Chapter IX
GROWING UP IN THE SIXTIES

In a stained old Panama hat, the long white dress shirt that he wore everywhere—“I have only one way of dressing”—brown Bermuda shorts that bulged with his capacious middle, and carrying a handsome straight gold-topped cane that had long been in his family, Edmund Wilson, having been driven there by his wife, Elena, now walked slowly, with some difficulty, along the edge of the great ocean beach at Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Finished with his long daily stint, he was now ready to look at Nature and have a talk.

The beach was full of interesting and notable people to talk to. There, on any August afternoon in the mid-1960s, could be seen Arthur and Marian Schlesinger, Gilbert Seldes, Allen Tate and Isabella Gardner, Edwin and Veniette O’Connor, Richard and Beatrice Hofstadter, Robert and Betty Jean Lifton, Irving and Arien Howe, Harry and Elena Levin, Daniel and Janet Aaron. At times there could also be seen Stuart and Suzanne Hughes, Jason and Barbara Epstein, Philip and Maggie Roth, Marcel and Constance Breuer. Once there was a view of Svetlana, daughter of Stalin, accompanied by the Georgian writer Paul Chavchavadze, whose wife was a Romanoff and who herself often modestly made her way to the South Wellfleet post office to receive letters from her cousins in Buckingham Palace. It was said that Svetlana and Mrs. Chavchavadze had even compared notes on what it was like to live in the Kremlin.

On the beach sat television producers, government and U.N. advisers from the social scientists and psycho-historians, professors by the dozen—people all definitely “in.” There was so much important, authoritative writing going on in Wellfleet that one professor’s wife, trying to hush the neighborhood children, put her head out the window and said pleadingly to the children, “The professor is writing a book review. I’m sure all your fathers and mothers have reviews to write, too!” The children of another writer, left to themselves on the beach, were playing a game with a ball devised by the witty novelist Edwin O’Connor. It was called “Schlesinger,” and consisted of trying to knock over a beer can propped up on a little sand hill. If you failed the number of times there were letters in “Schlesinger,” you had to pay a forfeit thought up at the last moment by O’Connor, which usually consisted in walking around some of the lesser discussion groups on the beach and mocking the Hungarian psychoanalyst and the graphic designer from Yale.

O’Connor enjoyed joshing “the heavy intellectual set”—there were so few other novelists about. But making fun of Schlesinger was not making fun of Jack Kennedy and the New Frontier. O’Connor could not have been prouder of his fellow Irishman; no one else on that beach mourned him so sincerely and was still enjoying the 1960s so much. In his first days in Wellfleet, Ed O’Connor had gone about on a bicycle. The Last Hurrah, a successful comic novel of the last great Irish politico in Boston, had made him rich. He now had a beautifully severe avant-garde house in the Wellfleet woods built for him by a haughty Russian-born architect who never arrived on the beach without two enormous, restive, threatening German shepherds that frightened everyone around while his master, who had an icy Oxford accent and the majesty of a Diaghilev, could be heard knocking down everyone else’s political universe. From time to time he was an advanced liberal.

Wellfleet, just a few miles down from where Provincetown spreads over the tip of the Cape, was not as famous for writers and rebellions as Provincetown. It had no rebellions and no rebels. Its first notable summer folk were architects and designers from the Bauhaus; its next, psychoanalysts. By now it was distinctly, as the pretentious consort of a famous historian put it, la plage des intellectuels. It was indeed. By now there seemed to be a book for every day of American history. The universities and the mass media had joined in incessantly producing still more documentation of “just what makes us tick” and “our American heritage.” Nothing “American” was alien to the incessant cultural analysts and psycho-historians, many of them of recent immigrant stock, who each summer in Wellfleet held seminars and read papers at each other, endlessly fascinated by the wealth of material to which they felt happily related by their newfound status as academic authorities and advisers to government.

Edmund Wilson, who lived in Wellfleet the year round, hated it in summer and called it “the fucking Riviera.” Oddly, Wilson was one of the few “old radicals” in Wellfleet, along with his friend Charlie Walker, the old Greek scholar and labor historian. I had first seen Wilson in Provincetown in 1940; he was carefully bicycling to the Portuguese bakery. He bought his crazily rambling house in Wellfleet before the main Cape highway, Route 6, had been laid out near his door. That was long before la plage des intellectuels in Wellfleet had become a continuation of Cambridge, New Haven, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the executive assistants’ wing of the White House. When I had met Wilson in 1942, he was married to Mary McCarthy and already isolated from fashionable opinion by his obstinate isolationism. I had met him again, in London at the end of the war, at the great party given for him by the Ministry of Information when he was on his way to Italy and Greece as a roving correspondent for The New Yorker. He was still against the war, still bitterly suspicious of the English. True to his own British delight in being difficult, he turned a cold face to the many writers who had come to pay him homage and amazed me by his appeal: “We must stick together against these Limeys.”

Wilson’s arrival on the Wellfleet beach regularly caused a stir. A distinct mental avidity and nervous unrest fixed itself around his bulky antique figure. He was so definitely not of this time, of these younger people, this academic set. The sight of him in his Panama hat and well-filled Bermuda shorts, the cane propped up in the sand like a sword in declaration of war, instantly brought out in me the mingled anxiety and laughter that I used to feel watching Laurel and Hardy about to cross a precipice. There was so much mischief, disdain, and intellectual solemnity wrapped up behind that getup, that high painfully distinct voice, that lonely proud face. His immense authority for everyone on this beach—especially among the literary professors, who explained to their classes that Wilson was not “really a critic at all”—was clearly at odds with the too elegant cane, the stains so carefully preserved on the Panama hat, the absurdly formal long white shirt sometimes flopping over the bulky stomach in the Bermuda shorts. He was a “character.” The improbably loud high voice—like no other voice you would ever hear, it seemed such a deliberate effort—launched into a “topic” before the man had even sat down. It amused and amazed as much as it intimidated. He asserted himself just by making his stage entrance onto what Thoreau, walking down here from Provincetown in all weathers, had in awe called “the great beach.”

The ocean rolled and thundered. The sand shone. The cliffs of stark dunes overhead, green grass and tiny twisted shrub pine against the gold sand, gleamed with wild rosebushes. Our happiest times were here, at the edge of the land, the ocean, the dunes. The beach was a great body, and on this beach we were bodies again. Beyond “Joan’s beach,” where a wartime army hut had been moved as a summer cottage for a lady from New York and her painter boyfriend, still stretched the outermost Cape, forever beating in your ears from the ocean, the emptiness of that long wild ocean beach where you could still contentedly walk, make love, and skinny-dip.

But “Joan’s beach” was a riot. The great beach was replaced every afternoon by the great society. Each year Joan’s weathered old beach hut sank more abjectly into the sand while around it rose the mercilessly stylized avant-garde house of a wealthy Leninist from Philadelphia. A leathery old man with a shaven head and showing off a powerful chest, a man who looked just as photographically virile as the old Picasso, walked with emphatic strides to the “nudies’ beach.” In the great clown tradition of the good old American summertime, pliant young girls in striped tank suits and Huck Finn country straw hats sat in the lotus position practicing Yoga. The ocean gamboled, young men dived into rollers and then hopped up and down in the water waiting for a wave to carry them back to shore. Down the beach couples lay about open, free, and friendly as if they had just made the happiest love. Red Japanese kites with long tails bobbed up and down wheeled by the screams of the children on the cliffs.

