Back home, the housing shortage seemed to be a permanent fact of New York life. The best we could do, and this only because Louise knew so many Italian exiles in New York, was a gloomy sublet from Italian Jews on upper Central Park West where Central Park comes to an end and where we did, too. Our brief unreal marriage was lived with other people’s furniture, pictures, other people’s forks and knives, and a detailed view in our bedroom of the Lakes of Killarney that sickened me by its irrelevance. Two rooms, no doubt stuffed full of keepsakes, were firmly locked and barred. After Tim was born, there was no room with a door in which I could write. My vast shapeless account of roaming New York seemed as homeless as I did. I would prowl the streets of the upper West Side looking for “material,” for I did not yet see how I could include myself.
Central Park West in the Hundreds had a great view of the Park and of the shining white fronts of Fifth Avenue across it. But you no longer entered the Park with confidence, and if the Park at most hours was no man’s land, the streets stretching behind you to Broadway were more secret barbed wire. In my college days the upper West Side had always presented to me a face strained, shadowed, overcrowded. There had always been too many hills to climb, and hanging over the street too many colossal apartment houses into which the sun did not shine, too great a show of garbage pails in front of every door. But now a block away and the terminus of the Park were enemy territory. Every day I steered my way carefully, very carefully, between enclaves made up of blacks, the first Puerto Ricans, and Santo Domingans, poor whites from the South, squatters resisting removal “necessary to urban renewal,” drunken supers and maddened tenants, belligerent pimps, addicts writhing like dervishes and staggering from one hydrant to another. The grimness of these bitterly ugly overcrowded streets was nothing to the anger of New York’s untouchables forever slouching along the steps under the signs that said “NO LOITERING.”
Broadway was a circus. The fat lady; the bearded lady; the transvestite in pink curlers who needed a shave; the hundred-and-two-year-old lady who announced in front of Zabar’s “appetizing” store that she owed her perfect health to sour cream; the madwoman in carpet slippers and shopping bag who prowled up and down Broadway all day long and walked into the local pharmacy to scream, “Bestids! Criminals, all of you! Never sympathy for a person!” I saw her sitting in a phone booth marked “out of order” shouting into the mouthpiece.
The West Side as a whole was ethnic territory, foreign, “Jew land,” the cheaper side of town, and the last stand of all exiles, refugees, proscribed and displaced persons. In the Park, boulders of the great rock that had once covered New York still made a trail for boys in Indian file, a springboard for boys jumping with arms outstretched and yelling, “Here I come!” New York on the upper West Side was rock all the way; rock hill and stone, up and down, no visible relief. But though I was often numbed by the way everything here came in mass, I also felt at home with so many recent arrivals. Fragments of Europe stuck to the signs over synagogues, food shops, beauty parlors. “Services Will Be Held Here by the Former Rabbi of Lvov.” “Madame Slavatasky, Formerly Chief Masseuse at the Franz-Josef Sanitarium in Innsbruck.” The Hungarian eye surgeon in the dusty office on the ground floor, whose wife endlessly complained of the noise made by “bad American children” playing handball against the side of the building, had found refuge in India operating on “whole villages.” The autographed photograph of Einstein in the surgeon’s office did not look steady on its nail and he smelled faintly of the spiced meat he had just eaten. He seemed a bit seedy for a doctor. “It is hard for my wife to keep the dust firmly out. I cannot get good hospital appointment.”
As the hostile super said, and he said it often, the West Side was “Jews.” Since there were many others on the West Side, it was not really a ghetto, but one foreign enclave piled on another. I did notice that non-Jews living with Jews were more likely to do so here than across town. My long Jewish memory was at home with what a patriot on the other side of town called the “West Side jackal bins.” When I walked out on Broadway, I felt myself so engulfed by the furious life of the street that I had to go back and write to keep from drowning in these many lives. Nothing would release me from the burden of so much common experience; so many old European habits, hungers, complaints; so much Jewishness, blackness, clownishness, vulgarity, old age, amazement, ugliness, anxiety; so much eating, fatness, dog shit; so many soliloquies and recitations; so much anger from the mad, deprived, sick, unhappy, doped, vicious, battered, alien, powerless, afflicted. Nowhere else in New York could one see on the street, on the subway platform, in the rush hour, such public suffering. In a howling rainstorm I saw a man beating the top of a car and weeping. In the subway a man suddenly looked up from the book he was reading and shouted, “And if I can’t pay it? If I don’t pay it?” People walked away from him, but it was no use. I remembered from my college days on the upper West Side a blind student to whom I read Godwin’s Political Justice the week before examinations. He had been thrown out by his family as “too much trouble.” On the West Side this was not considered unusual.
In this boiling sea of foreign nations and foreign tongues, of bearded Orthodox upholsterers and tinkerers whose signs read “WE CAN FIX ANYTHING” and who occupied cellar shops on Amsterdam Avenue that had come straight from Odessa and the Old City, there stood out the Upper West Side Hebrew Relief Association. This name was not always pleasing to the Columbia professors, associates of Commentary and Partisan Review, New York Post editors and columnists, trade-union press agents, publishers, composers, shirt manufacturers, and psychoanalysts who were united by the unrivaled experience of Communism they had gained in their radical past and their unflinching hatred of it now. You did not have to be Jewish to be part of the Upper West Side Hebrew Relief Association. You could live in the Village or Scarsdale; there was a banker’s son from Harvard who taught English at Columbia, several Irish Catholic intellectuals, and at least one Virginian who, like all the rest, had what J. Edgar Hoover would have called “a subversive record.” A visiting British Kremlinologist mistook one super-hawk for a black, but there were no blacks. The Jews in the Upper West Side Hebrew Relief Association were not practicing Jews, often regretted the newborn State of Israel as “nationalistic” and an unwelcome distraction from the proper business of politics. Professors and shirt manufacturers alike, they regarded themselves as a political avant-garde whose task was still to impart the lessons of the Russian Revolution. The destiny of the century now depended on oracles and Cassandras who had passed through the fires of totalitarianism, even in Brooklyn; who were an élite because they knew, and could not wait to educate the American people.
The Upper West Side Hebrew Relief Association included many distinguished intellectuals. All the members were more prosperous and established than their parents could have dreamed for them. They should have been as happy as larks. They knew too much to be happy. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” Politics had turned them mad, but no madder than many others in the forties, fifties, sixties. They just knew more. They saw the danger in Russia and were not ashamed to be obsessed. They had no forgiveness for Communists who, long before Hitler, had brought the totalitarian century into being.
And somehow there was no forgiveness for themselves, children of the thirties and of the ineradicable influence of Stalin-Hitler. Some obscure guilt weighed on them, possibly because guilt was more modish than innocence. The title of Leslie Fiedler’s first book—condescending to Dean Acheson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Rosenbergs in the death house and poor old Hemingway—said it all for the Upper West Side Hebrew Relief Association, though at the moment Professor Fiedler was teaching in Montana: An End to Innocence. The film critic Robert Warshow was to write that the thing about Jews was just that they were older. Even the youngest members of the Upper West Side Hebrew Relief Association seemed weighed down by every fresh political shock from Lenin country. They could be uproarious about each other’s characters. They were rarely light-minded. They had none of the self-dramatizing gifts that were to be found among the theatrical pros Lillian Hellman, Zero Mostel, Elia Kazan. Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day capitalized on the anxiety that hung over the West Side like the carbon monoxide spurting straight into his hero’s face from the Broadway bus. But Bellow was too detached for them and they despised the pleasures and addictions of the crowd. “Mass culture” was the opium of the boobs. It explained the failure of Socialism in America. It was sometimes called “popular culture” and could make a sociologist out of any literary intellectual.
