations, newspapers, and prominent individuals. One of the peace organizations, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, asked if I would permit them to publish the letter in their magazine, Fellowship. I was in possession of my first “acceptance,” and I telephoned everybody I knew to tell them so.

  I was back at work on the automobile plant novel immediately, and I finished it sometime in November or December and sent it out. By this time I had bought an old 1951 Buick, and had moved from my back room in the school to an apartment in Teaneck, New Jersey.

  I had, then, within a year of leaving GM, written two books that derived from my experiences there. More important, I thought, I was—my political activities being the evidence—a totally different person than I’d been when I’d left graduate school in the spring of 1960. That year, and in all the years since, I would seize on the fact of my GM experience as a way of explaining to others why I had (as I thought), suddenly—at the age of twenty-two—changed, become politically radical.

  The emotions, feelings, concerns that were aroused during my days at Chevrolet-Indianapolis—these had probably, in some form, been in me before, I’d admit, but it was GM which had caused them to surface. Moreover, I would often claim—as I did in the political book I wrote that year, and as I thought I’d be doing when I began this narrative—almost all the political activities and emotions which have engaged me in the years since have been a working out of what I felt during my half year there, much, I would sometimes note, in the way a novel is the working out, the unwinding of a single vivid feeling or impression—an attempt to recapture and to give narrative life to a single moment.

  Things are not—have never been—that simple. Though a brief explanation of the effect my six months at GM had on me often seemed a persuasive enough reason for some changes in me, the explanation always seemed too easy, too neat. Still, even here, I shy away from delving into other, more personal origins for whatever changes I’ve undergone in the last ten years. I find, though I touch on things in my family, my childhood, that my motivations do not really interest me so much, or rather, that I resist analysis of my motivations. Not only because I rest in this essay on a prejudice (a defense mechanism) which derives from my sense of myself as a novelist—from my feeling that my job as a writer is to describe action in such a way that motivation is implied—but from a feeling that whatever motivations a reader may infer should themselves be permeated with mystery. My way—inevitably romantic—of defending myself against the possibility that there may be clear, mechanistic, deterministic, unmysterious, and unambiguous explanations for my actions, my life; that there may not be some terrible—ultimate—relations between what I am as a writer and what I am in the rest of my life; that the sources for both my writing and my actions in the external world may not themselves have sources which are deep, mysterious, and unknown.

  Which is one oblique way of introducing the fact that, a year after I’d left GM, I was involved in an experience more personal than political—an experience that, unlike GM, had no discernible (final) beginning or end point—one which affected those things I call (called) my political emotions at least as profoundly as assembly lines did.

  Shortly after I’d finished my automobile plant novel and sent it out, Robert, eighteen years old at the time, began a journey through the madness of city, private, and state mental hospitals—a journey which would take several years until, largely through his own courage, his own humor, he emerged whole, himself at the other end—back again for better or worse in the “real” world.

  His first hospitalization that winter, coming after my own shaky days that fall—plunged me deeper into the fears for my own mind and future which had first plagued me in Indiana. Robert and I had been very close, and though we had known—had talked for some time about the possibility of hospitalization, we both fiercely resisted the thought, fought against the actuality.

  The first time I visited him in a city hospital—he was locked behind iron doors, tied in a straitjacket—though I felt shattered, defeated, uncertain about everything, the visit had a stabilizing effect on me. Much as—in my love, my guilt—I might have wanted to change places with him, to have taken his place so that he could be set free (wishes I would voice often in the next few years), I did what I knew I had to do to make sure that this would not happen. I clung to whatever I felt promised my own self-preservation.

  I did this mostly by transforming his hospitalization and its effect on me, things I knew were beyond my control, into things abstract—into part of the political field theory I’d begun developing at GM. What was terrible-evil—at both GM and mental hospitals, what, that is, destroyed others and could do the same to me, were related, and if I could spell out this relationship, I could, in my mind, gain control over it. Robert’s hospitalization, then, became the clearest, the final proof—in my emotions and my theories—of the injustice of things, of the need for revolution.

  The edge of these emotions and theories was rage; for every sinking, confused feeling in me I compensated with anger—at the fact that he was imprisoned while others—less good, less virtuous, less sane, less worthy-were free; at the inadequacy of the hospitals he was forced—by himself, by our family, by the world—to be part of; at my inability to get him out.

