Parenthesis

by Jay Neugeboren

  My brief research shows that the law requiring persons to carry a draft card is merely an extension of the law which requires you to register for the Draft at age 18. The penalty for not carrying is the same for not registering—up to 5 years and $10,000. Since you have already registered, and have carried the card for years-it seems foolish to make a moral issue out of this—especially since you now state that you don’t particularly believe in handing in draft cards anymore…the only time that you should fight is when they actually decide to draft you…at this stage it seems ridiculous to thumb your nose at them and ask them to punish you for some silly little infraction…. Ask for the card back and say no more…. If you say it’s a matter of conscience—I wont believe you because you have already admitted that draft card protests have no more meaning to you. Please write your draft board now.

  He signed the letter—General Hershey.

  An hour after his letter arrived I’d written to my draft board, telling them that they could return my card to me, and I’d delivered the letter to Georgette. I shook my head, then proceeded to visit each of my friends, telling them of what I’d done. The point, I said (still having to find some justification—moral, political, and metaphysical—for every action I took in this world), was not to give the shits who were killing us any more power than they already had. The point was not to be absolutely moral when dealing with amoral bureaucracies. The point was not to let one’s life be destroyed in symbolic skirmishes. The point was to read carefully what I’d written on my thirtieth birthday…and there were, as always, many more points. I felt high, spun around, relieved—and then, strangely, almost drunkenly pleased with myself. Had I actually considered—for over a month—living in semipermanent exile? (Until I received a new draft card two months later—1A classification—the possibility that I hadn’t written in time to counteract the delinquency notice would remain.) Once I’d asked for the card back, I had to wonder what had made me become so morally obstinate—and once I wondered about this, I found myself smiling, dizzy with the knowledge that I had not, after all, changed so much in all the years since GM—since my first political campaign, and that first novel which had preceded (had prophesied) that campaign.

  Our life continued in Spéracèdes—except that we now began to make plans for returning to America. There were no particular reasons for coming back—just the feeling that we wanted to (and that we wanted to return when we weren’t forced to). If for nothing else, to see if—after Spéracèdes—we would be able to live in America —si on pourrait supporter la vie là-bas. I’d already accepted a teaching position in New York—at a new experimental college on Long Island (State University of New York, College at Old Westbury), where there would be, for the first two years, less than 250 students, where all administrators would also teach, where students would share fully in planning and decision making, where housing (on campus—in former servants’ quarters) would be provided for us. It sounded ideal—if at some point we had to go back (because we wanted to), and if going back I would have to work somewhere (we would have to eat, we would have to live somewhere), I didn’t think we would ever do much better than this: no hassle about finding a place to live, a college which—it seemed from the literature they were sending me—might have a greater sense of community, of “relevance” (every student would be required to spend at least one year away from the school working or studying—in ghettos, foreign countries, etc.) than most others. “Responsibility for one’s own living and learning,” the college catalog stated, “in college as in life, will be the operating principle.”

  Life in Spéracèdes was as it had been. The daily round of our life was the same, and—in good times and bad—we continued to share it with our friends. In the winter of 1968–69, the bad times outnumbered the good (Nancy Cusack died, some close friends went through bad times, other families talked of leaving Spéracèdes). But the essential quality of our lives remained good, whole. Betsey and I spent more time than we ever had with our friends—and with each other. We still woke early, I walked into town for the day’s bread, we ate breakfast together, I got the mail, I went up to my room to work (to read, write, stare at the sea), Betsey painted, we had long leisurely lunches, took walks, brief trips to nearby villages, spent evenings with friends, or at home, reading, talking.

  Our refrigerator had now been borrowed by Clément for his store, and, plugged in twenty-four-hours a day, it became the village’s frozen food department. Bene finished building his house and we had a huge feast to celebrate—in fact, Sundays had become ritual days for feasts; every week we seemed to find one excuse or another—and when we didn’t have excuses, we had the feasts anyway: all of us together (with children, our group would number between thirty and forty), singing, talking, drinking, eating cous-cous or paella or lamb (which we’d roast—whole or half—over an open pit), playing boules, gathering in the bistro for coffee and more drinks.

  And, as noted, the first draft of this book finished—and several other projects completed (a collection of stories, a screenplay)—my own desire to write seemed gone, and I didn’t mind. We considered changing our plans from time to time—we told ourselves that our life in Spéracèdes was good, that we were happy together there, that—if we left and then returned—things would not be the same, that we would not find a comparable life anywhere in America, that there was still time to turn down the job and just stay on—but in the end we always came to the conclusion that we wanted to go back, that we would stick to our plans. We would see friends and family, we would put away some money again—if things became intolerable for us—we could always pick up and leave, return to Spéracèdes. (Clément and Fernande told us that they would not rent our house in September until we told them—100 percent—that we were not coming back.)

