It was at this point, out of earnestness and without seeing how it would be taken by the public, that Corde began to speak in his articles of “superfluous populations,” “written off,” “doomed peoples.” That didn’t go down well. You could use terms from sociology or Durkheim or Marx, you could speak of anomie or the lumpenproletariat, the black underclass, of economically redundant peasantries, the Third World, the effects of opium on the Chinese masses in the nineteenth century—as long as it was sufficiently theoretical it went over easily enough. You could discuss welfare politics, medical and social work bureaucracies, without objection. But when Corde began to make statements to the effect that in the wild, monstrous setting of half-demolished cities the choice that was offered was between a slow death and a sudden one, between attrition and quick destruction, he enraged a good many subscribers. Something went wrong. He wrote about whirling souls and became a whirling soul himself, lifted up, caught up, spinning, streaming with passions, compulsive protests, inspirations. He experienced, as he saw when he looked back, a kind of air anarchy. He began to use strange expressions. He wrote, for instance, that Toby Winthrop was a “reconstituted” human being, a “murderer-savior” type; that Winthrop was therefore an advanced modern case. Why? Because the advanced modern consciousness was a reduced consciousness inasmuch as it contained only the minimum of furniture that civilization was able to install (practical judgments, bare outlines of morality, sketches, cartoons instead of human beings); and this consciousness, because its equipment was humanly so meager, so abstract, was basically murderous. It was for this reason that murder was so easy to “understand” (or had he written “extenuate”? Thinness for thinness). He never did get around to explaining how we must reconstitute ourselves. Because of the incompleteness of his argument he confused many readers. Some wrote contemptuously, others were incensed. He hadn’t meant to make such a stir. It took him by surprise.
But by far the most controversial part of his article was the interview with Sam Varennes. To this Varennes, the Public Defender in the Spofford Mitchell murder case, Corde had very nearly spoken his full mind. The results, in the lingo people were using nowadays, were “counterproductive.”
Corde had gone to see Sam Varennes to discuss the case and to ask permission to interview Mitchell. Varennes was interested in publicity, but in the end he and his defense team decided that any pretrial media coverage would be prejudicial to their client. Corde had, however, reported his conversation with Varennes in full.
The Mitchell case was not exceptional. There were thousands of similar crimes in police files across the country. But there were special circumstances which made it important to Corde.
The victim was a young suburban housewife, the mother of two small children. She had just parked in a lot near the Loop when Mitchell approached and forced her at gunpoint into his own car. The time was about 2 P.M. Spofford Mitchell’s Pontiac had been bought from a Clark Street dealer just after his recent release from prison. Corde didn’t know how the purchase was financed. (The dealer wouldn’t say.) In the front seat, Mitchell forced Mrs. Sathers to remove her slacks, to prevent escape. He drove to a remote alley and assaulted her sexually. Then he locked her into the trunk of his Pontiac. He took her out later in the day and raped her again. By his own testimony, this happened several times. At night he registered in a motel on the far South Side. He managed to get her from the trunk into the room without being seen. Possibly he was seen; it didn’t seem to matter to those who saw. In the morning he led her out and locked her in the trunk again. At ten o’clock he was obliged to appear at a court hearing to answer an earlier rape charge. He parked the Pontiac, with Mrs. Sathers still in the trunk, in the official lot adjoining the court building. The rape hearing was inconclusive. When it ended he drove at random about the city. On the West Side that afternoon, passersby heard cries from the trunk of a parked car. No one thought to take down the license number; besides, the car pulled away quickly. Towards daybreak of the second day, for reasons not explained in the record, Spofford Mitchell let Mrs. Sathers go, warning her not to call the police. He watched from his car as she went down the street. This was in a white working-class neighborhood. She rang several doorbells, but no one would let her in. An incomprehensibly frantic woman at five in the morning—people wanted no part of her. They were afraid. As she turned away from the third or fourth closed door, Mitchell pulled up and reclaimed her. He drove to an empty lot, where he shot her in the head. He covered her body with trash.