Despite these many responsibilities, these intellectuals should have been happier than they were. The cold war and the McCarthy era needed them, raised them, publicized them. Sometimes—as in the case of Encounter; the Committee for Cultural Freedom; the Free Trade Union Congress, AFL, run by a former leader of the American C.P., Jay Lovestone, now stirring up strong-arm squads against French Communist unions—the government financed them. Those who had so long talked of alienation, who had proved the iron necessity of alienation, who had loved the theory of alienation and especially their alienation, were now with the government of the United States as advisers on Communism, “experts on Communism.”
The atmosphere was heavy with souped-up patriotism, and, radiating from the many disillusioned and fretful ex-radicals like a new weapon, it was also intensely religious. All evil was now to be attached to Communism, no doubt because some former Communists felt their old attachment so intensely. Meanwhile throughout the country, powerless people were subjected to “loyalty hearings” because their parents had lived near people who took the Daily Worker. There were loyalty hearings in the Pentagon, loyalty hearings in factories, schools. An attendant in a New York City park toilet was dismissed because he had belonged for a few months to the Communist Party. He had broken openly with it, but his job obviously made him a security risk—he was always “underground.” At the same time, scientists like Ernst Chain were refused admission to the United States; Linus Pauling was not permitted to leave the country for a Royal Society conference on his discovery of the chemical bond. The misery any of these intellectuals could see for themselves in any street of this swollen and disordered city was to be ignored. New York was having “the greatest building boom in history.” Yet there was a special grievance on the part of the new patriots against “intellectuals,” “scholars,” “well-known personalities” whose political liberation had been slower than their own. There was malicious pleasure in the “naming” of actors, movie writers, and directors who were blacklisted but vulgarly referred to as “headline names.”
One old Communist after another, one old fellow traveler after another, called because he had been “named” as a Party member or a onetime sympathizer with “Communist causes” that sometimes signified only opposition to nuclear testing, appeared to make loud public repentance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Senator McCarthy’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, the Tenney Committee on Un-American Activities in California, Movie Producers’ Committees, School Board Committees, Library Committees. He had to “come clean,” make a clean break, make loud public expression of loyalty to America. If he was an ex-Communist, he proved his patriotism by naming names, described his valiant struggles inside the Communist Party for intellectual freedom, his fervent faith in one nation under God, and so had his hand warmly shaken by congressmen and their professional interrogators. If he was still a Communist or did not want to go back on a Communist husband, wife, lover, friend, he refused to admit anything, fervently identified the Bill of Rights as his lifelong political philosophy, pleaded the Fifth Amendment, denounced “the Committee” as a hireling of Wall Street and Hitlerian Fascism, identified himself with the immortal principles of Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Until the wartime alliance was abruptly switched at the outbreak of the cold war, the Communist Party U.S.A. had called itself the party of “twentieth-century Americanism.”
In Milwaukee the Progressive magazine asked passers-by to define Communism. Patricia Blunk, seamstress: “I don’t have much of a definition but I think it is someone who doesn’t believe in another country’s Lord.” A mail carrier: “I’ve been trying to find out myself but I’ve never been able to get a definition.” A truck driver: “In my mind it is a guy who is working against the government.” A machinist: “I really have not studied much on the subject. I guess it would be an undesirable person.” A clerk: “I think it is somebody who does not believe in religion and thinks everybody should be equal.”
Every day rang out with the super-heated hatreds of the day, end products of a history that could not be discussed, only accused or confessed. Exposed. Smeared. Cleared. Commie. Commie Rats. Comsymp. Communistic Sympathies and Longings. Guilty by Association. Stoolies. Loyalty. Conspiracy. Anti-Anti-Communists. Knee-jerk Liberals. Commie Jury Hits Pay Dirt. Can We Trust Our Teachers? The Republican attorney general of Pennsylvania suspended the assistant district attorney of Allegheny County: “The issue is not whether Mrs. Matson is a Communist or ever was. The issue is whether she has Communistic sympathies and leanings as shown by her associations, her acts and her utterances.” Arthur Miller was refused a passport under regulations refusing passports to “citizens believed to be supporting the Communist movement, whether they are members of the C.P. or not.” “Let us face the facts,” said Senator Robert A. Taft, “we are already in World War HI.” A professional anti-Communist, Ralph de Toledano, was soon to write in H. L. Mencken’s old American Mercury, now an openly Fascist publication:
His name, in its contradiction of symbols, adds to the bafflement: Alger, the almost comic personifier of the rags-to-riches story: Hiss, the onomatopoeia of the spitting serpent. He is the Traitor rampant in a land which by its very goodness cannot understand treason. He is the Communist.
At Harvard, the coruscating genius of Felix Frankfurter lay in wait, crouched to leap at whatever ties of Christian tradition still bound Hiss to the American past of his fathers.
Part of a generation sinned with Hiss, still sins with Hiss, and sits in prison with Hiss.… It has not learned that when a soul divests itself of God, Evil takes possession. And not having heard, not having read, and not having learned, it has earned a damnation which Reason cannot chill.
The language of hysteria was acceptable in the highest places. An alien named Ignatz Mezei was ordered excluded from the United States on the basis of evidence that the government said was too confidential for disclosure. Writing the majority five-to-four decision that an alien barred for security reasons could be held indefinitely on Ellis Island, Justice Tom Clark conceded that this might be a hardship on Mezei. But, “the times being what they are,” such action might be necessary. Justice Jackson in his dissent said that Mezei seemed likely to be held for life for a cause known only to the Attorney General.
Professor Sidney Hook, in an influential polemic of the times that asked “Can Our Teachers Be Trusted?” supported the firing of supposed Communist teachers on libertarian grounds. Such centers of independent thought had no room for “a man who has sworn or pledged himself to follow a party line through thick and thin, and insofar abandoned his freedom to think, to choose and to act.”
The history of thought is to a large extent the history of human mutation and heresy.… I am making a plea for tolerance of all heresies within the limits of intellectual integrity and competence.
This open house to integrity must not be interpreted to mean that a university or college is a community of the fey, the eccentric, or slightly mad vying with each other in exhibitionistic glee to see who can believe more impossible things at once or make the more outrageous remarks.…
… We suffer from a dearth of heretics.
At a time when Hook at a public discussion of the Communist problem explained that “only a few teachers have been fired,” Senator Jenner boasted that twenty or more colleges and universities in California were cooperating with state and Congressional leaders in a blacklisting program under which about a hundred members of their faculties had been removed and as many more rejected for teaching posts.… Some institutions hired full-time investigators, many of them former members of the F.B.I. or Army-Navy intelligence, to snoop around classrooms and the campus.