In the midst of all this Edmund Wilson was hoarsely at the center of everyone’s attention, sometimes forced against his will into the usual gossip and polemic. He sat without ease; he scooped up a handful of sand and let it drift slowly through his half-clenched fist as people running out of the water gathered around him only to run back into the water. So many staring, giggling, and deadly scrutinizers, guessing that he was “someone,” made him nervous, but he unhappily sat on, unable to make his escape. So he talked. He talked as if he were reluctant to talk but too stubborn to stop. He talked as if talking were a physical difficulty forced upon him by a disagreeable world. But it was one he had learned to use for his own purposes, and even with cunning, in short, shy, killing observations. Then, looking as if he had just heard himself for the first time, he would throw his head back in a loud whinnying laugh.

He talked about what he was reading and writing. He talked, as he wrote, from current preoccupations only. His talk was as formal as his writing. He invariably led off with a topic. He had been reading this new thing of Sartre’s, and had to say that the fellow was not as big a windbag as he had been led to believe. He liked the man’s big French radical schemes. This Allegro man and his brazen but not uninteresting guesses on the mysterious principles and practices of the Essenes. An irritable rejoinder to Gilbert Seldes, who had been telling a story about getting tight with T. S. Eliot in the twenties. Gilbert had the date wrong. A new book about our animal aggressive tradition. Everything the new young anthropologists were telling him he had known from Darwin. He was still a nineteenth-century mechanist and materialist: “We must simply get along without religion.” As for T. S. Eliot, he had the story in his notebook and the exact date. Had you by any chance looked into Swinburne’s novels? The amusing structure of the Hungarian language, which he was just then learning? “My dear boy,” he had greeted me on the beach the week before, “have I given you my lecture on Hungarian? No? Then sit down and listen.” There was also this new book on magic. He was very proud of his magician’s lore and often set out to do tricks that did not always succeed. He was too distracted. At Rachel’s birthday party one summer, he came with his equipment and disappeared into the lean- to searching for newspapers he said he needed for his act. Time passed, no Edmund. We looked in and found him absorbedly reading one of the newspapers.

Everything alive to him was alive as words, had to find its exact finicky representation in every single trace of his experience and of his reading. Much of the day and often late into the night, he sat in his great big study in the old house just off Route 6. He sat there with the stuffed owl that he hated, with the sets of Scott and Dickens that had come down to him from Wilsons and Kimballs and Mathers like the gold-topped cane and the family pictures he could never stop studying. Just outside the study was the great Delphin set of the Latin and Greek classics in their heavy striped bindings. Inside the study were the books he used for each book, like the many-volumed Michelet he had needed for To the Finland Station.

There were several desks in that study, and he moved from one to the other as he worked now on one book, now on another. He wrote always by hand, in his elegant and peremptory script, and there were as many projects going on at once as in a Renaissance painter’s workshop. Everything in the household revolved around his day’s work and the regimen needed to accomplish it. He had his own record player in that room, his own bathroom just a few steps down from his study, his own bedroom when he wanted it in this separate suite of rooms. Out on Route 6 cars screeched on their way to and from Provincetown, the pleasure place; girls with streaming hair bicycled past in halters and shorts. But inside the study that was deep inside the house off the main highway, Edmund Wilson—protected by his tall beautiful European wife, Elena—sat writing at one desk or another, reading in one language or another, eagerly waiting for Elena to bring the mail back so that he could get still more reading matter and letters to answer.

He lived to read and write. Each new language—after the Latin, Greek, French, and Italian he had learned at school, the Russian, German, and Hebrew he had acquired mostly by himself, the Hungarian he was now so proud of, the Yiddish he typically attempted from grammars after he had learned the Hebrew alphabet—was a “love affair,” he once said to me, with some subtle new syntax to love. He laughed at academic specialists with their proprietary talk of “my field”—more usually, in modern American, “my area.” One of his favorite antagonists was a scholar who was always pressing him to read Cervantes. (Spanish, for some reason, never interested Wilson.) “Elena and I have been attempting Don Quixote,” he once calculatedly told him, “and I have to admit that we find it just a mite dull.” The other turned pale and stood up shaking: “Harvard thinks differently!”

Yet what Wilson wrote dealt so much with the plight of personality, his fascination with his own family, his need to involve himself with other people, that one could see in his every sentence the extraordinary effort he put out, by words alone, to free himself from bookish solitude. Life was one elaborately constructed sentence after another, and he had been sentenced to the sentence.

The formality of sentence structure even on the beach, like the aloofness of his manner when you were drinking and gossiping with him in his own house, was like nothing any of us would ever see again. Ponderously shy, abrupt, exact, and exacting, he was matter-of-fact in a style of old-fashioned American hardness. He could be massive, unyielding on the smallest matters. Why did I always feel that I had to shout in order to reach him? There was that famous distraction, the great bald dome thinking away, arranging its sentences, even as he talked to you. But of course he made no easy splash of talk to swim in, as the rest of us did at the many cocktail parties. To depart from the question he had set was to find yourself addressing questions to the air.

He was tyrannically correct with himself and officiously correct about everybody else. The correct word, the unquestionable historical detail were professional matters. Competence was the only right relation to others. He worked from fragments and études in his notebook; short flights were the natural span of his intellectual imagination. But he had also absorbed from his passion for grammar (and no doubt his long solitude; he was an only child, with a deaf mother and a neurasthenic father) some un-American patience and thoroughness. He knew nothing else so well as how to make a book. He made books out of his intellectual satires against intellectuals, out of the light verse he sent his friends at Christmas, out of his New Yorker book reviews, out of his hatred of Robert Moses’s high-handed urban renewal, out of his compassion for Indians, out of his typical belief (based on early holidays there) that Canada represented a better, uncorrupted version of his now too big and too powerful country, out of his aversion to the endless bookkeeeping forced on American taxpayers by the Internal Revenue Service. This somehow turned into a book against the cold war.

Wilson made books out of virtually everything that crossed his mind. But certain subjects (especially American, nineteenth-century, related to the Civil War and the Gilded Age) never just crossed that mind. They stayed there, decade after decade, to be used as articles after they had first been sketched in his notebook-journal. Then they got rewritten for his books and would be rewritten again for new editions of these books. What he knew he knew; what he read he remembered; what he had seen of San Diego or Jerusalem or Odessa stayed with him forever. No one else I knew had so much patience with his own writing, his own impressions, the stories he told and retold from notebook to article to book to the next meeting in his living room. He could recast his own writing—and yours—with the same air of easily inhabiting the world by words alone. No one else I know had the same impulse to correct and rewrite everybody else. He once returned from lunch to The New Yorker, saw on someone else’s table a proof of my review of his book The Shores of Light, and calmly changed a date in it.

