As at GM, I began generalizing (if such waste and wealth were running wild at one college…), and devising antic, silent schemes. When the school had its year-end review session I would have only one question: why was a state car available for a professor but not for a welfare recipient?
The school, I said (to myself at first—later to others) was an obscenity and should be closed. We had to take away from the state its ability—its right—to claim that it had an experimental college. Take the money, give it to the Black Panthers, and let them fund us as a free university. Take the money—and just give it away. Why, I asked, was the editor of Time-Life Books, and not one of the school electricians or gardeners, the head of the College Council? And why were students walking across gardens and lawns which they didn’t tend? How could the school consider itself real—set off on the six-hundred-acre estate and arboretum of William Robertson Coe (owner of several other estates, including Buffalo Bill’s 200,000-acre ranch in Cody, Wyoming)—when it had no village store? no bistro?
Betsey and I tried, in our own lives, to maintain as much of what had been good in Spéracèdes as possible—and six months later, we still try: we have no television, no telephone, we buy no newspapers. Though we’ve given up on getting fresh vegetables (those that are called fresh seem to spoil overnight if left out of the refrigerator), or eggs that have taste (the mass-produced eggs in France, Jacques had said, were made by “concentration-camp chickens”)—we still eat long leisurely lunches, which we prepare together, we still take walks after lunch. But life in Spéracèdes, as I’d written over a year before, had “unfitted me for a return to American civilization”—especially to life on Long Island, where everything seems to move on superhighways, where all essential relations (shopping, getting the mail, working) seem impersonal, where everything is arranged and communicated by telephone. And most of all, where the possibility of friendship—built and sustained on a daily basis in a world where the essential parts of day-to-day life are actually and physically shared—is almost nonexistent.
In fact, the only time during my first six months back in America when I felt that I’d been lifted from the severe depression which had immediately become my life was during the student sit-in at the end of the school year. After a few days of living in buildings with students and faculty, I realized that I felt good—and I knew why, made as many analogies as I could. For the week that we occupied buildings—even though the world we lived in was artificial, temporary—we were returned to essential functions: getting food, preparing meals, eating, sleeping, talking. For the first—the only—time, when I would meet somebody, instead of talking about a subject, we would talk about one another—I’d just seen X walking out of the dormitory; Betsey was making a batch of cookies to bring for lunch; Y was looking tired; How did you sleep last night? What was the weather going to be like? So-and-so seemed to be in good form today.
That we shared political enemies, political theories, and political objectives—all right; more important that—if briefly, artificially—I was in a situation among people I was coming to know and like and admire, I was in a situation where, when nobody was talking, I didn’t mind the silence.
“At least,” I would say to people during my first few months back, “it’s good to know that the war in Vietnam is over.” My cynicism trying vainly to mask my frustration, to excuse, in some arch way, the fact that—back in America—I felt (feel) no desire to become involved again in protest against the war, in politics. Not reading papers or watching TV or listening to the news on the radio, it was impossible, walking the streets of the nation, to know there was a war going on in which at least a half million American soldiers were fighting. Despite my perverse refusal to listen to news or to discuss politics, attitudes and opinions trickled in: the entire country, it now seemed, agreed that the war in Vietnam should be ended—how then, could it be that the actual numbers of men in Vietnam, the actual amount of bombing and destruction, the weekly numbers of dead and wounded were greater than they had been two years before, when only a minority of Americans were against the war?
The peace movement, people would tell me, had accomplished a lot in changing the attitudes of Americans toward the war. What was I to do with such a statement? If most Americans were against the war—if the American people had voted in two presidential elections for disengagement from the war—and if the war was larger than it had ever been, the murder and death and destruction greater than they’d ever been, what conclusions did this lead to—about the relation of democratic processes to processes of government, about all the wealth and waste which, home again, assaulted my imagination?
(An item noted just before I left Spéracèdes: one airline company giving a subcontract to another company to develop—not produce—new in-flight ideas for mixes of movies and music and tapes; cost—over ten million dollars—though I didn’t know what to do with such a fact, like the existence of new state cars for faculty members, it seemed to tell me everything I needed to know. Cf., also, my experience working with open housing committees in New York, where I would go in to see about renting an apartment after a nonwhite person had gone in. If, in 1964 and 1965 (before that phenomenon misnamed backlash), in the most liberal city in the most liberal state in America, a city and state which had the strongest antidiscrimination laws in the nation, doctors and lawyers and businessmen who could afford $600-a-month apartments still needed such a committee, were still being refused housing because of race—then this too was all I needed to know in order to imagine what things were like elsewhere, for people without such education, money, position.)