Silone had said that the next war would be between Communists and ex-Communists. In America, Leninism did root itself among intellectuals. Leninists with their worship of the state and their belief in authority, Leninists past or present, Leninists who remained Leninists long after they had ceased to be radicals, were at the center of the war of words. In New York many left-wing intellectuals, having just discovered that America stood for freedom and that Russian despotism was probably incurable, emerged from their proud long-standing “alienation” to lead the new ideological crusade. It shocked me to hear so gifted a writer as Delmore Schwartz fulminate crazily against Silone for being “anti-American”—Delmore was already sliding downhill—to watch the old Bolsheviks on Partisan Review hedge on condemning McCarthy, to read the ex-Trotskyist and now professional rightist Irving Kristol: “There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”
Many old Stalinist apparatchiks were now serving McCarthy and other inquisitors as “experts on Communism.” This they certainly were. McCarthyism was fanned by the long-frustrated Republicans. Everybody knew that it was fomented more by hatred of the New Deal than by honest fear of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. But political “discourse” was still dominated by the belief of the left in a “final conflict,” by Communist and ex-Communist belief in history as constant acceleration. The United States was not just to resist Russia but, like Russia, to become a purposive dreadnought of “History.”
The terms of the attack were irrelevant to the genuine fear of Soviet espionage. The Broadway-Hollywood celebrities who were the favorite victims in these American purge trials were picked because they were “names.” They were not spies but veterans of the 1930s, people of commonplace political reflexes who had been frightened by Hitler and the Depression into the usual delusion that the Soviet Union was “Socialist” and offered a way out. Professor Sidney Hook was not the only supporter of the Communist Party in the early 1930s. Congressmen investigating “un-American activities” were ignorant hacks who saw votes in scare tactics and exploited the political cruelty that follows every great American war. Since unrepentant Stalinists were incapable of telling the truth, the victims were those who could not confess their now shameful past without betraying others whom they still identified with themselves.
In the Moscow trials of the 1930s Stalin condemned his old and now powerless opponents in the ruling group of Russia not because they were disloyal to the Communist state but because they had developed secret doubts about their old beliefs and had “divided” minds. The American inquisitors had many an ex-Communist in a vise; he was guilty if he affirmed Socialist ideals that were now totally unreal, guilty in his own mind if he “named names,” guilty about the divided, secret, hesitant figure he publicly presented before a triumphant prosperous postwar America to which he was more reconciled than he could admit.
It seemed impossible in public to admit doubts, divisions, nuances, contradictions, hesitations, lost illusions. Orwell had described Communists as “attracted by a form of Socialism that makes mental honesty impossible.” Some were stuck in the habits of a lifetime—and found that their patriotic tormentors were just as absolutist in their thinking. Communism had indeed invaded the highest places. Alger Hiss was obviously incapable of telling the whole truth about himself; the Rosenbergs in the death house wrote the crudest Party slogans to each other in the form of personal letters. Delmore Schwartz turned his many literary hatreds into political hatreds. Robert Lowell at Yaddo was to bring charges that the director, a devoted friend to many writers over the years, was a link to Soviet agents. McCarthy could hardly admit that his goal was not to eradicate Communism in America but to inflame the populace in unashamed Hitler fashion, to gain constant publicity and prominence for himself. At least half the populace believed what he said.
The demand for orthodoxy suffocated me. Almost anywhere you looked now, the lies of Stalinists and the blood lust of super-Americans yelled down everything else. Perhaps World War III had already begun, and Russia and America were fighting it out in time-worn slogans. The issues of the “war” were set by political doctrinaires, fanatics, pseudopatriotic careerists, super-religious reactionaries. You were with one or the other. “Politics” now meant accusation, and became such an epidemic of fear, hysteria, intimidation, confession that only old-fashioned American libertarians and democrats, brought up outside Marxism—Sidney Hook was to sneer at them as “ritualistic liberals”—seemed in this maddened atmosphere capable of defending “suspects” in government and the universities.
The ex-Communists, now usually professional enemies of all “radicalism” and “subversion,” became influential missionaries to the American mind. Of course they saw no connection between their sudden celebrity and the morbid craving for an American orthodoxy, between so much consensus and the self-conscious anxious prosperity that had come in with the war; they had no objection to a permanent war economy. In this best of all possible worlds—though it did seem a bit fragile—only a specter called Communism stood between us Americans and the fulfillment of all our dreams. Converts to America naturally cheered America as an ideology. There was much talk of “society,” by which ex-radicals like Trilling meant “manners,” but little concern with the possibly capricious use of the power possessed by us, the most formidable power on earth. The ex-radical intellectuals were in fact total arrivistes and accommodating in their thinking. But they were unusually accomplished and informed, and their influence over more modest minds permitted them little sense of what was really going on at home—especially in their native streets of New York. America was at the top of the heap and there would never be another economic trauma like the 1930s. Secretary of State Acheson put it perfectly: Americans felt as if they were “present at the creation.”
On my return from Europe I sometimes saw Lionel Trilling walking up Broadway. Since our 1942 meeting at The New Republic he had become a major influence. Although he still looked vaguely careworn and ravaged in his sensitive way, he also looked pleased with himself and life, even debonair in his homburg hat. He seemed shocked by my suggestion that we have coffee at the Bickford’s on Broadway and 111th, outside of which I happened to meet him. Although he lived just a block off the Columbia campus, he looked as if he merely tolerated his environment, or could be amused by it if the occasion warranted amusement.
This was Trilling’s high moment. No other critic was now so much an influence on the “liberal imagination” in America, so much a metropolitan figure and yet of the purest prestige to the derivative critics who could find an intellectual home, wanted an intellectual home, nowhere but in an English Department. From having been a problem Jew, “the first of his faith” to get a permanent post in Columbia’s English Department, Trilling had become a major influence on the droves of sparkling Jews who now enlivened Columbia as if there had never been a Nicholas Murray Butler and a numerus clausus.
Amidst the broiling hysteria of the McCarthy period, I found comfort in some ancient American tradition of intellectual freedom among Zechariah Chafee, Henry Commager, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the genuinely conservative Hannah Arendt, and the Italian libertarian and friend of Camus, Nicola Chiaromonte. None of them had ever been deluded by Leninism. But it was the best of times for Jewish intellectuals who, as Robert Lowell said with as much truth as spite, “were unloading their European baggage.” Yes, we Jews were older; we embodied “a school of experience.” We had been stage center at all the great intellectual dramas and political traumas of this century. After “the worst episode in human history” we had just—after nineteen hundred years away from it!—declared ourself a nation again on the very soil that obsessed the Jewish liturgy. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.
If I forget thee! We never forgot anything; our holy book, our book of laws and commandments, was a history book, a recital that went back so far and was repeated so fondly that the history of this people seemed magical, unreal, improbable to everyone but themselves. How could one possibly justify the return to Eretz Israel by secular, rational, “normal” reasoning? How could one explain the inordinate zeal of the Socialist Prime Minister Ben-Gurion who said of the “ingathering” of so many “exiles,” “We are living in the days of the Messiah”? There was no justification for any of this except the divine wisdom to the Jews of their mad perpetuation. There was a sacredness that the Jews had made part of existence, but often understood as little as others understood them. The God who first disclosed himself as fire was, as usual, an impassable barrier. He could not be encompassed in words. We were, above all, creatures of culture, idolaters of words. Words were our culture; culture had to do everything. God did not seem much connected with “culture.” Certainly nothing had so betrayed us as culture, humanism, the fine professions of European civilization.