  At the end of March, after parties, tears, good-byes, we set sail from Cannes (Betsey’s paintings rolled up and hidden in our trunks to hide them from French customs—who didn’t even bother to look; all paintings which leave France must be passed on by the Beaux-Arts)—and ten days later, we arrived in America, where the U. S. customs agent opened every one of our packages, every piece of luggage, made us wash dried mud from our boots, tapped on the sides of our trunks in search of false compartments, went through the titles of our books. We drove across the city and when I stopped for gas, a young black guy in a baseball cap, eyes at half-mast, held the pump hose and asked me about the foreign license plate on my car—my first conversation in America. I told him we’d just returned from over a year and a half in France.

  He shook his head. “Oh man,” he asked. “Why’d you come back?” His eyes opened. “Man,” he said, “it’s worse here than Vietnam…. Soon as I get through school, I’m gettin’ out.”

  That morning, after not having slept all night, Betsey and I had come on deck just before six—at the moment that our ship passed under the Verrazano Bridge. The ship turned, headed toward Manhattan Island. The skyline seemed changed—squarer, less varied. The city looked vast, huge—and something I hadn’t expected—strong. It didn’t, however, look good; it did not, as I’d expected it would, feel good to be home. As the ship made its way up the Hudson—as we passed downtown, the Lower West Side—I spoke for the first time: “Bring this down—?” I said. “Not a chance.” Stop it—maybe…paralyze it from time to time—but destroy it, overthrow it (whatever that might mean)—never. Okay, I said to myself—even before we’d left the pier (listening to the dock workers, looking at the muddy, filthy water, watching the gulls, watching a longshoreman slip a huge payoff to a customs inspector, having to go through every item I’d brought back with me)—okay, this is what you came back for—if only for five minutes: you made the right decision, you had to return, you’ll write the new novel.

  There were, predictably, too many impressions at first. Things were big, dirty, noisy, overwhelming. Cars were enormous. People’s faces were gray, and sad. The bright-colored clothes, draped on tired bodies, unsmiling faces (sometimes the complexions s
eemed almost universally jaundiced), made Americans look like dolls with glaring doll’s clothing. Especially so with old people-women with painted hair and lips; men in absurdly bright colors.

  Life seemed hard, people seemed unhappy, food was dreadful—I spent much of my first week reading the lists of chemicals on all the packaged food I ate—everybody seemed to work hard, even when they were not working, all of life—work, friendships, family—seemed fragmented, compartmentalized, the opposite of what it had been in Spéracèdes. In my memory, the German and Swiss people we’d met on our trip—my sense of their lives—made them now seem like relaxed Mediterraneans. Conversations tired me more than I believed possible—everything one said, even in passing, among friends, seemed to have some object. Conversation was not merely conversation; it seemed to need, always, to have some issue, some profit, some gain. Everything—even in the newest, most modern parts of the city and Long Island seemed to be temporary, in a state of disrepair. And yet, as I sensed such things during my first few days back, despite the fact that everything seemed to be in some stage of deterioration, the country seemed unbelievably strong. For so much waste to exist in the midst of so much affluence (my only theory during my first week), the basic productive power of the economy (and the empire) had to be enormous.

  The school I was to teach at was a disappointment. The fault, again, as at GM, probably lay in me, in my expectations. Had I actually believed that a radically experimental college could be sponsored by the state of New York? Had I really hoped that—amidst the expressways and shopping centers and suburban towns of Long Island—one could have an island of relevance, a genuine community? With only eighty-three students, I discovered, the college was already a full-scale bureaucracy. There were, by count, more full-time administrators (fourteen) than faculty (eleven), and the total support staff-secretaries seemed to be everywhere—numbered over sixty. I received three or four memos a day—reports, studies, notices for committee meetings, evaluations of reports; in the president’s office there were shelves lined with over seventy different handouts, mostly reprints of his own speeches about the new experimental college of the State University of New York.

  The total number of full-time faculty and administrators (I couldn’t keep track of the part-time teachers, consultants, and staff) was twenty-five, and there seemed to be almost that many political factions. I was staggered—depressed—most by the sheer amount of mistrust and double-dealing that one year had bred—business on campus seemed to be conducted as much by rumor, gossip, and private denunciation as by anything else. Faculty members despised one another, and said so. Several of the faculty who supported the president against the students, at the same time drafted a letter to Albany, asking for the president’s resignation, a letter they were ready to use should the president have lost a major battle with the students.