He could be hilarious in his retentiveness, his obstinacy, his intense personal relation to any book or subject that he liked very much or disliked very much. Discussing The Scarlet Letter (a book that as a literary modernist he easily disliked because it belonged to the American schoolroom or too much to his own past: on his mother’s side he was descended from the Mathers), he was angrily asked by a young professor of American Studies, “May I ask when you last read the book?” “Nineteen fifteen,” Wilson said breezily.

Later, relaxed on the beach after the crowd had gone to a cocktail party at a psycho-historian’s (it was to begin as a memorial service on the anniversary of Hiroshima, and one could see trailing up from the beach a procession of shoeless intellectuals, the ladies in fashionable white outfits, carrying candles), Wilson was rosy with Scotch and full of his special belief in conspiracies. Getting liberated as crowd, bottle, and day dwindled, he said, with the caustic smile he reserved for anxiously Americanized and patriotic Jewish intellectuals, “Bobby Kennedy knows who really killed his brother—and is not telling.” “Edmund, you’re going overboard, the way you did in that preface!” He learned back on his sand hill with perfect confidence. “My dear boy, you mustn’t discount my legal background.”

My legal background! He meant Edmund Wilson, Sr., one of the best lawyers of his day in New Jersey, at one time attorney general of the state and, though a Republican, invited by Woodrow Wilson to join his Cabinet in 1913. Edmund, Jr., seemed to trace his own tics, quirks, and obsessions to his father, who was a passionate admirer of Lincoln the lawyer. (The tragedy of Lincoln runs through Patriotic Gore as the tragedy of the superior man in America.) The father identified with Lincoln the melancholic. Though a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad and able to give his less finicky relatives advice about the stock market, Wilson, Sr., would not buy a share of stock. He regarded stock transactions as a form of gambling. Like many brilliant men of his generation, he thought his own life a forfeit to the big-business spirit in America. He became a “nervous invalid,” a total hypochondriac; his professional career yielded to his concern with his own symptoms. His wife, a heartier type, not “intellectual,” went deaf under the strain of her husband’s breakdown.

Edmund Wilson knew he was “odd,” and was always looking into his ancestry for the sources of his own obsessions as well as the intellectual interests plainly derived from the many preachers, lawyers, doctors behind him. He wrote about his parents and grandparents: “The fact was that I knew almost nobody else. I knew they had their doubts about me, and that in order to prove myself I should have to show that a writer could become a successful professional.” T. S. Matthews, who had known Wilson on The New Republic, liked to say that Wilson’s parents had once bought him a baseball suit—but that he had gone on reading even after he had put on the suit. As a writer, he had indeed proved himself thirty years before with Axel’s Castle. But despite his many books since and his long record of production, he had become with increasing insistence a kind of self-proclaimed outsider to the “America I see depicted in Life magazine.” He liked in the 1960s to say, in the sight of so many “sophisticated” academicians, that “old fogyism” was creeping in. He now made a point of stating—boasting?—of how little money he had accumulated. Thanks to his worrisome income-tax case, he was in financial trouble virtually to the very end of his life in 1972. The Cold War and the Income Tax was, however, a bit of political afterthought when he was nailed by the government for neglecting to pay his taxes. He was just too distracted even to sign the returns that his wife prepared for them. But when the government attached much of his income and heavily fined him, it became a point of defiance with him, as against the swollen crazily prosperous sixties, not to have amassed much money and to be, in the good old American style, “agin the government.” My friend Peter Shaw wrote that in the sixties every typical product of America (including the student rebellion) “lacked modesty of scale.” Edmund Wilson was certainly not “modest”; but he did enjoy being out of scale with the rest of the country.

At several periods in his life, he noted in his journal, he had felt impelled to write protests against various officials of the United States government; he first wrote one as a sergeant in the A.E.F. Medical Corps. As if he were now one of his own forebears, he lived in two “old-fashioned country towns,” Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and Talcottville, New York; he depended on a small income from one of his few relatives who had gone into business; he did not drive a car or use a typewriter; he did not teach, give lectures, join honorary societies that asked to honor him. When he at last accepted the Emerson-Thoreau medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he explained that he must refuse to make a speech and insisted on reading his translation of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman. When he accepted the MacDowell medal, he terrified the chairman by rolling the medal between his palms to show that he could make it disappear.

He would not play the game. Every year he became ceremonially more difficult, seemingly more perverse, more alienated from what President Johnson called “the Great Society,” from the endless American sociability, from the “successful career” that American writers strive for as thirstily as professors and oil executives. Of course he had authority, and how proudly he could use it. To ward off the many people who want something from a “name,” he had a postcard printed up on which it was noted (with a check against the appropriate box) that Edmund Wilson does not read manuscripts for strangers; does not write articles or books to order; does not write forewords or introductions; does not make statements for publicity purposes; does not do any kind of editorial work, judge literary contests, give interviews, broadcast or appear on television; does not answer questionnaires, contribute to or take part in symposiums. And so on!

As the contrast deepened each year between Wilson and the “America I see depicted in Life magazine,” his concern with right words and standards seemed to become more intense, his irritation with sloppiness and misuse even more pronounced, his sense of his own intellectual honor loftier and yet more anguished. The old radical was becoming the old curmudgeon.

Behind Wilson’s ever more pressing urge to make order of his life by words, behind the obsessive journal-keeper feeding on the one book he never had to give up writing—a day as its own subject, its only expressive task—there was some patrician belief that through style everything, even in his disordered country, would yet fall into place. He had always been a fussy corrector of everything he read. Now the authority derived from his sound education, from his many books and almost “bewildering” interests, from being Edmund Wilson, became as necessary as the articulation of the bones to the movement of the body. This insistence on “correctness”—as of a judge or minister or national leader in the days when a few solitary geniuses molded American culture—became basic to the sense of his role in American life. Let the young and the newer stocks have their pretentious social science theories and academic careers and ridiculous “New Criticism”! He was the last American man of letters, the great anachronism—and not without mischief.

Wilson now depended on “style” in an aristocratic-political sense more familiar to English universities and the House of Commons than to American intellectuals. He seemed to read the young writers with more attention than they read themselves, and loved to point out to a writer his misuse of a word and some error in detail. “Trotsky was killed not with a pickax but with an ice ax. You made the same mistake in your last book.” Sometimes the pressure to write well was so grinding that, as one noticed when the notebooks began to be published, there was not a picture seen but just the effort to make one. Writers his too concrete mind could not grasp—Blake, Kafka—he dismissed with a wave of his hand. What he understood he understood.

There was a kind of political majesty to all this. Behind the pressing personal urge to correctness, I saw the moral significance of “right words” to Wilson’s class—the professional gentry of lawyers, preachers, educators, scientists, which from the time of New England’s clerical oligarchs had remained the sustaining class of American intellectual life. Despite all these eager beavers from the newer stocks, the few figures with the most unquestioned influence still represented—and often in the person of Edmund Wilson himself—the old American clerisy. These were still the policymakers, while imitative critics spoke haughtily of “irrelevant texture” in Shakespeare. Was the intellect in America to be banished to the new mass universities? The true thinkers were the policymakers behind the scenes who, no matter how many billions heaped up by the old robber barons they gave out as heads of the great foundations, were as detached as Henry Adams from the unctuous propaganda of American business.