No other distinguished professor of literature was so much a man of letters as Trilling, so much interested in Freud, Babel, the Kinsey Report, the E. M. Forster he made a part of our “intellectual baggage.” The galley slaves of criticism in the universities were chained to eighteen sacred poems, to Brooks and Warren, to tension, ambiguity, and paradox. Trilling, with his strong sense of history and his exquisite sense of accommodation, was the most successful leader of deradicalization—which was conducted in the name of the liberal “imagination” against those who lacked it or had the wrong kind. “Radical” was not mentioned. “Communist” could be applied only to those who could not confess their past, like Alger Hiss; or those anti-Communists who had turned all the way around, like Trilling’s old college acquaintance Whittaker Chambers, and could talk of nothing other than Communism.
Trilling’s leadership in this “battle of ideas” was subtle, graceful, and never departed the soft culture world of “literary ideas.” Like his mentor Matthew Arnold, about whom he had written his superb loving book before the war, Trilling wrote as if the only problem of society was the thinking of the “advanced intellectuals.” Those in charge, and properly in charge, simply had wrong notions. Arnold smote the philistines: Trilling the liberals. In his America there were no workers, nobody suffering from a lack of cash; no capitalists, no corporations, no Indians, no blacks. And, on the whole, neither were there any Jews. His favorite characters were the unimaginative, misguided, generalized liberals or “educated classes.” This extraordinarily accomplished son of an immigrant tailor was so passionate about England and the great world of the English nineteenth-century novel that his image of this literature turned England into a personal dream. But America? In America it was possible for a Columbia sociologist to say of this period: “In the fifties, the only perturbations, the only tensions, strains and agonies that really mattered were those which could be seen as, or inferred from, the human spirit and its ties with culture.”
Perhaps Trilling’s forays against the liberal “mind” were not an evasion but a form of middle-class claustrophobia. Like many less gifted and interesting ex-radicals, he was limited to New York, to his intellectual class, to friends who could never forgive themselves or anyone else for having in misguided youth trafficked with Socialism. But what raised Trilling above the dull zealots, informants, and false patriots of this agonizing period was the critic’s gift for dramatizing his mind on paper. A writer of tremulous carefulness and deliberation, he nevertheless became the master of a dialectical style that expressed his underlying argument with himself. There was an intellectual tension in his essays, as in the seminars that excited the new intellectual crowd at Columbia. The old triple-named WASPS at Columbia had enforced upon him the importance of “manners” and his cherished “modulation.” The new postwar intellectuals, brought up on the residue of the old radicalism and now enlisted in revising it, were fascinated by an intellectual so totally absorbed in giving full expression to his intellectual loves and revulsions. Trilling was an expressive Hamlet of the intellect who felt that the time out of joint was up to him to set it right. The great critic, as in Victorian times, might yet change the temper of the times by his persuasion of the “advanced intellects” around him.
Columbia’s English Department, which was now metropolitan and supple, included as teachers old radical friends of Trilling, F. W. Dupee and Robert Gorham Davis; students who would be influences at large—Allen Ginsberg, Norman Podhoretz, Jason Epstein, Jack Kerouac, Steven Marcus, Robert Gottlieb, Richard Howard, John Hollander.… Columbia in the fifties would be the starting point of the Beats and of college bohemians who made a Greenwich Village of their own in the rooming houses and bars just off Broadway. Columbia students could easily frighten the staid members of the faculty, one of whom put his hand on his heart and said he had never seen such corrupt characters before. But these young intellectuals also knew that in Trilling, Jacques Barzun, Mark Van Doren, Andrew Chiappe, Meyer Schapiro, Richard Hofstadter, I.I. Rabi, Mario Salvadori, John Brebner, Robert Merton, Daniel Bell they had the most emancipated and creative faculty in America. My old friend Hofstadter was now one of its chief luminaries. Whenever I saw him walking about in his beret or telling one of his jokes about the Japanese rabbi dismissed by his Westchester congregation, I liked to think that learning still went with our old profane New York style.
Hofstadter liked to say that he stayed at Columbia because he found it so interesting a “society.” “Society” at Columbia was not the runaway society of postwar America, with its returned soldiers crowding the universities on the GI Bill, its Quonset huts for their families, its race hatreds, its urban hatreds, its somehow bracing American disorder, abrasiveness, corruption. It seemed to mean a certain intellectual contentment. Trilling’s wife, Diana, writing about Allen Ginsberg and other disturbances in “The Other Night at Columbia,” wrote that on her return from a reading “there was a meeting going on at home of the pleasant professional sort which, like the comfortable living room in which it usually takes place, at a certain point in a successful modern literary career confirms the writer in his sense of disciplined achievement and well-earned reward.… Auden, alone of the eight men in the room not dressed in a proper suit but wearing a battered old brown leather jacket …”
Like all of us old liberals, the Trillings lived at the edge of the abyss created in modern culture, in all our cultured minds, by the extermination of the Jews. The case of Alger Hiss seemed easier to deal with. He was a proven liar, perhaps especially to himself. And he was such an obvious case of what was wrong with liberals that he made society real to those for whom it meant liberalism gone sour.
But the faster time carried us away from it, the closer the gas came. It stole up our skin without our always knowing it. It was total, the inescapable crime lying across the most documented century in history. People in the millions could be considered superfluous. Lenin had first propounded this. The Jews as a people were now the most concentrated and direct example. Certainly they were not the only ones. But the abyss was at our feet because we believed in nothing so much as what Trilling called “the life of the mind.” The life of the mind was of no use unless it addressed itself to the gas. And what then? Letters of fire had been read at Nuremberg:
A word must be said on the decision to economize on gas. By the summer of 1944, the collapse of the Eastern front meant that the destruction of European Jewry might not be completed before the advancing Allied armies arrived. So Hungarian Jewry was killed at maximum speed—at the rate of up to ten thousand people a day. Priority was given to transports of death over trains with reinforcements and munitions needed for the Wehrmacht. Entire trainloads were marched straight to the gas chambers.
The gas used—Zyklon B—causes death by internal asphyxiation, with damage to the centers of respiration, accompanied by feelings of fear, dizziness, and vomiting. In the chamber, when released, “the gas climbs gradually to the ceiling, forcing the victims to claw and trample upon one another in their struggle to reach upward. Those on the top are the last to succumb.… The corpses are piled one on top of another in an enormous heap.…
The sheer volume of gas used in the summer of 1944 depleted the gas supply. In addition, the Nazis deemed the costs excessive … the dosage of gas was halved from twelve boxes to six per gassing. When the concentration of the gas is quite high, death occurs quickly. The decision to cut the dosage in half was to more than double the agony.