  The general stupidity and indifference of the world were evidenced for me in the particular stupidity and indifference of mental hospitals. How, I would demand, could a human being “get well” when the conditions of his environment told him—not in words, but in the prison-like architecture, the mammoth dormitories for sleeping, the primitive forms of therapy, the shortage of trained personnel—that the world didn’t really care much about him. Once, brought back to a state hospital after what had been diagnosed as an “acute psychotic episode,” he was placed in a maximum security ward. A week later we telephoned his doctor to find out how he was doing, only to discover that his doctor had not yet been informed that he was back in the hospital.

  One had only to look around and see what society’s priorities were: when I looked at the world in those days I saw the ease with which money could be obtained for new highways, for sp
ace programs, for new model cars, for marching bands, for advertising—and I needed to see and know no more.

  How, I asked at the time, could anyone become “sane” in an institution in which he was surrounded all day by the “insane?” (Robert: “You have to be crazy to want to stay here—” Or, telling me not to worry about him: “I’m sane, don’t you see, Jay—? That’s what it means to be here—I’m in sane.”) In my analysis of the situation, I had, I was certain, noticed things that few others had seen. My theory developed: Because of its meager budget and staff, the institution had to place primary emphasis on what were custodial values—i.e., since its burden, day by day, was to try to keep things quiet and orderly, patients who were manic and/or aggressive, for example, were more trouble than patients who were passive and/or depressed, and they were treated accordingly: with security wards, straitjackets, less and less of the already limited, inadequate therapy—and even, at a supposedly decent private hospital, with punishment, confinement to quarters, loss of passes out of the hospital.

  In short, the needs of the institution, not of the “patients,” seemed to me generally to determine the forms of treatment. And the needs of the institution, I concluded, were determined by the society which created it, funded it, and declared that people placed in it, designated as “mental patients,” be, in effect, invalidated as human beings—all rights, decisions, property, etc. taken away from them—so that they could become, in this institutionally mad logic—somehow “human again,” “part of society,” “responsible for themselves.”

  In the self-justifying deterministic logic of the hospital, my version of things was not, of course, true: patients, the argument went, always acted so as “to get what they wanted.” It followed, therefore, that if patients wound up confined to their rooms, in security wards, without therapists, without doctors—that they must have “wanted” to.*

  “The shits,” Mailer wrote in Advertisements for Myself, “are killing us.” The sentence spun around in my head, rested there. The shits, I vowed, would not get me (too). And the shits seemed to me to be everywhere—free, walking the earth, sitting in offices, inflicting suffering, enjoying life while (because) others despaired.

  The sight of hundreds of visitors—other brothers, mothers, fathers, friends, relatives—waiting in long lines several times a week, laden with shopping bags and packages, eyes darting with fear, anxiety, anticipation—to spend an hour or two with their beloved inmate, always seemed more terrible to me—obscene was the word I used—than what actually existed behind the locked doors. And the sight ot the same people, atter visiting hours, waiting in long lines for city buses to take them home, though less overtly terrible, seemed more depressing.

  How, I would ask, could anybody place faith in these hospitals, how could anybody place faith in any of the world’s institutions, when—in one of the largest hospitals in the most progressive state of the most advanced nation in the civilized world—the Director was still clinging to authoritarian notions in which the hospital was analogous to a church, and, I reasoned at the time, the doctors to priests, the patients to sinners. In what everybody else took for a harmless notice placed on the doors of the hospital—a plea for “appropriate” dress by visitors (no shorts, no low necklines), I was able to see stupidity, insanity, the epitome of all the lies and misconceptions and errors that were responsible for the tragic state of the world. “Although a hospital is not a house of worship,” the notice began, “it does partake somewhat of the same solemnity and dignity….” I quenched the fire of my rage by tearing the notice from the door, taking it home with me, brooding over it.

  Although I felt I had no choice but to act as if I too had faith in the hospital, the system assigned to “cure” people, my desire again, as at GM, was to destroy: There was more hope in organizing patients (with the support of their aides—almost all black, all underpaid—their doctors, their relatives, their friends) to strike, to picket, to revolt, to blow up the hospitals—than there was in letting things continue as they were.

  At one point, on the advice of a friend, a child psychologist at Harlem Hospital, I wrote letters to several private clinics (clinics he said were especially trained to offer my brother the chance he needed), giving my brother’s history, inquiring about openings, telling something of our family, of our financial situation. I received replies which thanked me for my “moving letter” but noted that such clinics could “not think” of accepting a patient (there were no “scholarships” one psychiatrist wrote) unless the family of the patient could “guarantee” the doctors for several years, sums which would run, annually between fifteen and twenty-five thousand dollars.