Wilson thus seemed the one man of letters in the American tradition who still represented the traditional American caste of professional diplomats like George Kennan, judges like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Learned Hand, scholars who were lawgivers like Noah Webster. No wonder that Patriotic Gore, our American Plutarch, ended on Justice Holmes, as it began with Harriet Beecher Stowe and that most superior intellect, Abraham Lincoln. Such men and women were “the capable,” as Sinclair Lewis (a doctor’s son) had admiringly called the lonely doctors, philosophic lawyers, and scientists who in his work resist the bitch goddess that William James (another doctor) had called American success. Though business ruled the roost and money was more important to everybody, it was “the capable,” who came from a long tradition of professional concern, who still kept up for others the standards Edmund Wilson grew up with.

The chief expression all this took was the bitter polemic he wrote in 1962 to preface the long-delayed Patriotic Gore. It had taken him fifteen years to put the book together from a lifetime of reading and absorption in the literature of the Civil War. In the summer of 1962 his bitterness against the American state took the form of a preface that was really an effort to deny the love of the American past and his belief in American moral heroism that made the book itself so moving.

Like so much else in his work, Patriotic Gore also took off from family history. One of his earliest memories seems to have been of the original two-volume set of General Grant’s memoirs, published by Mark Twain (and sold by subscription to all good Americans) as a service to the strange man who had crushed the South but as President had proved a disaster both to the nation and to himself. After leaving the White House he went bankrupt, was cheated of his own money, and dying of cancer, he undertook the Personal Memoirs at Mark Twain’s urging in order to provide for his family.

Wilson, so deep in “all that Civil War stuff” that the enchanted reader could not help following him at every turn of the great narrative, nevertheless opened his book with a preface that read as if composed to drive off anyone still holding the illusion that the Civil War was historically necessary. As if the title (from “Maryland, My Maryland”) were not surly and sarcastic enough, Wilson compared the Northern “refusal to grant the South its independence” (certainly an unhistorical way of putting it) to the Soviet suppression in 1956 of the Hungarian revolt. The history of the United States was nothing but a big-power drive. The United States had been an aggressor against the Indians, against the Mexicans, against the South. “The institution of slavery, which the Northern states had by this time got rid of, thus supplied the militant Union North with the rabble-rousing moral issue which is necessary in every modern war to make the conflict appear as a melodrama.… The North’s determination to preserve the Union was simply the form that the power drive now took.…

“I am trying,” Wilson claimed, “to remove the whole subject from the plane of morality and to give an objective account of the expansion of the United States.” This was hardly Wilson’s forte. The value of his book, of course, lay in its intense biographical method. Wilson was no more at ease in “objective” history than he was in removing any subject “from the plane of morality.” His main text, so assiduous in tracing every detail of character and intelligence in his main figures, was full of the most obvious gratitude for what they had contributed to the eradication of slavery and the preservation of the country. But on and on Wilson went in his preface, ticking off Pearl Harbor as Roosevelt’s doing (“… it has been argued, to me quite convincingly, that this act was foreseen by our government and—in order to make our antagonists strike the first blow—deliberately not forestalled at a time when a Japanese delegation was attempting to negotiate peace”), ticking off Hiroshima, ticking off our postwar belligerence toward Russia, ticking off our preparations for bacteriological and biological warfare. The United States, it seemed, had obstructed Castro’s Socialist revolution, thus forcing him to seek support from the Communists. (Castro was himself to give the lie to this in acknowledging his long Communist background.) But Wilson was in such a state about any and all wars fought by the United States that he was wild enough to write that though Jews had strong reasons for fighting Hitler, it was wrong of them to support the war, since “the extermination of six million Jews was already very far advanced by the time the United States took action.”

Wilson then excused the Southern resistance to the civil-rights movement on the ground that Southerners “have never entirely recognized the authority of the Washington government.” This was as mistaken in fact as it was foolish in theory. The South was the most militaristic section of the country and had been enthusiastic for war against Spain in 1898, against Germany in 1917, Korea in 1950. Southerners in the 1840s had led the attack against Mexico and had wanted to annex Cuba. Lincoln had said over and over what the North knew to be the simple truth: it was the South’s attempt to foist the slave system on the free territories that led to the Civil War.

Wilson’s bitterness on the subject of America’s “power drive” of course represented the despair of many Americans as their government vainly attempted to “contain” the whole world against Communism. The government since 1941 had become too autonomous and powerful. But Wilson, very much like Thoreau in his own passionate political essays against the American state, made no effort to prove his case; he just helped himself out with caustic images taken from his reading on the power drives of animals. There was little in that preface one could deal with as historical evidence. It was a series of defiant assertions in the old American style: government is not to be trusted! Many younger Americans were soon to feel this, but they had radical solutions for still more government, Leninist style, that Wilson laughed at.

A question naturally emerged. Why, if Wilson felt bitter about the Civil War and about American history in general, should he want to spend fifteen years on this book? To which the only possible answer was another question. Why, if he said he felt that way about the Civil War, should he have written such an extraordinary book around it?

For Patriotic Gore is a great book. It was the greatest single performance of Wilson’s unique career as a man of letters (and contained in passing the most profound considerations on literature in America I had ever read). It made the passion that went into the war, and into the disillusion that followed it, more affecting than any other contemporary book on this greatest of national American experiences. It had in particular a fullness of historical atmosphere, a sensitivity to the great personages of the vital writers and leaders, that made the reader see Mrs. Stowe, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and the others as commanding figures in a great American epic. Though Abraham Lincoln “examined the mechanical devices that were brought to him in the years of his Presidency and is reported to have understood them, he does not seem to have been much impressed by the development of machinery in America or even much interested in it.” Grant, dying of cancer of the throat, dictated his Personal Memoirs until it became impossible to use his voice. “Humiliated, bankrupt and voiceless, on the very threshold of death, sleepless at night and sitting up in a chair as if he were still in the field and could not risk losing touch with developments, he relived his old campaigns.”

There, in the heroes, the writers, the sensitive consciences, the faithful diarists of the conflict, was Edmund Wilson’s own story. There was no real social history in this book of studies in the literature of the Civil War, no grasp of the real social issues and movements behind the war and nineteenth-century America. History to the “old radical” was still, as it had been to Emerson, biography.

As the sixties darkened into war, and he became increasingly ill, his sense of himself, of his necessary authority, became more pronounced and more tragic. At a party in Ed O’Connor’s house in the Wellfleet woods, Wilson, drunk and defiant, said, laughing, that the F.B.I, would be suspicious of him. “I’ve been married four times!” As he stumbled out of the party and down the stairs, the consort of the famous historian who was so proud of knowing exactly who was who on la plage des intellectuels said throatily, “Really, shouldn’t someone look after the poor old man?”