Life seemed far from terrible and extreme in this postwar era of expansion and prosperity when so many Jews “came into their own.” But it was. We had just been ruled out of the human race, systematically annihilated on the latest scientific principles. What did our political thinkers have to say about this? The left had nothing to say, did not even include the gas in its summary view of Hitlerism as “the last decadent stage of capitalism.” The right excused everything and everyone: there is evil in all of us. The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, like many a Christian quietist, explained that “everyone is guilty.” For me, no one was serious who did not fight the condemnation of a specific group that ended in its “extermination.” Nothing else was serious. Murder had become the first political principle. We had to recognize the abyss on whose edge we lived.
From her first book in English, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt was obsessed with genocide and the threat of future holocausts in an “overpopulated” world. She became vital to my life. Much as I loved her and submitted patiently to an intellectual loneliness that came out as arrogance, it was for the direction of her thinking that I loved her, for the personal insistencies she gained from her comprehension of the European catastrophe. She gave her friends—writers so various as Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Mary McCarthy, the Jewish historian Salo Baron—intellectual courage before the moral terror the war had willed to us.
Hitler’s war was the central fact in the dark shadowy Morningside Drive apartment where she and her feisty husband, Heinrich Bluecher, now lived, taking in a boarder to make ends meet. Hannah never stopped thinking. What she thought about was uprooting in every sense: starting with the uprooting of whole peoples that had washed up on the West Side this specialist in St. Augustine, had turned her life into a voracious political inquiry. How did it happen? How had it all happened? How had this modern age happened? The boarder could be heard walking down the hall to the toilet. She rocked that dark flat with the flushing of the toilet; walked back to her room. Hannah paused ever so slightly in her explication of the police state. She had been brought up in a genteel upper-middle-class Jewish family in Königsberg. She had studied with Bultmann! Dibelius! Heidegger! Husserl! Jaspers! She had written her doctoral thesis at Heidelberg on Augustine’s concept of love! With a little smile, she resumed her analysis of the police state. Nothing could deflect her very long from her inflexible concentration on the subject. Her uprooting and her need to understand from the modem age the origins of totalitarianism had become the same experience. She lived her thought, and thought dominated her life.
A time would come when her deep German conservatism, theological and classicist, made her a mightier professor than she could ever have been in Germany. It directed her to the “human condition,” and away from the political terror that was the foundation of her American life. But when I met her in the late forties she was a blazing Jew, working round the clock for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction from a little office in Columbus Circle. Her job was to round up and restore to what remained of Jewish communities in Europe the libraries and religious objects stolen by the Nazis. She had been a social worker in Paris immediately after leaving Germany in 1933; she had assisted in the emigration of German Jewish children to Palestine.
A new-learned English word was “fetch.” I would call her to have some coffee with me just outside her office, and she would respond in her deep voice and the barbed accent that became more German the longer she lived here, “You will fetch me? Yes?” In those days, before the sterile Coliseum took over the place, Columbus Circle was lined with shabby old United Cigar stores, suspect junk shops, run-down office buildings clearly occupied by ambulance chasers and soapless abortionists. But whenever I fetched her at the offices of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, I was greeted by a beaming Hannah brimming over with the enthusiasm for the New World, her discovery of that new political thinker John Adams, and able genially to tolerate the late-Tammany dreck that was Columbus Circle. She was as arch, witty, womanly as she was acute and powerfully cultivated. When stirred by a new friend, her angular Jewish features and amazingly gruff voice melted into wistful lovingness. I was never quite sure what she looked like. The strong, sometimes too commanding mind went with a fiercely imploring heart. In the midst of a late-afternoon rain howling down on Columbus Circle, she talked with love about Kafka and why he was much—oh, much!—greater than Thomas Mann. I had never met a woman so reflective, yet so eager and gifted for friendship. She was entrenched in her long formal training as a philosopher, yet was glad to be an outsider, unconventional, solitary in this strange new world.
Her constant refrain was “the decisive break with tradition.” There had been a tradition, and no one was more eager and willing to bestow on you, in Greek, the prime Greek meanings of man, mind, the polis, the common good. But there had been a break. Definitely, there had been a break. Her presence on the West Side was like Lear’s on the heath. The kingdom had been rent. Breakup was her life and everyone’s life now. She often spoke to me of her anguish at being separated from so many old friends and associations in Germany. With all her intellectual passion as well as some laconic personal despair, she seemed to cry out a wildly urgent need for constancy in life, every instance of life. She was a passionate and anxious friend; from the moment you entered her flat, she tried as it were to hold you with old-fashioned European house offerings of candies, candied fruits, cookies, “porto.” The longer she lived here, the more she insisted on constancy in her friends, constancy in the world of ideas—no matter how far back that stretched. Like her other house offering, Greek quotations, her mind instinctively sprang to some essential principle of life as tradition. And what happened to tradition? It broke.
Was it perhaps not in the nature of tradition to “break”? Could any tradition go on forever? Modernity was a tragedy because of the wrong thinking behind it. Plato’s myth of the cave represented the true condition of man front and back; the world made what it is by the forms of human perception. Marx had usurped Plato; he had replaced the cave with “society,” the inner world of our thinking by a world outside of us. The human mind searched this vainly for a single principle of determination and a single lever of control. Marx was indeed right to see alienation everywhere; he had helped to accomplish this by construing the world entirely outside himself. “Politics” had ceased to be the public sphere, the common good; it was every man’s ambition, his blind search for his own interest. The instability of society and the panic in the self-alienated mind led to the daemonic thirst for “total domination.” The necessary fiction of all totalitarian regimes was that terror assured “security” through total domination. What could “total” mean but an illusion for which you had increasingly to step up the terror? And where had the whole terrible unraveling of our common life, of our common safety, begun but in Marx’s usurpation of Plato’s categories of thought?
Marx-Plato-Hegel-Heidegger-Kant-Kafka-Jaspers! Montesquieu! Nietzsche! Duns Scotus! The great seminal names were a big thing in Hannah’s shelter on Morningside Drive overlooking the sign of the Krakauer piano factory and the bleak unenterable enemy country that was Morningside Park. The excitement of being with her and her tempestuous, sometimes frighteningly mental husband Heinrich Bluecher was really their belief in great thoughts, great men. The world was definitely a hierarchy, and the top of the top was always some great thinker. Heinrich, a poor relation of the famous Prussian military family, was a stocky, pugnacious, self-trained philosopher who came out of the trenches in 1918 to make—at last!—a German revolution. The Nazis made it instead, and Heinrich left for Paris, where he met Hannah. With his Aryan passport and obstinate sense of justice, he returned to Germany several times to help fugitive Jews. He had a passion for Jews. He certainly had a passion for Hannah. They were vehemently involved in working out a common philosophy; any conversation with the two of them could suddenly turn into German and open connubial excitement in some philosophic discovery unsuspected until that moment. Between clenched lips holding a pipe, Heinrich growled his thought out as if he were still on the battlefield—against wrong-headed philosophers. Hannah, despite her genteel training, also talked philosophy as if she were standing up alone in a foreign land and in a foreign tongue against powerful forces of error. She confronted you with the truth; she confronted you with her friendship; she confronted Heinrich even when she joined him in the most passionate seminar I would ever witness between a man and a woman living together; she confronted the gap, the nothingness, the “extreme situation” of “modern man.” Philosophy was the highest intellectual calling because it was inescapable, not a profession but a way of life.