She was soon discovered. Exceptionally prompt, the police descended on Mitchell. He was found in the garage behind his father’s house, cleaning out the trunk of his Pontiac, hosing out the excrements. He confessed, then retracted, confessed again. He was being held in County Jail for trial. These were the facts Corde learned from the papers. He was then preparing his article. What might the real content of these facts be? He made inquiries and was referred to the Public Defender in charge of the case, Mr. Sam Varennes. In Harper’s he gave an account of his long conversation with Varennes, whom he described as
… a strong bald young man with prominent blond eyebrows and a wide throat, a college athlete in his time. The views we exchanged were enlightened, intelligent, liberal—did us both credit. To be appointed Defender you generally needed some sort of backup or sponsorship, still such appointees are often well-qualified conscientious public servants. Mr. Varennes is a scholarly lawyer, well nigh a Doctor of Jurisprudence. I think he said Stanford.
He asked first what feelings I had about the case. I admitted that I was subject to claustrophobia, and that I believed I might rather be killed than get into the trunk of a car at gunpoint, that sometimes I had fantasies in which I said, “You’ll have to shoot me.” But if I were pushed in and had the lid slammed on me I would hunt for a tire tool to hit the gunman with at the first opportunity. To lie in a trunk was like live burial. I could never endure it. I then said, “Only think how Mrs. Sathers must have begged the man every time he opened the lid.”
He seemed, to my own surprise, slightly surprised by this. “You think she prayed for her life?”
“Begged or prayed—‘Let me out!’”
Mr. Varennes did not care for what I was telling him. He had put himself in a posture to make an effective argument for his client (a man, after all, a human being like the rest of us), so he was much disturbed. I think also that I myself—the interviewer—disturbed him. I was disturbed. He said, “You suppose? I hadn’t thought about that….”
I said, “Oh, but she must have.”
“And he was indifferent, are you saying?”
“I wouldn’t say indifferent. I’m trying to guess whether he understood her emotions. If you say something in all the earnestness of your heart, and wonder why this doesn’t … with this earnestness it must—it must get through. If he had understood her pleading he would have been a different kind of murderer.”
“The kind who feeds on the victim’s pain, like this mass killer Gacey, who specialized in boys? Part of his sexual kick? Subtler and more perverted …?”
“Gacey seems to have tortured and mocked his victims.”
“So you don’t believe Mitchell was the same?”
“Classification of psychopaths is technically beyond me. My only guess about Mitchell is that he was just bound for death. If you’ve taken that fast direct track, you may be deaf and blind to something so exotic as the pleading of a woman whom you’ve locked in your car trunk.”
“A more primitive person,” said Varennes.
I saw that the Defender was examining me on my social views. Mr. Varennes is a muscular man. Even his throat has muscles, a pillar throat. I think he pumps iron. He said next, “As part of the defense we may argue that Mrs. Sathers accepted the situation.”
“Does he say she did?”
“Some of the time she rode in the front seat with him. She was seen by witnesses when he stopped at a bar to buy a bottle of Seven-Up. When he went in to get the drink and left her, she sat and waited. She didn’t run away. You might say he had tied her feet.”
“I didn’t. But it’s probable that she was dazed.”
“As dazed as all that?”
“Felt she was already destroyed. There must be a sense of complicity in rapes. The sex nerves can stream all by themselves. If people think they’re going to be murdered anyway when it’s over, they may desperately let go.”
“Sexually?”
“Yes. In spite of themselves, spray it all out. They’re going to die, you see. Good-bye to life.”
“That’s quite a theory.”