Nothing mattered except what happened: the only yardstick for measuring political protest, I said before we left Spéracèdes, was to ask if it affected the Stock Market or the Gross National Product. The rest, as Jacques would put it, “c’est de la littérature.” But I drew no conclusions from my observations, impressions: I felt, I suppose, what I’d felt before—working in a single community, protesting a particular issue, closing down a particular school, teaching a particular human being—this was work which had nothing to do with those large things which trapped, wounded, and murdered people, and which preserved the continuity of such processes—but, as always, one did the best one could where one could.
Politics, however, in any overt form (except for the minor business at the college), did not now concern me. Having had, for a while, a place to live which we loved, where we lived—and how—seemed suddenly central, all important. Outwardly, back in America, things could not have been better. My life, in September of 1969, had the elements which might have been the matter for the happy ending—the epilogue—of a nineteenth-century novel: Betsey was pregnant again, and, in her seventh month, doing beautifully; I was succeeding beyond any previous hopes with my writing, and (something I’d never let myself hope would be possible) earning enough from it for us to live on; Betsey was painting and we were still spending most days—all day—together; my brother and mother and father were all well and I was relaxed in their company, I enjoyed being with them (for the first time, my father and I could sit in a room together, not speaking, and I could—as I’d done with friends in Spéracèdes—simply enjoy his presence).
Still, this wasn’t enough—still we found (find) ourselves longing for Spéracèdes, find ourselves unable to accept—as real or necessary—life on Long Island, in America. A luxury, of course—symptomatic of the wealth and waste of the land—to even be able to debate the relative merits of Spéracèdes and the United States, to have the choice of one or the other, to even be able to write a narrative such as this, one in which I can reflect on such decisions, on ten years of my life. (Cf., students at Old Westbury considering what kind of college they would like to have. Consider—I had not, until I was back here—what the reaction of a North Vietnamese might be to an ad in The New York Review of Books for the Vietnam Curriculum, to the fact that, while we wage war against them, we are also able—we are free, in the most literal sense—to debate the
rightness and wrongness of what we are doing, to absorb the war into our schools for study and debate. Or, to put it another way, as one young Englishman put it to me, during my second week in Europe: “Funny, ain’t it—that all you Yanks get to come here for your vacations, but I never get to spend my summers in your country—”)
The problem, then, luxurious as it is: having lived in Spéracèdes and having tasted, over the course of sixteen months, the kind of daily life there that I did, I find that I cannot (do not want to) live here. And it will not, I suspect—sense—be substantially different anywhere in America—in California or the Northwest or on a farm in upstate New York or a commune in New Mexico; one goes (I would go) to these places to escape America, and my life would be defined by this escape, by opposition. I would still be living in America, and by now, this obviously has a particular meaning for me. As with the college at Old Westbury, I would say, so with other things: since Old Westbury is in America—part of America—why should (how could) it be better than, different from, America?
Yet—the part I have no reasons for, cannot analyze—I know I can’t live any place but in America. A question—it seems at first—of roots, of history, of my subject (for fiction). But more than this: at the least, I know that, for me, living even semipermanently anywhere outside of America—even in Spéracèdes—seems, in prospect, unreal. Something like the situation—the predicament—of a black man in America; or, minimally, in my own life, analogous to the form that predicament took in the life of one black man. “The most crucial time in my own development,” James Baldwin writes in his “Autobiographical Notes” for Notes of a Native Son, “came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use—I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe.”
The problem—for Baldwin, too—has something luxurious about it; the terms of reference, the feelings are distinctly a writer’s. They do not, at least at first, seem to deal with the everyday problems of masses of people who live in America’s cities, trapped (at least at first) by things physical: color, ignorance, poverty.
Back in America, everything good—my writing, my life with my wife, the times spent with friends—seems a refuge from everything bad, from everything else. So, while living and working here, Betsey and I talk endlessly to one another about our situation, about what we’ll do next—though lately it seems, we do this less. Having found, temporarily, a place that was home for us, a place in which we had a better life, day by day, than we thought possible, we now find that we do not want to settle for less; and we know that we are, at the moment, lucky enough not to have to settle for less. Give things time, we say—a year, a year and a half—and if life here is still intolerable, if our friends are still there, we’ll return to Spéracèdes. Long-range plans and decisions stay unresolved, our life remains transient (we systematically shed possessions)—and that’s all right, too. The readiness, as always, is all.
I began this book, I thought, in order to trace my own political activities—their origins, and where they might lead; yet I end without having really done either—I end without any conclusions, political or otherwise, with—at the most—merely the attempt (doubtless an attempt which is politically counterrevolutionary) to discover, in terms more personal than political, who I am and where I’ve been. I.e., in the fall of 1969 it seems enough to be finishing the narrative of some of the things which, in my own life, I thought had their beginnings at General Motors in the summer of 1960—not in order to persuade or convince or prove, but simply because it is what I have been writing.
Spéracèdes, France—Old Westbury, New York March, 1968—September, 1969
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