The Bluechers certainly lived philosophy—not “their” philosophy but philosophy as “a thinking through of the age.” Human destiny was under the armored fist of politics. To sit with Hannah under the photograph of a kingly bearded bust reputed to be that of Plato was to hear that philosophy was still king. She reverted constantly to the image of the polis, the public realm, politics as true knowledge of the public interest. This was her protest against the unpolitical “idealism” of German intellectuals who had abstained from politics, had condescended to politics, so had opened the door to Hitler. She liked to quote Theodor Mommsen, the great German historian: “My greatest wish was to live in a free German republic, and lacking that I wrote the history of Rome.” America was different. She was enchanted with the wisdom of the Federalist Papers, the political theory of John Adams, came to believe more deeply in the Founding Fathers than any July Fourth orator.
None of this touched on grimy unenterable Morningside Park across the street or the fact that the door to the Bluechers’ apartment was secured by two locks and a pole. The sense of exile was overwhelming. In the foyer was an enormous photograph of Kafka as a student. He is awkward and funny. Of course he knows, with his famous mistrust of himself, that he looks awkward and funny as he poses for the photographer in Prague in derby and high choke collar, and with strained casualness rests two long bony unbearably tense fingers on the head of a dog. This is Kafka, our great and beautiful novelist, prophet, misfit. He did not live to see the Holocaust, though he guessed it and its aftermath: “Not the murderer but the victim is considered guilty.” In the photograph (I do not say this to Hannah) he looks as winsome as Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel. The eternal nebbish with the past and future in his marvelously clear tormented mind, and nowhere to rest that mind. He is an angel of thought, condemned forever to fly the higher spheres. Hannah certainly loved the higher spheres. The presence of the Krakauer piano factory across Morningside Park never interfered with what her teacher Karl Jaspers had said, what Hegel had said, what Spinoza should have said. She quoted, quoted, quoted. “Nietzsche writes like a charlatan but is a philosopher; Schopenhauer writes like a philosopher but is a charlatan.” The network of life was made up of the paradigmatic individuals, the great thinkers. They possessed Hannah, were the filaments of her brain. Reading modern poetry to her, I once mimicked her with E. E. Cummings:
plato told
him: he couldn’t
believe it (jesus
told him; he wouldn’t believe
it)
I wouldn’t have wanted her otherwise. The excitement of being with Hannah was mysterious, for it reached to foundations of thought that she accepted with a kind of awe. “I have never, since a child,” she once said to me, “doubted that God exists.” She had devoted herself to Augustine because of a single sentence: “Love means that I want you to be.” The difference between “tradition” and the “great break” that represented current reality expressed itself for her as some ancient force of poetry, some half-remembered sublimity. All this mental idealism, fervent with the need to teach and teach, the constant injunction “to think what we are doing,” produced in Americans either adulators or the bitterest enemies. Saul Bellow found it outrageous to be lectured on Faulkner—another novelist!—by someone from Königsberg. I found it comic to hear Heinrich instruct us in the meaning of marriage by way of quotations from Melville. Louise was more and more impatient with me, but Heinrich—who had nothing but Hannah—was important to Louise as our marriage crumbled away. Listening to him, her silence took on something unusually respectful. She thought him an extraordinary psychologist. Heinrich came on as an existential guide to our personal problems. He seemed to Louise a figure of exalted common sense, ready to meet life on its own terms, and not like her uselessly bookish husband. I thought him an inspired madman of sorts—she found him the most practical lawgiver for every day that she had met in years. He was the very sort of ripe, seasoned European who seemed to her a figure to rely on.
On the basis of one adverse opinion by a Harvard professor, The Origins of Totalitarianism was rejected by the Boston firm that had contracted for it. The editors did not bother to read it. I took the manuscript to Robert Giroux at Harcourt, Brace, who immediately recognized its quality, went through the enormous manuscript in all-night bouts of enthusiastic reading, and published it. Hannah was launched. But her insistence that Stalinism was as totalitarian as Nazism was offensive to her Marxist critics; she would not include “authoritarian” regimes like Franco Spain. Franco had allowed conflicting authorities, and did not proclaim the total domination by his party as the state.
“Totalitarian” was becoming an easy label for political intimidation of every kind. By contrast, Hannah refused the term to everything outside her own experience of the break with tradition. Totalitarianism was a phenomenon entirely new, a law unto itself. Hannah saw it Biblically as a great fall. The political structure of Nazism, as in her devastating end chapters on terror and the police, were more real to her than the social roots and strains of the German dictatorship. The relation of the Czarist state to the Leninist bureaucracy she did not examine at all. The Origins of Totalitarianism left its haunting and influential vibration on literary intellectuals with an overdeveloped sense of the past as the great tradition. It was literally about the subversion of great men and great thoughts by the social process—which Hannah saw as the social attrition and despair that turned resentment into a raging flame. The power of this resentment was something Hannah could suggest with great vividnesss from the Weimar experience, but there it stopped. You saw the German madness, but still could not account for it. When, discovering the classical wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, she firmly declared that “the pursuit of happiness” meant the pursuit of politics, “the public happiness,” she made a European projection typical of her ceaseless instruction of her American friends.
Hannah became irresistible to Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. Jarrell in particular was caught up in some amazing adventure of culture in the big terrible city that Southern writers usually made a profession of despising. To be with Hannah was to learn and learn. Randall could not get enough of teaching. “I would pay to teach,” he wrote. He read English poets to Hannah by the hour. He could not get enough of learning. Listening to Hannah read Goethe and Hoelderlin, he became so intoxicated that he felt he knew German well enough to translate Rilke, Grimm’s fairy tales—eventually, even Faust. What attracted him to the Bluechers’ house, Hannah said after his death, was that it was a house where German was spoken. “I believe my favorite country’s German.” He knew German by ear, by heart, by instinct—he told Hannah he was too busy translating German to learn it. He knew it as Robert Lowell knew the Greek, French, German, Russian, Italian poems he turned into reckless stunning “imitations” from other people’s word-for-word translations; he knew it as poets know so many verbal mysteries without understanding them. Cocteau called poetry “a separate language.” Randall certainly believed that poetry was separate, another country, the best country, the only country where the soul was entirely free. Hannah was shaken by Randall’s insistence that poetry was the only decency, by the shouting intensity of a football fan that he brought to every reading of poetry and any discussion of poetry. With the beard that covered him up to the eyes, his flaming absorption in anything that absorbed him, his lovely Southern manners, and his truculent innocence, she could not account for him except as “a figure from fairyland … emerged from the enchanted forests in which we spent our childhood. Randall Jarrell would have been a poet if he had never written a single poem.”
Randall knew better. Poetry meant so much to him that I believe he died of not being able to reach that final place, that country, that future—
Du bist die Zukunft, grosses Morgenrot
über den Ebenen der Ewigkeit
—that he knew with his marvelous intelligence of poetry. I loved Randall’s grasp of the poets he loved—Wordsworth, Hardy, Whitman, Eliot, Frost. I loved the wild wit and impatience with which he walked over everything and everyone to shake friends and readers with the terrible beauty of what he saw. I loved him for living and acting as if poetry should be worth a life—anyone’s life, his life. Edmund Wilson was the only other writer I knew who lived so completely in literature. But Randall did not need so much literature in order to be a great poet; he could not fool himself. His poetry was adroit, “brilliant,” put together with the greatest feeling and intelligence. It was never as moving as he was—and he was moving in a kind of passionate weakness. His cleverest essays displayed recognition by a poet studying poets better than himself; you felt he was a keen strategist studying superiors. On those below him, he spent wit and scorn ridiculing to the cruelest lengths writing that a greater poet would have ignored. Conrad Aiken protested to The Nation about the cruelty of Randall’s reviews; Randall did not understand what had shocked Aiken.