  The housing which had been promised to us had disappeared (as we were about to arrive, the school discovered that it had promised and given out more campus housing—less than ten spots—than it had), but at the last minute temporary quarters were found for us. Two weeks before we’d sailed I’d had what was probably my best indication of what was to come when I’d received a telegram asking if I could report the following September, instead of in April—this after I’d sent letters, over the course of a year, asking, in each one, exactly when I would be needed on campus and what my duties would be when I got there. When I arrived, administrators began asking me what I would like to do. A seminar they had hoped I would, upon my arrival, “save,” had dissolved sometime during the ten days it took for me to cross the ocean—why then, they suggested, didn’t I “take my time” and use the months of April and May “to get to know people”? For this, I gasped, I would be paid over $1000 a month. As for the promise of partnership for students—though the mandate of the school, made official in the State University’s 1966 Master Plan, stated that the college “would admit students to full partnership in the academic world,” this was taken by the administration to mean that students would be “consulted” on all major decisions; administrators would, still, make the final decisions themselves. They did. Thus, though a joint student-faculty committee to select new faculty had, in the absence of departments, submitted a list of ten new faculty recommendations to the president—the president had vetoed two of the ten choices, and had made an offer to another faculty prospect who had been rejected by the faculty selection committee. Not a bad percentage, of course, but—given the fact that nobody could recall the last time a president of a major college or university had vetoed even a single faculty recommendation, and given the particular mandate of the college at Old Westbury—this became one fact among many that the students would decide they couldn’t live with. And so—seven weeks after I arrived—confrontation, occupation of buildings, a sit-in, student demands—and (as someone pointed out to me I’d predicted in what I’d written on my thirtieth birthday) I found myself on the side of the students, in the buildings, drafting—on the first day—a statement of no confidence in the president and of support for the students which I got the majority of the faculty to sign.

  But such things—political, personal, predictable—were not what impressed me most about the school. It was—despite its miniature size—a college like other colleges; it was neither “relevant” nor “experimental” (by the following fall the college, which had been given a virtual carte blanche for innovation and experimentation, had settled down to a vague program, one which virtually excluded “field work” for all but those students specializing in Urban Studies, and one which included three programs: a Disciplines College (courses in modern literature and philosophy), a standard model Urban Studies College, and—for everybody else—a General Program that had already been tried and tested for four years at San José State College.) The college was, however, still different in one crucial way—in its claim to be different. This was a college which had been asked by the Chancellor of the State University of New York “to review all the conventional ingredients…and break whatever barriers may be in the way.” It was a college which tried endlessly to explain away the phrase “full partnership”—but which would not give it up.

  By the fall of 1969 the start of its second pilot year, the president—a former Associate Director of the Peace Corps, an adviser to President Kennedy on civil rights, a lawyer with a special interest in civil liberties—had resigned to become president of Bryn Mawr. His own understanding of educational innovation, experiment, and civil liberties was evidenced for me several weeks after I arrived, when the student literary magazine was seized from the mailing room and not permitted to go out to students, because, as the president explained in a letter to the editor, it would probably be judged to be “obscene.” While “as a lawyer,” he said, he might defend the magazine’s “right to publish” what it chose, he was still an “officer of the University”; his reason for seizing the magazine then, was because it was his judgment that its contents—specifically, a cartoon by R. Crumb, reprinted from Head-Comix—might “offend the moral views of the majority of the people of New York State who support this college.” (When he first saw the magazine, the president had sent a messenger to the office of admissions to find out if R. Crumb was going to be an Old Westbury student the following fall.)

  All of this, then, was not surprising, and, after a month or two I seemed to get used to it. What continued to amaze me, what still amazes me after a half year back was something else: the funds that kept being poured into the college for buildings, supplies, consultants, salaries, secretaries, programs, printing, cars. Where, I kept asking, was all that money coming from?

  I felt, I said during the first few weeks, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—i.e., that I was, quite literally, plugged into the nation’s power supply: I received housing, an office, a telephone; my postage was paid for, my writing supplies were provided (there was a carton of supplies on my desk when I arrived—appointment calendar, marble stand with pen, paper, pads, stapler, stapler
remover, tape, boxes of throw-a-way manifold carbon paper sets—in which a sheet of carbon paper was used only one time (“Your time is worth more to your employer typing than salvaging carbon paper.”)—this after years of making four and five carbon copies of novels and stories on my portable typewriter, trying to figure out whether to use each carbon nine, ten, or eleven times); and—most amazing of all—there were new state cars with official state seals on their sides, available for my use. (For its eighty-three students and two dozen faculty and administrators, there were five state cars; when the school grew to 222 students—and to a staff of over 100—in the fall of 1969, five additional cars were delivered.) How, I kept wondering, could this be? How could the system support so many planners, so much nonproductive labor and material?

  Where, I kept asking, was all the money coming from? The school’s operating budget was slightly over one million dollars for the first year, slightly under two million for the second year (the cars came out of a separate budget in Albany, and not out of the school’s budget). In a speech given shortly before his resignation, the college president revealed that the “promise of ‘full partnership’” was “taken from an early memorandum on the college by [the Vice Chancellor], which was written in the aftermath of the explosion at Berkeley, at a time when the University was anxious to get ahead of the student revolution.” The advance construction budget for building a school whose origin, whose reason for existence, lay in such notions—for building a school that would have a maximum of five thousand students when completed, was—I still can’t believe it (and the figure will doubtless be higher by the time construction is finished)—one hundred million dollars.