I dreaded the idea of a second year as tutor to the rich. I wanted, again, to get far away from New York, from my family. In late spring I applied to the Indiana University School of Letters for the summer session. If I survived it, I decided, I would stay on for the fall and finish my Master’s Degree.
The eight weeks in Bloomington were a joy: I played tennis every day, basketball, made good friends with other graduate students, had time for reading, writing, and—what seemed suddenly all important—more than enough of the company, the conversation—about literature, politics, Indiana—I had obviously been hungering for. Having been away from graduate school for two years, having broken the usual pattern—straight from four years of undergraduate studies to graduate school to college-teaching position—I found that I could more easily accept what had previously seemed unacceptable. I was wary, though, fearful—especially about what discussions, papers, theorizing on other novels—when I, at twenty-four, had had none published—would do to me, to my writing.
The world of the university, upon my return to it, did not impress me as being any more moral in its internal politics, its bureaucracy, its contracts, its own caste system, than GM; still, I discovered, I preferred the business of education to the business of business.
I was struck also by the ways in which the lives of the graduate students impressed me, initially, as being similar to the lives of mental patients. Again, I worked out a theory: graduate students, like mental patients, were protected, insulated from the outside world; they were given fixed rewards and punishments for obeying and disobeying rules; they were taken care of with respect to the necessities of life; they had their own therapists (teachers, advisers, counselors). Undergraduates at the university had always referred to the graduate center as “the zoo”—and I now found the word appropriate; the numbers of graduate students who seemed to me to be misfits, who would not, I felt, have been able to survive in any other environment was astonishing. More than this, it was their physical bearing which had first elicited my reactions, comparisons: stiff neck and shoulders, drugged look about the eyes, tight mouthlines, inability to laugh naturally…
Still, I was happier on the campus, among them, than I’d been at GM, at home, or at Saddle River. The pressures within university walls seemed infinitely less severe than those outside it; I had forgotten about the incredible amounts of sheer time a student had to himself and I found, at the end of eight weeks, that I wanted to stay. Even the fact that many of the people I was surrounded by were timid, tight, vulnerable, or strange, came, by this time, to represent something positive for me—i.e., I interpreted their (projected) inability to get on in the outside world as an instinctive rejection of it.
At the end of the summer I sent a letter to the headmaster of the Saddle River Country Day School from Los Angeles (I’d driven there with some graduate students), telling him of my decision to return to graduate school. I flew to New York after two weeks in California, settled things there, and drove back to Bloomington, where I took an apartment a few blocks from the campus with two graduate students in botany.
Shortly after classes began I repeated, briefly, the games of the previous year: I’d walk the town streets at night and wait until the last second before racing across the paths of oncoming cars. Thanks to the summer tennis and basketball my timing was good—despite blaring horns, screeches, skidding runs, I was never hurt badly. The games lasted for a week or two and never returned.
I received an assistantship in the English Department that fall and I thrived on the teaching. That my freshmen students seemed, in general, inferior to most of my ninth- and tenth-grade students at Saddle River only gave me more reason to assume antic dispositions, to work hard.
Once I asked my classes for a definition of “empiricism.” They had just read Bertrand Russell’s essay, “Empiricism and Democracy,” and I said that I wanted to know how much background I’d need to give them when we discussed the essay during the next class meeting. They should not put their names on their papers, they should not answer if they hadn’t had time to read the essay. The word, which appeared not only in the title, but in virtually every paragraph of the essay, was taken by all but two of fifty students to be “a form of government like communism or colonialism.”
During my second or third week of teaching we read an essay by Wright Morris, “Abuse of the Past: Norman Rockwell.” In the essay, Morris repeatedly uses Rockwell’s drawings to illustrate what he describes as the American ability to make of all things “a joke,” of the
American inability to face reality—try to imagine a Rockwell drawing of a concentration camp, a bad train crash. I was almost through the class period before I realized that the reason things were not going well was that we were operating on different spectrums; my students, I discovered by a few quick questions, had assumed that Morris was praising Rockwell for his truthfulness. If you couldn’t say something good about somebody, they seemed to believe, you shouldn’t say anything. I was, I realized, back in the provinces—and I discovered that I didn’t mind.
At the end of the second semester my students wrote, without exception, that the value of their year at Indiana, the purpose of their college education, was “to get to know different kinds of people better.” That they could not write sentences in English, that any single composition seemed to contain (like the notice on the New York State Hospital door) all the logical, ideological, and philosophical errors of Western Civilization, that they were fundamentalist-conservatives politically (the first essay I looked at the second semester was entitled: “How Franklin Roosevelt Caused the Second World War in Order to Aid International Communism”), that most of them found the classroom an obvious intrusion on the other activities associated with college live (in their lives, the work-pleasure split was natural and untroubled)—I found that I did not become enraged with them for such things. Their prejudice, like their ignorance, seemed profound—in the simplest, most literal way, I said, they didn’t know any better.