  If I’d needed any further evidence for my belief that the inadequacy of mental hospitals was a direct product, a true reflection of our indices of priority, our economic-social-political system, I now had it. True enough, I’d admit at the time, there were people who got well in state hospitals who were not helped in such private clinics, but if one had to “go out of one’s mind” for a while, it might be more pleasant to do so in pleasant surroundings: on a beautiful estate, with a private nurse, with good professional care, with daily and individual therapy, etc. At the least, it would be nice if one could enjoy the cures available to others, to the rich, if one could “make a little trial of the opposite.”

  My life at the Saddle River Country Day School during these months became secondary. I resented the school—the fact that I was part of it—but not with the passion I’d reserved for GM or The Meadows. If the Marxist inside me still insisted on simple dichotomies—the privileged lives the students led did not somehow entitle them to have problems—it didn’t stop me from getting to know the students, from liking them. I enjoyed teaching. The students were my daily world and I talked about them with the other teachers endlessly, thought about them always. I seemed to be able to get the students interested in themselves, in their own worlds—and once this was done, they quickly and easily became interested in books, in writing, in new worlds. I brought their once and twice-weekly compositions across the George Washington Bridge with me on weekends to show friends, and I was, for the better part of my waking hours, respected, admired, even loved; at the time, this was no small thing.

  As a teacher, I was able to satisfy my own needs (to be important—the center of attention, the source of change, knowledge), while at the same time satisfying my sense of what a good teacher should be by making my presence, my opinions irrelevant, secondary. The grades I had to put on written work never seemed to affect students adversely—those who had received the lowest grades were as eager (afterwards) to read and show their work as were those who received the highest. On the first day of school, not knowing what to do, I’d assigned “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” as the topic for the first composition in my eighth-grade class. As soon as I heard the students groan, I added, as an afterthought; “And you don’t have to tell the truth—” It was the first of my attempts to reverse the conventional—barely original, but it seemed to be enough to set the students free, to set me free, to set the tone for the year.

  At the school itself, not wanting, I suppose, to endanger the respect and popularity I’d achieved, I kept my political emotions and theories to myself. In the course of the year I can recall only two things I did which could in any way have been considered political, 1) I refused to make my students take part in civil defense drills in which they would protect themselves from nuclear warheads by crouching under their desks; and 2) I taught The Catcher In the Rye despite warnings from the headmaster and his request that I choose another novel. In addition—the events rest in my memory precisely because they were so absurdly minor, so earnestly proletarian—I actually said to a student, with others present, when he came in one day bemoaning the $50,000 his father had lost in a stock market slide the previous day: “Have you ever considered that your father earns money for which he doesn’t work?”—and I rooted for an opposing football team (an orphanage) against my own.

 
I did no writing all winter, but that spring I started and completed two projects. The first was an attempt at a children’s book. The teacher with whom I was friendliest at the school was Mrs. Gladys Matthews, and she was in her early eighties at the time. Born and raised in Texas, she was a member of the DAR, the Colonial Dames of America, a descendant of Pocahontas, and had been a staunch supporter of Norman Thomas in the thirties. When she read articles and stories in magazines, she would systematically tear out all the full pages of advertising, muttering as explanation: “I didn’t pay for this—” Mrs. Matthews had taught Mexican children in Texas border schools, and one of them had given her the memoirs of an ancestor of his—a guide named Poli (José Policarpo Rodriguez)—famous in Texas during the nineteenth century for having blazed many of its important trails and for having been keeper of the camels when Jefferson Davis had brought them to America just before the Civil War.

  “Here you are,” she said to me one night, handing me several boxes of yellow-edged pages. “I tried to write a book once and found out I wasn’t a writer. So I stopped. I’ve been waiting thirty years to find somebody to finish the job.”

  The fact that Poli had lived through both the Mexican and Civil wars without taking part in either intrigued the pacifist-propagandist in me, and I worked on the book every night for several months. The result, however (my fifth complete book), was dismal, and working on it depressed me, only made me aware of the original fiction I was not writing.

  The second piece of writing I did that spring was also derivative. By then my political book (A Letter to Kennedy) had been rejected by enough publishers to convince me that it would not be published. Several publishers had helped sharpen my sense of injustice (helplessness) by noting that for such a letter to have “relevance,” it would have to have been written by “a well-known political figure.” Hadn’t, I screamed silently, that been the point of the book—that I was not well known, that I had not, until GM, been political? I took up such points, at length, in the new article, quoting from my rejection slips, telling the story of the letter, of the book about the letter, of the article about the book about the letter.