“Maybe. But that’s quite a situation,” I said. “And with the special confused importance, the peculiar curse of sexuality or carnality we’re under—we’ve placed it right in the center of life and connect it with savagery and criminality—it’s not at all a wild conjecture. The truth may even require a wilder interpretation. Our conception of physical life and of pleasure is completely death-saturated. The full physical emphasis is fatal. It cuts us off. The fullest physical joining may always be flavored with death, therefore. This was why I said Spofford Mitchell was on the fast track for death—fast, clutching, dreamlike, orgastic. Grab it, do it, die.”
I reminded myself that I was talking with a gymnast. He had backed off his head as if to get a different slant, and took me in again, extremely curious. So I resumed the interviewer’s role. “It may be wrong to pry into the last hours of Mrs. Sathers. Well, we were discussing why she didn’t make a run for it when he went into the bar. Is it a fact that witnesses saw her waiting alone? …”
“I’ve taken the depositions.”
“I’m trying to imagine the despair that kept her from opening the door. And suppose he had chased her down the street; would anybody have helped her?”
“Maybe not, against an armed man. Yes, when you put it that way. I suppose that’s what the prosecution would say.” His next comment was, “My team and I are on these homicides year in year out. We can’t get up the same fervor as an outsider.”
I made a particular effort now to recover my interviewer’s detachment or professional cool. I am obliged to admit that I never know why I say certain things when I’m agitated. It was nice of him to call it “fervor"; it was far more insidious, a radical disturbance. But he was a nice man. His looks appealed to me. I liked his serious eyes and strong bald head. And this induced me to talk more.
His examination continuing, for he was examining me (as if there were something about me that was not strictly speaking contemporary), he tried me on the professional side and invited me to discuss the situation in broader terms—the mood of the country, the inner city, urban decay, political questions. He asked me to describe the pieces I intended to write. Why was I doing them, and what would they be like? I explained that the Cordes had moved up to Chicago from Joliet more than a century ago and that I had been born on the North Side and thought it would be a good idea to describe the city as I had known it, and that my aim was more pictorial than analytical. I had looked up my high school zoology teacher, for instance, whom I had helped with the animals, feeding them and cleaning the cages. Also a self-educated Polish barber who used to lecture boys on Spengler’s Decline of the West while he cut their hair. I had traced him to Poznan, where he was now living on his Social Security checks from America. I revisited the Larrabee Street YMCA. Also the Loop. The Loop’s beaneries, handbooks, dinky dives and movie palaces were wiped out. Gigantic office towers had risen everywhere. Good-bye forever to the jazz musicians, and the boxing buffs who hung around the gymnasiums, to the billiard sharks from Bensinger’s on Randolph Street. Then I mentioned a number of contemporary subjects, among them the new housing developments south of the Loop in the disused freight yards; and the mammoth Deep Tunnel engineering project, the Cloaca Maxima one hundred and thirty miles long and three hundred feet beneath the city. Not wishing to ruffle him, I made no reference to my interest in the abuse of “immunities” under federal law by U.S. attorneys (refractory witnesses who rejected the immunity offer were sentenced for contempt of court; judges had the right to send them to jail for a year). It would have done me no good to discuss this with Mr. Varennes. Nor did I mention my interest in the case of Rufus Ridpath, the same people who had dumped Ridpath having perhaps appointed Varennes.
Whether I could be trusted, what my angle was, why I wasn’t somehow one hundred percent contemporary in my opinions—these were the Public Defender’s questions. I came well accredited—journalist, professor, dean. But in spite of these credentials and the prospect of favorable publicity for his team, I was suspect, he smelled trouble.
He was right, too. A certain instability …
Corde laid aside Valeria’s copy of Harper’s and tried again, re-framing the interview, as if he intended to write a new version, wider in perspective, closer to the real facts, taking bigger forces into account. The meeting with Varennes was one of those occasions when (if you are like Albert Corde) you are strongly tempted to say what is really on your mind. Very dangerous. In ordinary life you dig far below your real thoughts. But if you come soaring by, why shouldn’t the fellow shoot you down? On the other hand, he may be the exceptional case, and perhaps he won’t shoot. True, Varennes was running any number of dependability tests. Did I play by Chicago rules or would I cut some exotic caper and embarrass or damage him? For his part, the Provost had decided that I didn’t accept the Chicago rules. He had trusted me, and I had brought tons of trouble down on him. But Varennes also buttered me up, you might say. He led me on. He said that on his first undergraduate holiday in Paris he had read my columns in the Herald Tribune. He asked whether I was familiar with Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address. Yes, and here and there I agreed with it. I hedged a little.