About a month after classes began—on October 24, 1962, two days after Kennedy announced the Cuban blockade—the campus had its first political demonstration of the year, and I welcomed it, found that I was excited by the possibility that I might be part of it, that I might apply—in some visible way—the experience, knowledge, theories, and emotions that I’d gained since the last time I’d been on the campus.
As soon as an Ad Hoc Committee of students issued a statement calling for a demonstration protesting the blockade, the University administration responded as I knew it would. The Dean of Students, Robert H. Shaffer, issued a statement in which he declared that “Indiana University has always supported the right of the individual student to express himself freely on any political or social issue. We shall continue to support this policy of free expression….” He added, however, that “common sense would suggest that students who consider participation in any public demonstration would understand with whom they are aligning themselves…. I am certain that the vast majority of the students will ignore the action of such a small number of students endeavoring to attract attention to themselves.” The president of the university, former Secretary of the Army, Elvis J. Stahr, Jr., stated that “the most effective way to deal with minorities with whom we disagree in the present kind of situation is to ignore them completely” (italics mine).
I arrived at the University auditorium on the afternoon of October 24 prepared to join the Ad Hoc group as soon as it issued its statement on the crisis. I never got a chance. The several thousand students who were gathered in the square in front of the auditorium hissed, booed, shoved, punched, kicked. The fifteen demonstrators, unable to give their statement, began moving away from the auditorium, and the students followed them.
The day had already been turned into a joke; the protest was another football rally: students carried placards bearing signs such as “Block that Ship!”—a refrain they chanted again and again. One fraternity paraded with a sign that stated: “We Believe in
Mom’s Cherry Pie and Sex.”
Groups of students formed barricades, arms linked, and kicked and punched the protesters at various points along the route of their march. The police, who followed the students across campus, did nothing. When a clergyman (the Reverend Paul Killinger, Unitarian minister in Bloomington) asked one of the policemen why he was doing nothing to protect the fifteen students, the policeman smiled, and replied that he was only there “to protect the liberties of Americans.”
The saddest part of the day concerned the attack on a young faculty member—a visiting professor from Spain. He told me afterwards that when he had seen the announcement of the demonstration in the student paper, he had been thrilled—for the first time since he’d come to America, he was actually going to see how our democracy worked, how we allowed free speech even in time of crisis. When he saw what actually happened, though, he suddenly found himself trying to address the crowd, trying to get them to give the protesters a hearing, to let them make their statement.
The crowd pressed in on him, he was thrown against a car, hurled to the ground, punched, kicked. A graduate student I knew ran to a policeman to tell him that the professor was being beaten, but the policeman told my friend, “He shouldn’t be here.” “It serves him right,” said another.
A week later, still badly cut and bruised, the professor showed me a letter he had received from the student body president, Mike Donovan. Donovan had issued a statement after the demonstration, beginning: “This afternoon the students of Indiana University clearly illustrated one of the things President Kennedy and the American people wish to preserve in this country…freedom of speech and the right to dissent….” In his letter to the professor, Donovan said that he had heard about the “alleged” attack on him, but he wanted to remind the professor that “as an alien,” he was not, of course, “entitled to the same rights as American citizens….” Donovan was considered the campus “liberal”; the campus “conservative,” who received the university’s highest award at graduation that June, went on to become the national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom.
The enemies I’d found in Indianapolis were living in Bloomington also, and I was ready to do more than battle them silently. The day of the demonstrations I was at work on an article and on letters to the student paper, to university officials. The day after the demonstration the student paper made no mention of violence, and though many faculty members and students sent letters about what had happened, the paper, under the direction of the Department of Journalism, refused to print any of them. They refused also to give any reason for their decision, though they did admit to me, on the phone, that they were “acting under orders.”
I sent the article out and it was quickly turned down by several national magazines; when, a few months later, the local county prosecutor, Thomas A. Hoadley, brought an injunction against three of the demonstrators, officers of the Young Socialists Alliance, for violating a 1951 Indiana Anti-Communism Statute (“It shall be the purpose of the state of Indiana and the people of Indiana to exterminate Communism and Communists, and any or all teachings of the same….”), I revised the article, sent it to The Minority of One, and soon had my second acceptance. (Later that year, when events proliferated, I would write a third article, one which was published in The New Republic.)
The sequence of events began to resemble something from Babbitt. To “clear the way” for a Grand Jury investigation of the “possible involvement” of the YSA in the demonstration of October 24, the young prosecutor dismissed charges against two nonstudents involved. “The important thing, in this case,” he told the press, “is to get this organization off the campus.” He announced that he would consider the constitutionality of the YSA (under the 1951 statute), that he would take the case to the Supreme Court “if necessary,” and that the action would “definitely not be taken as a witch hunt.”