At the moment we were all looking very well after ourselves. Round and round we rode the great carrousel of American literature, American money-getting, American fame. Some of us were getting nearer than others to grabbing the gold ring that beamed at us every time we went round again. Ed O’Connor, with his money from The Last Hurrah, awoke one day to find himself with a Porsche, the house in the Wellfleet woods, a magnificent town house in Boston, and the friendship of the Kennedys in nearby Hyannis, nearby Boston, friendly Washington. Ed’s newfound wealth was somehow also our treasure. Everyone basked in it.

The blowy shifting dunes of the great beach, where Ed and I walked every golden heady summer of the early 1960s, had been his patrol ground as a lonely Coast Guardsman during the war. It amused him to compare his walks then and now; his early life as a beggarly radio announcer before the war and his overflowingly happy, wealthy life now. O’Connor still had a radio announcer’s voice, could mimic all the Wellfleet characters, and told his stories with professional charm. His practiced voice played on you. The easy flow that he had developed as a radio announcer was now the total geniality of the wealthy host—a host who neither smoked nor drank, was until 1962 a confirmed Irish bachelor, a fiercely old-fashioned Catholic surrounded by Jews against whose “lack of religion” he grumbled, but who were among his closest friends.

Another Boston Irishman was in the White House. And in this happy go-ahead best-sellerdom that had suddenly come upon him, Ed O’Connor shone and gleamed like a new car. The young on the Wellfleet beach doted on him, chalked “VISIT THE HOME OF THE STARS” on his brand-new driveway; there was one great summer birthday party when Beth presented him with a money belt. Ed gave his best performance as the Scrooge in charge of the pay toilets that someday were sure to desecrate “our beach,” suddenly threatened by the government’s damnable creation of a National Seashore.

The woods back of the O’Connor house that birthday party were suddenly full of White House detail in incongruous business suits as Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Goodwin, released from academic constraints and just in from the Kennedy compound at Hyannis, gamboled and gossiped. Ed O’Connor, the Irish ascetic and non-drinker, quietly served more and more drinks to lissome girls in bikinis. Young men in rustic beards sat cross-legged on the floor humming and strumming folk rock to their own guitars. There was a cocktail-party sense of everybody’s ability to move fluently anywhere. Power from Washington seemed to be stored up in the cells of Kennedy’s executive assistants and advisers even on a weekend romp in Wellfleet among their old colleagues from Harvard, M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study.

With his heavy, wearily pitted face Richard Goodwin radiated shrewdness in the midst of relaxation. The councilors to the Prince seemed to themselves to be in unforeseen but abundant relation to power. Things were done for you; travel to any part of the earth instantly and beautifully arranged; your opinion gravely solicited on the best way to foster the economic development of Latin America and on what subtle shifts might yet be expected among the hard-liners in the Kremlin. Above all, you were now “Society,” the only true upper crust, those in the know.

Their rich, lean, handsome chief and war hero had fulfilled more than his own ambition; he raised with him intellectual prodigies whose glamour had been confined to academe. He radiated like the sun. He was not just the center every day now of everybody’s attention, rich, and the President, shining with the light of kings; he was at the center of everything and everybody, and could give you—as the councilors were always quick to tell you—the inside dope on de Gaulle, Khrushchev, Macmillan. The councilors identified with the Prince, with his youth and handsomeness; with the style of conscious impudence that the Kennedy sons learned from their father, so that you could not always tell whether a Kennedy was his father or his father’s son. They were proud of his sophisticated and agile wife; proud that he had so many girls; proud of travel arrangements beautifully typed out on White House notepaper; proud, without knowing too much about it, of the thirteen million the campaign had cost.

But proudest of all were they of the “scholarly atmosphere around the White House.” After all, they were scholars; that was their usefulness. It was more than a privilege; it was an education to be at the beck and call of a President with this inside mastery of the whole throbbing social machine. Even as a candidate, Kennedy had excited the usually hardened Washington observer, Richard Rovere: “The easy way in which he disposes of the question of Church and State … suggests that the organization of society is the one thing that really engages his interest.” Such a contrast, as Kennedy himself pointed out to visitors, with the Eisenhowers’ many television sets, so important to those dowdy people that they ran wires down a wall to the nearest outlet.

Intellect was in touch with power. The councilors brought back news of talks with their chief about Disraeli, an interesting review in the latest New Statesman. His favorite book was Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne! He could speculate, so rare in a politician, about the fate of power in American lives. As he was grinningly objective about himself, his father’s old Neanderthal opinions, his father’s wonder-making fortune, so he was “cool”—that great ideal of the period—facing the many world crises that were known first to the President.

The President knew, and through his councilors you knew, that Chiang’s “people” wanted a war. They presented him at lunch with the most beautiful and delicate vase, and all they wanted in return was a little war! Khrushchev, visiting a great farm in the Middle West, had been given figures that turned out to be inflated, and Khrushchev had used this to score off Kennedy. Power was great but strangely frail when you least expected it—as at the Bay of Pigs. Power included some secret essential, it was at the mercy of some larger reason, but this would not be admitted on the surface. In some way power remained an illusion of power. The more pressure you applied to your claim, the more it took on the fatalism of old Celtic tales. There were ancient spirits or wizards who promised you a treasure and would deliver; but the treasure itself could not be depended on. Ah, but a Gael could be sad for all his power and laughter.

Meanwhile, however, the hard-pressed people of this suffering earth cried out for change, a modicum of hope. Goodwin drew up large-scale reforms for Latin America, presented them to Kennedy with the warning that big business would oppose them. Kennedy, great man, smiled and told him not to worry. The famous Kennedy toughness would support burning social change as well as our “posture” vis-à-vis our “adversary.” Goodwin was as confident about changing many things as was Life when it announced in the first summer of the new administration:

It is apparent to the editors of Life that the national goals of our country can be stated in these two propositions: (1) Win The Cold War (2) Create a Better America. Can a magazine presume to say that it will help win the Cold War, help create a better America? It cannot presume otherwise.

Everything was suddenly possible because intellect was in charge. The Kennedy administration in its happy dizzy first year was a social occasion from which certain overearnest advisers like Professor Henry Kissinger were finally excluded as not being “entertaining” enough. It was important to be entertaining, nimble, quick; it was most important to entertain possibility in all things. Intellect was in charge. Over and again I was told by the professors in the White House not only how much Kennedy read, but how quickly. There was a driving claim all day long on History to be made, History to be recorded. The field was open at last to the informed and brainy. What I did not learn from the councilors was that Kennedy, with his patchy education and the snubs he had suffered at Harvard as rich Joe Kennedy’s son, resented intellectuals as much as he used them.

In Wellfleet I had just finished “The President and Other Intellectuals” for the American Scholar issue on the new administration when Arthur Schlesinger called me from the White House to extend the President’s invitation to lunch. In my essay I described the admiration between the President and writers so different as Robert Frost and Norman Mailer; went on to Kennedy’s executive need of scholars and intellectual “experts.” I brazenly, on the basis of reading and interviews with many Kennedy observers, doubted his seeming freedom from the conventional wisdom, but not his quickness, his overwhelming interest in journalism, his concern with History as something to be made. The key to Kennedy’s character was one I thought I knew all too well: the need to remodel himself, to recreate himself, to fit himself to the endless demands behind which gleamed the immense stakes available in American life.