Varennes was checking my papers, as it were, to see whether my liberal sympathies were in order. I said that liberalism had never accepted the Leninist premise that this was an age of wars and revolutions. Where the Communists saw class war, civil war, pictures of catastrophe, we only saw temporary aberrations. Capitalistic democracies could never be at home with the catastrophe outlook. We are used to peace and plenty, we are for everything nice and against cruelty, wickedness, craftiness, monstrousness. Worshipers of progress, its dependents, we are unwilling to reckon with villainy and misanthropy, we reject the horrible—the same as saying we are anti-philosophical. Our outlook requires the assumption that each of us is at heart trustworthy, each of us is naturally decent and wills the good. The English-speaking world is temperamentally like this. You see it in the novels of Dickens, clearly. In his world, there is suffering, there is evil, betrayal, corruption, savagery, sadism, but the ordeals end and decent people arrange a comfortable existence for themselves, make themselves cozy. You may say that was simply Victorianism, but it wasn’t—isn’t. Modern businessmen and politicians, if they’re going to give billions in credit to the other side, don’t want to think about an epoch of wars and revolutions. They need to think about contractual stability, and therefore assume the basic seriousness of the authorities in Communist countries—their counterparts, officials, practical people like themselves, but with different titles.
More of this real-sounding discussion, mutually comforting ideas. Those were the stillborn babies of intellect. Dead, really. I realized that long ago. They originate in the brain and die in the brain. Although it’s true enough that a simple belief in progress goes with a deformed conception of human nature.
But Varennes got a bang out of this discussion. He didn’t want all the time to be thinking about lousy rapes and murders. He knitted his fingers and said he had been reading a new study of the Munich mentality—Chamberlain’s inability to dope out Hitler’s designs. He asked me, “Where did you get your own catastrophe exposure?”
I said, “In Germany in the forties when I was young. But probably even more by what I read as a young kid in my father’s library. He was an artilleryman in the First World War and collected books on the subject. I read a great deal at an impressionable age about trench warfare. In some sectors they paved trenches in winter with frozen bodies to protect the feet of the Tommies. You knew it was spring when the corpses began to cave in under your boots. I didn’t stop with Remarque and Barbusse, or Kipling. I went into the memoirs of infantrymen and sappers. I recall an eyewitness account of rats eating their way into corpses, entering at the liver and gnawing their way upwards, getting so fat they had trouble squeezing out again at the mouth. There should be a shorthand for facts of that category. Or maybe there ought to be a supplement to the Book of Common Prayer to cover them. They have rearranged our souls. This is Lenin’s age of wars and revolutions. The idea has gotten around by now.”
The Public Defender said, “Except the Americans? The last of the ideology-negative nations?”
Needing time to think over these propositions, Varennes turned his head to one side, looking out from the big but unopenable window of his air-conditioned office. He was a steady and strong man. He would be steady when he worked out at the gym; also steady and strong while he was cutting his medium-rare New York sirloin at Gene and Georgetti’s; presumably he would be strong in the sack, a pillar of muscle on the bosom of some swelling, soft girl. I, instead, was folded skinny into my chair, hands clasped low in my lap (between my cambered thighs—the legs criticized by my nephew), with my swelled eyes, yoked goggles, whitening brow hairs, pale dish face and long, uncomplaisant (only complaisant-looking) mouth. Varennes went on, “Our catastrophe is these inner city slums? Or—tell me if I follow you—the Third World erupting all over?” And as well as I can remember, he went on to say I was suggesting that a man like Mitchell was an unconscious agent of world catastrophe, or an involuntary one. “Do you identify him with terrorists or Third World fanatics? Are you asking whether we—the bourgeois democracies—are capable of coming to grips with the catastrophe mentality?”