Randall looked all shining in his glass box of poetry, surrounded on every side by Dichtung as a man’s only way of getting into the world. His constant citations, his crying need of literature, seemed to me the last of their kind. Verveile dock, du bist so schön! Watching him at Hannah’s, completely happy and glorying in the profusion of her total sympathy for literature, in endless reading and quotations and invocations of the best that has been said and thought—if it was said first in German—I could see Randall lonely outside the classrooms of the Woman’s College at Winston-Salem where he happily taught—“I would pay to teach.” Randall—mocking, jaunty, always the university wit, masked within his beard and behind that beard—nevertheless pitied himself as “the poet at the supermarket.” He declaimed his loneliness to a publishing-industry audience at the National Book Awards that thought him ridiculous for saying so. The audience was right. A poet more confident of his talent would not have needed to raise himself at the expense of the supermarket. Randall, fighting for the true, the beautiful, the good, nobly rushed at people who did not know what he was talking about. He even thought himself brave and reckless for praising Whitman to his Southern literary friends.
Randall certainly lived and died for excellence. To be the best poet! To be the poet of a generation! When he reviewed Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, his natural piety expressed itself without limitation. The uprush of his praise was the most perfect example in public of Jarrell’s capacity for veneration:
I know of no poetry since Auden’s that is better than Robert Lowell’s. Everybody who reads poetry will read it sooner or later.… Lord Weary’s Castle makes me feel like a rain-maker who predicts rain, and gets a flood which drowns everyone in the country. A few of these poems, I believe, will be read as long as men remember English.
Lowell was another addict of Hannah’s. Bellow might find insupportable her instructing him about Faulkner. When in later years Hannah’s vexing book on Eichmann and the “banality of evil” appeared, Bellow took his revenge in Herzog: “the canned sauerkraut of Weimar intellectuals.” But Lowell, the strongest poet of my generation and given to mood swings that encouraged his gift for exaltation, responded fervently to every suggestion of her culture, her sympathy for the coming men in American poetry. As her gifts made themselves known to the “educated classes,” and she emerged as her extraordinary self at Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, was given prizes by the eagerly repentant Germans, her natural tendency to hierarchy irritated those intellectuals she put down as “little Jews.” Nothing was so likely to inflame former Communists who not only were afraid of McCarthy but did not know Greek. If you were admitted into what Hannah, like Stefan George, called “the inner circle,” you were obviously one of the best. As the McCarthyite epidemic grew and Hannah in public mocked ex-Communists who became heresy hunters and professional patriots, the Bluechers came to think of themselves as a lonely wagon train fighting off the redskins. Heinrich, who could not write but who talked with a conviction not often seen in American classrooms, passionately impressed his lucky students at Bard with the living presence of Abraham, Moses, Kant, Nietzsche, then described McCarthy as “the last big personal fight of my life.” It was talk, it was funny, it was magnificent. The Bluechers were “unduly sensitive” to the repressive state. They had reason to be.
Wonderfully gifted Robert Lowell, whose instinct for language worked on me with the force of a jackhammer, was more exalted by Hannah’s recognition of him than he was by her politics. I was never to understand what Lowell’s politics were. His eyesight had kept him from military service, but he was a Catholic convert and positively insisted on going to jail as a conscientious objector. When I met him again at Yaddo in 1949, he was divorced from Jean Stafford and no longer a Catholic, but he sounded like Evelyn Waugh rampaging against the wartime alliance with Russia. He objected more to Russia than to the war. It was a gloomy time for me; listening to Lowell at his most blissfully high orating against Communist influences at Yaddo and boasting of the veneration in which he was held by those other illiberal great men Ezra Pound and George Santayana, made me feel worse. My “New York book” included everything in New York except me, so the book never seemed to move of its own accord. I retyped the same page over and again, stared at the bleak winter light from my bedroom window, walked aimlessly in the snow in the great estate that adjoined the Saratoga race track.
Yaddo had once been my greatest refuge and release on earth. It was the perfect escape for writers who needed solitude. Katherine Anne Porter had labored there for years over the seemingly endless voyage that finally became Ship of Fools; Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, John Cheever, and many other finely tuned and overtuned American instruments had done good work there. The summer gaiety, croquet before dinner, the races in August had never meant as much to me as the perfect retreat it made for my overexcited New York soul when I wanted to be discharged from every care except a book. In winter this estate of a wealthy New York stockbroker left to writers, artists, and composers, became a thorny mysterious return to another century on the rim of the Adirondacks, a mixture of primeval woods and the genteel tradition. There were perhaps half a dozen people in residence. You lived and worked in a wooden house that could have been a farmhouse but was lined with copies of Pre-Raphaelite pictures of Dante on the Lungarno in Florence first seeing the young Beatrice, complete old-fashioned library sets on the shelves, pink-shaded lamps and crimson rugs, photographs of the stockbroker and wife, whose children had all died young. The great estate had been left to strange beings who could shut themselves up in a little room all day staring at a piece of white paper.
There was nothing to do all day but to write, after writing to walk in the woods, to walk down Union Avenue, which Henry James had thought the most beautiful street in America. Past the shut-down race track, past the little practice tracks with the low fences along which I had wandered the last summer with Natasha, watching the early-morning workouts; past the last great Victorian and Edwardian houses, now turned into Skidmore College dormitories and boarding houses for elderly Jews who still believed in a good old-fashioned spa and “taking the waters.” Saratoga and Yaddo were full of ghosts. If you didn’t care for so much history, the ghosts could seem jealous of your sitting in their old places. If you responded gratefully to the Victoriana hovering over your writer’s prison, a few winter weeks of solitude put you chapters ahead, gave you back to yourself.
But for once I could not work at Yaddo. That winter on the edge of 1950, when nothing could still buttress the marriage, not even a little boy in the unhappy apartment on Central Park West, my book about walking New York was barren, smart, soulless. I was just not in it. Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick were a brilliant couple, but Lowell was just a little too dazzling at the moment. He was at the top of a psychic crest down which he would slide the next season; but at this peak he talked in tongues; he was of the great company, with Milton and Hardy and Eliot; he was wonderful and frightening. He was not just damned good, suddenly famous and deserving his fame; he was in a state of grandeur not negotiable with lesser beings. He was a Lowell; he was handsome, magnetic, rich, wild with excitement about his powers, wild over the many tributes to him from Pound, Santayana, his old friends Tate and Jarrell and Warren. Flannery O’Connor, who was also at Yaddo, seemed to be attending Lowell with rapture. All these gifted, assured, deeply traditional writers made me feel useless. No fiction writer after the war seemed to me so deep, so severely perfect, as Flannery. She would be our classic: I had known that from the day I discovered her stories. And at the moment I seemed unable to finish my second book; I had a wife who was no wife and to whom I was no husband. New York was political crazies and fanatics, a spiritual desert. Only the New School took me on when I wanted to teach again.