Reading Kennedy’s books and current pronouncements had impressed me less with Kennedy as “intellectual” than working for him had impressed his councilors. I told Schlesinger that my essay would displease the President, and suggested that Schlesinger read it before I accepted the invitation to the White House. Schlesinger laughed but read it his next weekend at Wellfleet. As we walked up and down the beach, shivering in the sudden wind that had come off the water, he praised my observations, corrected some facts, supplied more information, and assured me that there was nothing in it to embarrass him with the President.

It was August, 1961; Kennedy had been in office for seven months. Despite the Bay of Pigs, the rising tensions with Russia, the uprush of black protest in the South, the ferocity of American “conservatives,” the bloom was still on the rose. His eyes were curiously bloodshot, but he looked so fresh and easy in the White House that he carried you along with him. He was full of gossip about the great; literary items he grinningly liked for their titles, like Irwin Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” He mused that success in America was always in personal terms, and so became ultimately unsatisfying, while in Russia the individual achievement was swallowed up by the group. He talked personalities around the globe, from de Gaulle to Ilya Ehrenburg. What struck me most was not the easy, bantering knowledge and the well-reported aggressiveness; it was the way he shifted from arrogant authority to a wistful need for a more confident learning than he possessed. He, too, was a personality under construction—rare in a politician, but one explanation of his openness to all impressions and his need to charm. He was still “making himself,” responding to the many demands on his character. The political ideas were something else. He was a “tough pragmatist,” and turned everybody else around him into one.

He wanted very much to be liked. I was astonished by how much he put himself out for me, how willingly he disclosed himself and his smallest resentments. He now had a great contempt for Time—once his journalistic ideal—whose “foreign editors get their great knowledge on the train between Greenwich and New York.” He was intellectually concessive to scholars and historians, to the leading novelists of the moment. But he was obviously fascinated by personality and by what he called “brain power” as the clue to a man’s importance. The volume of cultural envy and resentment amazed me in a politician so glamorous and, at that moment in the Western world, positively supreme. Was I the only luncheon guest who wondered over so much intellectual chic? Was there no one at those White House dinner parties who questioned his pretensions? Yet I could see why so many President-watchers were fascinated with his style. He regarded himself—and his domestic emotions—as a dramatic event. He recounted André Malraux’s visit with the same excited ability to cover every personal detail that he admired in writers—and applied to his own life and marriage. Malraux’s two sons had died in an automobile accident. The man was amazing in his stoicism. Then Kennedy said, with husbandly sharpness, “Malraux sure went for Jackie. So naturally Malraux is now Jackie’s favorite novelist.”

The once-golden cloud over an American President certainly covered this President those first months in the White House. There was a dazzle to Washington that I ascribed to Kennedy himself—to ambition, not his ties with “intellect.” I went back to the Willard, added to my already written piece some appreciative notes on Kennedy as a personal force in all our lives, and unmindfully waited for the American Scholar to appear in the fall.

It appeared and Kennedy was outraged. Despite reports of choler from William Styron and other literary friends of the President, I had not anticipated just how furious a President could be made by a literary critic in the American Scholar. The article produced a fan letter from Professor Henry Kissinger, obviously still smarting at not being “entertaining” enough for Kennedy. Only when Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days appeared in 1965 did I also realize that my article had so irritated Kennedy that Schlesinger promptly forgot that he had gone over my article with me in Wellfleet. A Thousand Days held me up for ridicule as still another “New York intellectual” ignorant of the necessities of power. “As for Kennedy, he was very funny about Kazin’s essay when it appeared in the American Scholar. ‘We wined him and dined him,’ he said, ‘and talked about Hemingway and Dreiser with him, and I later told Jackie what a good time she missed, and then he went away and wrote that piece!’ ”

In the exuberance of the New Frontier in 1961—then the maelstrom of the sixties—nothing could have mattered less than my uninformed and obstinate suspicion of power. Like my old friend Hofstadter, who never saw an American President and would not have gone out of his way to see one, I was afraid of so much power in the hands of one man. Henry Adams, who was mesmerized by the power given to politicians he despised, said he was content to be a “stable companion to Statesmen.” Hofstadter did not much care where Kennedy’s stable was. He was a historian of American society, American hopes, and American paranoia, not a councilor to the Prince.

We were all innocents, even the councilors. Power beyond reason created a lasting irrationality. Kennedy’s hideous death, turning the promise and the secret corruption of the thousand days into the century’s most famous murder mystery, uncovered enough to intimate that the mystery was the government’s secret doings and might never be revealed. Government ruled, not “Society.” Kennedy’s assassination, followed so soon by Johnson’s war and Nixon’s war, Johnson’s folly and Nixon’s lying, made one wonder if Kennedy’s early promise had been based on anything but his extinguishable charm, irony, deftness. “Camelot” became a sneer, an emptiness. Had anything been there except so personal a sense of power? The refugee physicist Leo Szilard had alerted Einstein to reach Roosevelt with the news that an atomic bomb was feasible. Leo Szilard in the early 1960s haunted Washington, constantly pressed the Kennedy administration on the dangers of nuclear war, and was termed insane by one executive assistant. How official these once-sardonic university wits became! As Vietnam slowly heated up, Goodwin assured Beth: “It’s the little wars that stop the big wars.” “History” in the making, “History” in the writing, had been everything to Kennedy and his entourage. History now waited for historians to see beyond so vain a sense of history.

But the truth was already in. You could say anything about power except how intoxicating it was. The old war had certainly made us tough, and the cold war made us tougher. The power could be glimpsed in the rows of gleaming jet planes on every great airfield; in the proud glint of the great new glass-walled office buildings on Third Avenue, Park, Sixth that looked like file cabinets, steel desks, Xerox machines, coding systems; in the new look of women as they went into the labor force and recognized themselves in the technological vortex as a constituency, not appendages to the kitchen. We were flying, floating in air, streaming, living it up under extended wings. There was a runaway feel to “society,” to our lives; to the mingled hope and terror, the sudden wild sexual freedom and man-woman battle that Mailer caught better than anyone else—and acted out, in respect for constant confrontation.

In 1943 poor Isaac Rosenfeld, dead by the 1950s, had sat in his orgone box looking for a message, for the Messiah, for the perfect freedom and happiness that would come to him as unprecedented sexual power—from the spheres. He hoped to get in touch with the hidden energies of this universe. But Isaac lived and died alone; too soon for the age of Mailer. Mailer, Bellow, Goodman had all been delivered by Reichian analysis to be bold, defiant of convention and body armature. But Goodman’s homosexual loneliness had saved him from “bourgeois convention.” Long before a mob took this over as if it had nothing to believe in but homosexuality, he had fondly believed that to be singular and lonely was genius. Bellow had “broken through” with Augie March, but despite his natural caution, his brilliantly self-centered novels described the sexual impatience of the rising Jewish middle class. Lowell, redeemed by suffering from his overdeveloped early style, found his true self and his best material in the irreducible self he portrayed in Life Studies wandering about Boston sanitariums.