The thought I had then I can recall clearly. I said that America no more knew what to do with this black underclass than it knew what to do with its children. It was impossible for it to educate either, or to bind either to life. It was not itself securely attached to life just now. Sensing this, the children attached themselves to the black underclass, achieving a kind of coalescence with the demand-mass. It was not so much the inner city slum that threatened us as the slum of innermost being, of which the inner city was perhaps a material representation. As I spelled this out I felt that I looked ailing and sick. A kind of hot haze came over me. I felt my weakness as I approached the business of the soul—its true business in this age. Here a dean (or a writer of magazine articles) came to see a public defender to talk about a limited matter and their discussion became unlimited—their business was not being transacted. I was losing Mr. Varennes. Anguish beyond the bounds of human tolerance was not a subject a nice man like Mr. Varennes was ready for on an ordinary day. But I (damn!), starting to collect material for a review of life in my native city, and finding at once wounds, lesions, cancers, destructive fury, death, felt (and how quirkily) called upon for a special exertion—to interpret, to pity, to save! This was stupid. It was insane. But now the process was begun, how was I to stop it? I couldn’t stop it.
Varennes seemed to glimpse this and he said, “It’s still not clear to me what you have in mind, overall.”
I took a different tack for the moment. I said, “You may have seen a long article in the paper recently. Fifty prominent people were interviewed on what Chicago needs to make it more exciting and dynamic.”
“I think I saw that.”
“Some of these people were lawyers, some were architects, one the owner of a ball club; also, business executives, advertising men, journalists and TV commentators, musicians, artistic directors, publishers, city planners, urbanologists, a famous linebacker, merchandising big shots, et cetera.”
“The beautiful people,” said Varennes.
“Well, now, some said we needed outdoor cafés like Paris or Venice, and others that we should have developments like Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco or Faneuil Hall in Boston. One wanted a gambling casino atop the Hancock Building; another that the banks of the Chicago River should be handsomely laid out. Or that there should be cultural meeting places; or more offbeat dining places, or discos. A twenty-four-hour deli. A better shake for the handicapped, especially those who use wheelchairs. But no one mentioned the terror. About the terrible wildness and dread in this huge place—nothing. About drugs, about guns …”
“Yes,” Varennes said, “but that’s hardly a serious matter, the opinions of those people, what the interior decorators are saying, what the feature editors print.”
“Quite right, but it made me think it was high time to write a piece, since I grew up here. Several generations of Cordes …”
Varennes then said that we had had a very thoughtful exchange, he and I, and that was nice in its way (but what of it? by implication). I had to agree. We sat there explaining evils to each other, to pass them off somehow, redistribute the various monstrous elements, and compose something the well-disposed liberal democratic temperament could live with. Nobody actually said, “An evil has been done.” No, it was rather, “An unfortunate crazed man destroyed a woman, true enough, but it would be wrong of us to constitute ourselves judges of this crime since its causes lie in certain human and social failures.” A fine, broad-minded conclusion, and does us credit. Although real intelligence is too vigilant to accept this credit and suggests to us all (since it is universal, the common property of all human beings) that this is only a form, and a far from distinguished form, of mutual aid.
Varennes went on, “I don’t know what you’d get out of talking with Spofford Mitchell. I’d have to take this up with my team, and I’d have to ask Spofford, too. I have to respect his rights. I guess you would find it interesting to see where he is. The more serious homicide cases are way down below. The officers don’t even open their doors at mealtimes down there. They push their trays under the doors. Then the rats come along and lick the icing off the bars.”
“Icing?”
Varennes said, “The kitchens bake cake….”