I was numb, entirely closed in, then was shocked awake by Lowell’s discovery that Yaddo, too, was subversive and may once have had a secret line to the Soviet Embassy. Lowell did not seem too unhappy about the frightful discovery that the charming woman director of many years—my friend, his friend, a good friend to many writers—was secretly attempting to cut down our country. He went to the F.B.I. about it. He was as happily excited as a man can be. With his newfound authority as an American poet, he had the Yaddo trustees convened, confided to them the great things Santayana and Pound had said about him, and demanded that the director be dismissed.
The director was not dismissed, but we all had a terrible time waiting for the verdict to come in. Eleanor Clark and I rounded up support from many writers, composers, and artists who had worked at Yaddo over the years. But there were even more who refused to support the director because they had families, jobs, “could not take the risk.” Some artists refused because they had not been given exactly the working conditions they demanded; some because they had not liked the food; some because they did not like the director’s “personality.” The artist under political stress was an unforgettable picture of limitless self-regard. Tocqueville had noticed that in America the individual placed so much stress on his personal enjoyment of “liberty” that he ended up surveying “a very puny object—himself.” The lesser poets were not only the biggest cowards, but impossible to shut up in their boring, whining self-defense. They were concerned with Lowell’s power to affect their reputations even when they had no reputations. Lowell, who would transcend the mannerism of Lord Weary’s Castle and find a straightforward “confessional” mode perfect for his literary instinct and troubled life in an age merciless with guilt, later admitted that he had forgotten the Yaddo episode. I believed him.
The night that Tim was born, I came back from the hospital to think and think about the howling little figure with the great shock of black hair whom I had just seen in a line of howling newborn babies at Lenox Hill. I needed to hold him firmly in my mind. I dreamed that night of Louise taking Tim off and Tim in the back seat vaguely waving. In less than two years, I was to become a weekly visitor; to pick him up at school Wednesday and give him lunch Sunday; to sit with him in the playground at Ninety-sixth and Fifth watching the seesaw go up and the seesaw go down; to read comic books to him, Golden Books, and play Uncle Wiggily on the long winter twilights; to pick him up at the school, the bus station, the railroad station, the airport; and to deliver him after the baseball game, the game of catch, the Walt Disney movie, the occasional weekend. He was to be picked up and regularly delivered back, this precious cargo, my son Tim, this regular American feller who by seven knew down to the last decimal point the batting averages of every important player in the National League. At night, during the usual uncertain summer weeks at Wellfleet, he so raptly dreamed baseball that I could hear him saying in his sleep that he was going to bat. “I’m ready for the pitch!” he cried. “I’m ready for the pitch!”
To have a son you do not live with but take out at regular intervals is to be the perfect setup for popular daily entertainment-filled America. There is nothing to do with the little boy Wednesdays and Sundays except to entertain him. And you entertain him, sitting with wildly bored and distracted women looking you through and through and making amazing conversation with you, the only man in the playground at 2:30 in the afternoon.
A long succession of taxis to the Polo Grounds and the Yankee Stadium, the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Millions of comic books; detestable plastic dreck for those great American suckers parent and child; pony rides in Central Park; rowboats in Central Park Lake. One day, right in the middle of the dirty lake, screams echoing from the girls on shore, that stare: “Other fathers live with their sons.” The seals in the Central Park Zoo jump out of the pool and right back into the pool. Seals are all slithery. Seals are surrounded by people who laugh the way people laugh when seals slither on shore out of a pool and then slither right back again. There is never anything new about these seals, not on Wednesday, not on Sunday. Nor is there ever anything new about Bimbo, the gorilla; or about the orange peels and carrot scraps on the floor of Bimbo’s cage; or about the hot and disheveled polar bear frowning, pacing, leaping as he clambers up and down the rock in his stage set. Even the pony at the head of the pony cart and the kiddies lining each side of the cart look the same every Wednesday and every Sunday. So are the animal cages the same; and the animals dolorously not looking at you from their cages; and the walks between the cages; and the scattered empties; and the assorted New York strangers, derelicts, parents, vagrants, reporters, photographers, Hasidim, pushers.
What can My Lord Heart say? There is nothing to say and everything to wait for. Soon childhood has passed, no more Mickey Mouse in every corner. It is spring a dozen years later and you are playing catch in the first radiant sunshine, the ball going back and forth, back and forth, with that easy lovely motion acquired by American men as they throw a ball to each other for hours at a time with the ready, eager, assured motion known only to men who love baseball. The game between father and son is deadly serious at times. The hard ball gets thrown harder and harder, and when you pitch to him at bat he sometimes smashes the ball in a line drive right at your face.
The Wednesdays were the same; the zoo especially was the same. But the successive acts are rapid, and the howling infant with the towering mass of black hair is a lean, handsome, careful young man, who sometimes stares at you to say that something dropped out of his life forever and that you may not fill the gap. The years rush on and on, moving from baseball to “politics.” The ball thrown at you with a hard smashing curve now demonstrates the infallibility of People’s China, the oppressiveness of “Amerika.” Every conversation looses the political avalanche of our century; unlooses every other hard-won tie; unlooses zeal, political righteousness, and intellectual contempt. He and his classmates throw themselves with the force of their bodies against a building, throw themselves into the black schools in Cambridge, calling the children of the oppressed “out into the struggle.” The curve ball he throws at me grows still harder every year, more derisive, certainly more difficult to catch. The man at whom he throws it seems with each new political argument more and more removed from me. But as Tim says with a grin, “We are all the children of those who were radical in their youth.”
The years will rush on even faster. But at the moment it is the winter of 1950, it is freezing in New York, and I am frozen with grief and longing. Tim is a little boy not two years old staring at me from behind a glass door as, finally, the silence between Louise and me ends in one last, unforgettable shout and I am out, leaving the little boy behind the glass door.
It is freezing in Washington, too. McCarthy is snarling at a witness—reducing his history, our history, my history, to shit. Arthur Miller will soon be saying to the McCarthy inquisitor: “This is now sixteen years ago. That is half a lifetime away.…”
The inquisitor Arens, the good American Vishinsky: “Can you tell us who was there when you walked into the room?”
“Mr. Chairman, I understand the philosophy behind this question and I want you to understand mine.… I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.”
McCarthy to President James Conant of Harvard: “I must say that when you have been a Communist, when you have been a member of a conspiracy, there is no presumption that you have reformed.”
The American government was beyond criticism. At one point Senator McCarthy asserted that the “U.S. State Department was helping finance some newspapers that were highly critical of President Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the Wisconsin Republican Senator himself.”
No doubt the times had much to do with our attrition. F. O. Matthiessen jumped to his death. More important to me, George Orwell died in the same year; the tribune of my generation, the clear beautiful voice of the old radical conscience was gone. During the negotiations for the divorce (it was five years since we had met on line in front of the U.S. Army post office in London), the great news of the hour was that Truman had finally dismissed MacArthur. As we waited to see the lawyer and were making conversation, Louise said, “The kids in the office are real mad at Truman.”