But no one else caught so well as Mailer the hidden public temper that would now flash out, from Washington to Greenwich Village, as a sexual riot that praised itself as radical politics. Mailer’s genius was to know the real grittiness and obscenity of American life, which he had learned in the Army, a bantamweight Jew from Brooklyn up against rednecks who could take seriously only someone who would fight them. Unlike Bellow, Goodman, Lowell, Mailer really knew—and rejoiced in—what Trilling would sadly have called the “underside” of American life. He knew that what intellectuals now wanted was what Washington wanted: to break out; to show muscle; to “confront” and confront again; not to be intimidated. Mailer went public, as no other writer of the period did, with the new revelation that it was really all a question of playing the right role. What he did not need to speak and what his audience welcomed most was his antagonism to secret government, to the wealth and power of which he was naturally suspicious even when their sexual self-expression fascinated him. You did not have to be so talented as Mailer to be tough; but if you were tough you could now think yourself talented. Middle-class hedonists eventually shocked Mailer by adopting sex not even as honest lust but as the latest advice. The itch to break out was everywhere now.

What would not subside after the “protest movement” did was the inflamed sexual language and bravado that supported the new painters and writers when you could see nothing but the triumph of surface. “I have to paint large so as to keep it intimate,” said Mark Rothko. “Action painting, like the new atomic physics,” said an admiring critic, “has the power to release trapped energy, to set great forces at work at liberty for good and evil.” “I paint the unconscious,” said Jackson Pollock. “I am nature.” There was indeed no “modesty of scale,” as the young historian sourly commented after the sixties were over. And especially was there no privacy. Everything was public, visible, explosive, “strong.” Was it just the confident new American middle class flexing its muscles, showing off? Did “protest” come only from those who had the power to defy authority? On my way to Tuskegee to lecture one week, I saw blacks meekly walking the sides of the highway, students still so shy that no one told me and I did not know until I had come home that the lights in New York had all gone out one night. In New York, Mailer was writing that “the ambition of a writer like myself is to become consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful.” I had learned early to believe in Mailer’s prophetic instinct. He was the writer of the big American change after 1945. The instinct was surer on American life, where he could be uncanny in sniffing out the secret policemen, the power brokers, the biggest money, than on himself, who was understandably fascinated by what he most urgently suspected. Like Fitzgerald, he used himself and used himself; the contradictions were his life. Unlike Fitzgerald, he could not make himself the believable fantasy he was in life. He was so insatiably mental about everything that he became his ideas, his heroes. Oddly, he was too reflective to be content with fiction. Despite his genius for publicity, he could lose himself completely in his favorite abstractions. His political instinct was brilliant, but he was always looking for political concepts that would not hold very long. Once, giving me lunch at the Plaza, he got so caught up preaching sex as freedom and power, denouncing the repression of sex as the prime cause of “cancer,” that he did not notice the fashion show put on in the Oak Room and the models dipping and swaying around our table.

Beth and I soon lived a full New York life crowded with love and anger, ambition and cultural war. The book-crammed walls of our apartment high over the Hudson seemed to rock with the violence between the generations. We could not seem to agree on anything except Rachel, not even on the obvious necessity of making a clean break with this excessive attention to each other. Novelist and critic, artist and mere intellectual, we were playing out a cultural drama, a literary passion play, in which issue succeeded issue. There was the ineradicable Germanism of Hannah Arendt, the latest literary recipe just imported from Paris by Susan Sontag, the new leftist chic of the “New York Review of the Vietnam War,” and what Beth at the most profound juncture of night and morning, when she woke up as angry as when she had gone to bed, roundly declared to be the indifference to fiction, and especially woman’s fiction, by the literary Establishment.

She fascinated me, she alarmed me, she constantly tempted me to think that there was still something I could do to appease her, some magic word that would bring back the love-mad young girl I had first met. I was hopelessly one self. Beth the novelist included so many selves, dreamed so many stories, that I was never sure which one I was in. I was amazed by the fluency of mood, of character, of her dreams. Like the novelists she most admired, she seemed to be made up of some invisible writing that nevertheless dominated her, shifted with the balance as it tumbled around her. She was easily turned on, and off; was possessed by what possessed her at any single moment. I was awed. Bellow said when I published a sketch of him over the years, “I’m not used to other people running the picture gallery.” There was in Beth a mixture of the novelist’s narcissism and infernal shrewdness about others, an irresolution about herself but a psychic’s intuition about other people that made me expect, in the most awful moments, that a different Beth would turn up in a minute.

So there was always, from hour to hour, a new wife to look forward to. After a bad fight steeped in alcohol, there would be in the middle of the morning tearing impatient lovemaking; followed by a deep fall into a silence and sadness I could never reach. Life was full anytime we were together—of homecoming and bitterness, excitement and peril, wild joy and the most deathly loneliness inside the same apartment. What a New York riot! What a two-person drama leading to and from the elevator; among the many drinks, the throwing of books and papers, the curses; all the old Jewish nightmares of annihilation being played out at the bar of the Russian Tea Room, while waiting on line to see the very latest French movie on Third Avenue, in restaurant after restaurant where the food, left uneaten, seemed to look up at us in shame.

We made quite a show—perfect scrappers—and I understood her resentment all too well. I was a critic, forever perched on the judgment seat, of whose hearty unending approval she could never feel confident. I was confident that I could read the mind behind a book and that there was some perfect mind—but that was in another country. This naturally ran against Beth’s belief that a critic’s job was to provide total support and no criticism of anything whatsoever.

Although I lived by this battle, my love and support were certainly imperfect. I could not handle so demanding a literary ambition rooted in panic, anger, fear of annihilation. I was losing faith in my own power to love. Our marriage seemed to be a Jewish autobiography, not a marriage of minds. Our fears were identical and repetitive—our fears kept me coming home. As Beth said, we were each other’s family. To which I silently added: each other’s old family.

Family! The dismemberment and torture of the Jewish family was a too familiar fear in our house. The farther we got away from the Holocaust in time, the more it took up residence right on New York’s West Side. The giddier our travels, drinking, our love and dismay, the more suddenly a trapdoor seemed to open into bottomless fear. This we had in common; this we knew: for Jews the war had never ended. The posthumous Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” stunned us by the knowledge she had of this. Her ferocity had been hidden by her perfect impersonation at Smith of a scholarship girl playing nice. But she had guessed the truth; to face this truth was already to die a little. “What the person out of Belsen … wants … is the knowledge that somebody else has been there, and knows the worst.”

The Holocaust would not go away, and so could be denied. The more “Jewish” we became, the more we were open to the new horror: the past did not exist unless you had lived it yourself. There was no historical memory if you chose not to have one. The buoyant, the storm-laden, the tumultuously revolutionary sixties filled up the present. The pleasure principle mocked the “atavistic” Jewish demand for a sign from one’s fellow men.