The look we exchanged over the cake was singular. But I broke it off, and backed down. I said, why not—cake and icing, why not? And it was too bad about the extra-security cells. I changed the subject. Of course I didn’t want to get in the way, infringe on Mitchell’s rights in any way or hamper his defense. He said he aimed to save Spofford Mitchell from the chair. I asked, was this a professional aim or a moral-legal one—was he speaking as a lawyer who didn’t like to lose a case or did he have an obligation to save the man’s life. He was not glad to hear this question. He was uptight as he said he saw no conflict, and what a bad gang the prosecution was. They kept a tally on their office wall. For a death sentence they chalked up a skull and crossbones.
Then he turned about and took the initiative from me. He became the questioner. He said I came down to inspect the Public Defender’s office and put him on the defensive as a representative of the educated middle class as if I thought he held a sinecure, and was self-indulgent. At least this mass of trained muscle could speak honestly. The base of his big throat became charged with emotion. He wasn’t angry yet, but a certain amount of indignation was developing, and he said that he didn’t know yet where I stood, or from what point of view I was asking him whether he was being professional or moral.
Well, high feeling was—or might be—a true sign of earnestness. This was better than the first stage of conversation, in which we stated views that might begin to be serious—points for culture and serious concern earned on both sides.
In this phase of the talk I was quite happy, in a whirling disoriented way. I didn’t expect him to let me interview Spofford Mitchell (I was a dangerous person), but it was in its way a satisfactory afternoon.
I said, “You’re feeling out my racial views. No serious American can allow himself to be suspected of prejudice. This forces us to set aside the immediate data of experience. Because when we think concretely or preverbally, we do see a black skin or a white one, a broad nose or a thin one, just as we see a red apple on a green tree. These are percepts. They should not be under a taboo.”
“Well, are they?”
“Yes, we try to stretch the taboo back to cover even these pre-verbal and concrete observations and simple identifications. Yes, you and I have been playing badminton with this subject for quite a while, with a shuttlecock flying back and forth over the taboo net.”
Then he said, “Tell me, Dean, how do you see the two people in this case?”
“I see more than a white mask facing a black one. I see two pictures of the soul and spirit—if you will have it straight. In our flesh and blood existence I think we are pictures of something. So I see a picture, and a picture. Race has no bearing on it. I see Spofford Mitchell and Sally Sathers, two separatenesses, two separate and ignorant intelligences. One is staring at the other with terror, and the man is filled with a staggering passion to break through, in the only way he can conceive of breaking through—a sexual crash into release.”
“Release! I see. From fever and delirium.”
“From all the whirling. The horror is in the literalness—the genital literalness of the delusion. That’s what gives the curse its finality. The literalness of bodies and their members—outsides without insides.”
Sam Varennes seemed to give this some thought. He must actually have been thinking how to get rid of me. We’re usually waiting for somebody to clear out and let us go on with the business of life (to cultivate the little obsessional garden). But my case was more special—I had just exposed myself as a nut, a crank in dean’s clothing. That was our conversation seen from his side. Well, you never can tell what conclusions a man may reach when you try especially hard to talk straight to him. Neither party is good at it. No one is used to it. And all individual or true thoughts are essentially queer. But outsides without insides—what did that mean! Metaphysics? Epistemology? What?
We were sitting in his office in the Criminal Courts Building at Twenty-sixth and California. (Here Corde would have added to the printed version in Harper’s that the sun was shining but even in broad daylight there was a touch of the violet hour. Maybe the architect had put a lavender tint into the glass to cut the glare. Maybe the atmosphere did it, or a metabolic derangement of the senses, a sudden increase of toxicity.) There had been many changes at Twenty-sixth and California since the old Bridewell days. New buildings had risen, a modern wing at County Jail, the achievement of Rufus Ridpath, for which his reward was disgrace, character assassination. Buses rolled up all day long. Prisoners brought from all the lockups in the city were unloaded here. The men hopped out by twos, handcuffed. As they went in pairs down the ramp to be processed in the jail, most were downcast or in a silent rage, but a few were having a hell of a time, reeling with homecoming spirits, yelling to the guards, “Hey, Mack! Look who’s back!” They trooped in to be psyched, social-worked, assigned to cells.