A local grand jury indicted the three officers, but miraculously, the indictment made no mention of the events of October 24—instead it charged the officers with being present at a meeting in which the national secretary of the YSA, Leroy McCrae, had stated that nonviolence might not be the only way for black people to secure political power in places such as Mississippi. The meeting had been held after Hoadley had announced that he would seek to indict the three officers.
Hoadley called the grand jury “courageous,” and told the press that “we want only to stamp out Communism and what it stands for before it gets a foothold here.” Then he added that because the grand jury could not obtain a list of YSA members, he had not been able to cross-check their names against a list of names compiled in his own narcotics investigation “to determine to what extent, if any, marijuana is used to recruit new members in the YSA.” When the indictment was returned, the student senate of I. U. called a special session and went on record—there was one abstention, by a foreign student—as being unanimously “opposed” to the “socialist minority” which was bringing their university into disrepute.
Invited to contribute a guest editorial on the controversy to the local newspaper, The Bloomington Herald-Telephone, Hoadley chose “academic freedom” as his subject. When several faculty members wrote to the paper to point out that fourteen of Hoadley’s seventeen paragraphs were lifted verbatim from a famous A. O. Love-joy speech on academic freedom, Hoadley replied that the Lovejoy speech was more than twenty-eight years old and therefore in the public domain. He added that he had not used quotation marks around Lovejoy’s words because he did not want “to impress the university community with [his] literary ability.”
Hoadley was a rather bungling parody of a Midwest anti-Communist, but what he was a parody of still seemed to me to be the strongest political strain in the central regions of America. The attitudes exemplified by Hoadley, the police, Donovan, the 1951 Statute, the student senate, the grand jury—these were, I continued to believe, the attitudes held by the majority of Hoosiers, and, I inferred (remembering my eight months in Indianapolis), the majority of Americans.
Those who ended by opposing Hoadley (as Stahr and Shaffer did) were, as they had shown earlier, not really so distant from him. As with the man who had provided the atmosphere for the passing of the 1951 Statute, those who objected to Hoadley did so more because of his “methods” than because of his purpose.
I remember discussing the case with one of the university’s best-known professors that spring, a man who considered himself a “liberal.” I told him about my articles, my involvement, and he seemed sympathetic. After a while our discussion passed to another I. U. case, that of a journalism professor who had been brought to Indiana to give the Journalism Department prestige and then had been denied tenure because of several articles he’d written for national magazines in which he’d been critical of the university.
The professor agreed with me that a man’s opinions outside the classroom should have no effect on his position in the university, that it had probably been a mistake to let this professor go, to in effect, fire him. “Still,” he reminded me, “it’s a dirty bird who soils its own nest.”
If such remarks alienated me from many who styled themselves “liberals,” I was no more at home, I found, with the YSA group. Although I did what I could on their behalf, I discovered that their political views impressed me as being enormously deficient in both subtlety and honesty. Most of all, their rhetoric (much of it about The Working Man, the Class Struggle, the Fascist State, etc.) made me twitch. My political reactions remained those of a writer.
I enjoyed being involved in the case; I enjoyed following the day-to-day dramas which attached themselves to events; I enjoyed writing about it, having articles published, getting attention (notoriety) because of my writing (the Herald-Telephone announced the publication of my first article on its front page); I enjoyed receiving long letters from people such as Stahr and Shaffer, from professors at other universities who’d been involved in similar episodes. Though I may have found the people in the YSA simplistic and strident—
incompatible temperamentally—as long as I could separate myself from them (and from everybody else) by setting my views down on paper and by having those views published, I was willing to work with them, for them. I was, in short, able to do something on a sustained basis about the world which, two years before, had paralyzed me; this pleased me, seemed to help lift me from the fearful melancholy depression of the previous two years. My year in Bloomington was a good one. For better or worse, I realized, things were in proportion: helping three indicted students was not an activity which had much in common with my previous campaigns, but that was all right too.
Early in the year—after a free Friday night showing of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky—a friend had introduced me to Betsey. She was with him and I was with another girl—but I couldn’t, for the rest of the evening, take my eyes from hers. Fortunately—we would laugh about this later, we almost laughed out loud that night-she kept hers on mine. We went out together for the first time a few weeks later—the night, in fact, that I finished my first article on the campus events—and we saw one another every day after that.
In the spring, though, after her mother had undergone open-heart surgery, and my father had suffered several severe coronaries, we decided that it would be best to break up. I’d already accepted a University Fellowship to Columbia for the following fall, which I thought meant—since Betsey had another year to go for her degree at Indiana—that things were bound to end. Better, we both reasoned, sooner than later. Then too, I remembered my father reaching under the plastic oxygen tent to take my hand in his (I’d been summoned to New York when he suffered his second coronary), to ask me to be good to my mother—a request which I interpreted at the time as his dying wish that I never marry a non-Jewish girl.
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