Around the courts and prison buildings, viewed from the superb height of Varennes’ office, lay huge rectangles, endless regions of the stunned city—many, many square miles of civil Pass-chendaele or Somme. Only at the center of the city, visible from all points over fields of demolition, the tall glamour of the skyscrapers. Around the towers, where the perpetual beacons mingled their flashes with open day, there was a turbulence of two kinds of light.
Varennes said, “When you talk about whirling you make it sound like the maelstrom—like Edgar Allan Poe.”
“You mean apocalyptic. Once you start in with apocalypse you lose your dependable, constructive social frame of reference.”
Now, here Corde would have added, in an improved version of his article, that Varennes was healthy, a normal person, with a preference for decent liberal thought. The details of his appointment to the Public Defender’s job were normal in Cook County. It was not easy to get in without sponsorship. But he was a symbol, anyway, of the public demand for decency to which even big Clout was obliged to make (limited) concessions. Nevertheless he was an educated and a decent man—jogged, pumped iron, his hobby was fixing up classic cars. And he was interested in what the Dean had to say. Dean Corde, sitting there, palms upward in his lap, one leg flung over the other. The Dean had an underbrow glance of swerving shrewdness. It seemed to interest Varennes in a theoretical way to hear the Dean talk about turbulence and whirling states, about subhuman incomprehension, about a woman begging for life when the lid of the car trunk was raised. Was his visitor trying to tell him (a middle-class fear) that the country was falling apart or something? Actually the Dean didn’t seem to be that sort of Nervous Nellie or commonplace hysteric. Some part of him really was shrewd; at moments he was acute, even hardheaded.
“What would you like?” said Varennes. “Would you give the dead woman’s husband a gun and let him take shots at Mitchell through the bars of his cell?”
“Did I suggest anything like that?”
“No, you didn’t, Dean. I suppose I’m only fishing.”
The Dean said, “Let me make it clear to you what I think. Your defendant belongs to that black underclass everybody is openly talking about, which is economically ‘redundant,’ to use the term specialists now use, falling farther and farther behind the rest of society, locked into a culture of despair and crime—I wouldn’t say a culture, that’s another specialists’ word. There is no culture there, it’s only a wilderness, and damn monstrous, too. We are talking about a people consigned to destruction, a doomed people. Compare them to the last phase of the proletariat as pictured by Marx. The proletariat, owning nothing, stripped utterly bare, would awaken at last from the nightmare of history. Entirely naked, it would have no illusions because there was nothing to support illusions and it would make a revolution without any scenario. It would need no historical script because of its merciless education in reality, and so forth. Well, here is a case of people denuded. And what’s the effect of denudation, atomization? Of course, they aren’t proletarians. They’re just a lumpen population. We do not know how to approach this population. We haven’t even conceived that reaching it may be a problem. So there’s nothing but death before it. Maybe we’ve already made our decision. Those that can be advanced into the middle class, let them be advanced. The rest? Well, we do our best by them. We don’t have to do any more. They kill some of us. Mostly they kill themselves….”
Varennes asked, “Is this the conclusion you aim at in your article?”
“Oh, I haven’t even begun to reach a conclusion. So far I’m only in the describing stage. What I’m telling you is simply what I see happening. The worst of it I haven’t gotten around to at all—the slums we carry around inside us. Every man’s inner inner city … Some other time we can talk about that.”
That was the end of our conversation. The telephone rang. An important call. He excused himself (I was ready to leave) and got rid of me. He promised to discuss the matter with his colleagues. He was a very nice man. Almost talkable-to. Those are the worst. For a while you almost feel you’re getting somewhere.