At a painter’s smart dinner party in the East Nineties, two visiting Indian diplomats explained, with a little smile, that the Holocaust had never occurred. It was all propaganda. Beth became furious. A prominent Jewish publishing executive was annoyed. She had spoiled the dinner party.

Our own battle went on and on. It was as if neither could conquer the past but had to find it in the other, to repeat it in the other, to liberate itself through the other. The drama soon palled. The marital discord that had seemed central, all-consuming, because it was fixed in monogamy—that essential furniture of the good life—now plainly seemed a piece of middle-class indulgence. The young en masse suddenly became revolutionaries against all fixed things. They were terrible, outrageous; they were outside of literature; they were even anti-literature. But since they were our children, children of the new middle class, they were perfectly equipped and ready to dynamite us.

The sons were out to get the fathers—especially if the fathers had been “radicals” during a certain ancient Depression. Although I was as much a target to my own son as my old friends were to their sons, I had a secret sympathy with the sons in general. It was spring, the sons were bursting out in France, England, Italy, Germany, and students were sitting on the windowsills of the Columbia buildings on Broadway, laughing and singing in the sunshine. Carnival time. At the beginning. The students certainly looked freer and more joyous than Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Stephen Spender, and other “old revolutionists” at the inevitable panel meeting held by the middle-aged to tell the young what to think. The students, at the beginning, certainly looked different from the booted-and-spurred horse cop in Sam Browne belt and hooded shades who contemptuously barred my way to a telephone in the coffee shop that his “special operations squad” had taken over. A Columbia professor, an “old Socialist” and hence by no means in easy sympathy with the strike, burst into tears when he saw the cops dragging students into the paddy wagon. The students did not mind the paddy wagon, far from it; but they especially relished the sight of “old Socialists” in tears.

The sons were attacking the fathers where we lived. They attacked our attachment to libraries; to books uselessly piled on more books; to our fondest belief that violence had nothing proper to do with sex and sex nothing to do with politics. America needed thinking, said Professor Richard Hofstadter in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at Columbia’s 1968 commencement. (The campus was too bloody-minded to accommodate the usual ceremony.) It needed the humanities; it needed learning, civility, understanding, not angry mindless platitudes. And besides, hinted Hofstadter, some of us, even us, used to be radical as well. Had we changed so much? he pleaded. Cannot you recognize that the America we suffered for in the thirties is yours?

But America has changed, Tim responded scornfully to me when, that tumultuous spring of 1968, I met him at Widener. Twenty years old; army fatigues, of course; the sweeping mustache; an impatiently loving, slightly pitying expression. The young were no longer waiting to be noticed. They were on stage! And as for “Amerika,” it is not and never was what you timid old Social Democrats thought it was. Hofstadter and I were what Blake called horses of instruction; the sons were tigers of wrath. Blake said that the tigers were wiser in their wrath than the horses of instruction. For we had “made it”; had turned into an Establishment; were compliant intellectuals who lent comfort to the same old system just by our being liberal, moderate—“wise.”

Was all this joyous brio “revolution”? Playacting? Publicity? Spring? The son corrected the father, who could use correction. But was there more to this than the social self-confidence of the Ivy League up against easily demoralized old profs who never quite knew what the young meant, or if they meant anything more than to show up old profs? There was a fine Oedipal aggressiveness which, for one son painfully identifying with his immigrant father, shocked like a sudden visit from outer space. A yippie flyer of the period became almost as dear to me as the slogan put up by students, in Paris—“L’imagination au pouvoir!”

 … disobey your parents; burn your money; you know life is a dream and all our institutions are man-made illusions effective because YOU take the dream for reality.… Break down the family, church, nation, city, economy; turn life into an art form, a theater of the soul and a theater of the future; the revolutionary is the only artist.

What’s needed is a generation of people who are freaky, crazy, irrational, sexy, angry, irreligious, childish and mad; people who burn draft cards, burn high school and college degrees, people who say “to hell with your goals!” people who lure the youth with music, pot and acid; people who redefine the normal; people who break with the status-role-title-consumer game; people who have nothing material to lose but their flesh.…

The white youth of America have more in common with Indians plundered than they do with their own parents. Burn their houses down, and you will be free.…

As it happened, at the moment the entrance hall of Widener was lined with showcases bearing ancient Hebrew grammars and exhibiting THREE CENTURIES OF HEBREW AT HARVARD. I rejoiced in the yellowing pages; the alphabet that always reminded Edmund Wilson of how far these letters had traveled; the letter ע, the ’ayin that I could never encounter without seeing my mother’s young face; the Hebrew letters into which the Jews transcribed the German, Spanish, Greek, Arabic they spoke in different countries. These Hebrew letters surrounded me as the deepest part of my History.

Tim was also my History. He was on the run, had no time to look at the frayed and yellowing pages showing THREE CENTURIES OF HEBREW AT HARVARD. Real life, his moment, the great moment of his generation were all outside. Before the Center for International Studies, a pent-up crowd of protesting students was demonstrating as if it were not a Harvard building but the infamous Pentagon itself. I looked at my son with love and wonder—young, brilliantly alive with the confidence of a generation that would “tear down the war machine,” he was enveloped in a mass of comrades and duplicates, seemed never to be alone. I thought of myself climbing the long weary hill every day, year after year, from the 137th Street IRT station to the City College. Tim and friends seemed to be “carrying out” an attack on unemployment, racism, persecution that I had shared all my life, that I never felt more than during the Vietnam war. Yet we laughed at our own uselessness when Irving Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, and I went to see Vice-President Humphrey about the war. “Why don’t you talk to him?” Humphrey said bitterly.

No more “mere” protest. This was action! Everything that blazing spring was clear to the young—just a little too simple, perhaps; trembling on the brink of violence; already engulfed in political delusion—as Tim and his friends saw all justice and truth in the Vietcong, ran through the school halls in the poorest parts of Cambridge “calling out oppressed youth,” who, baffled but no doubt grateful to get out of school for the day, perhaps disappeared instead of marching on the State House and the local draft board.

But of course it was “oppressed youth” who were getting sent over to save Vietnam for democracy. In the cities of “Amerika” young people were chalking on the walls “God Is Not Dead. We Are” and, without a doubt, driving wild that already crazy war President who called himself “the head of the free world”:

Hey, hey, hey, L.B.J.,

How many kids did you kill today?

And all those new councilors to the new Prince! Rostow, owl-glassed, with his sheaf of position papers, briefing papers, scenarios, and game plans, was photographed by Life leaning against a column on the White House porch as he waited to see The Boss. No doubt Rostow said to Johnson what he said to me at the University of Texas in the last paroxysm of the war: “I’ll tell you how we can still win this.” That military genius and perfect Southerner General Westmoreland, who looked as if no thought had ever passed through his mind that he alone had ever thought of:

I know that the passing of a loved one is one of life’s most tragic moments, but sincerely hope that you will find some measure of comfort in knowing that your son served his Nation with honor.

His devoted service was in the finest traditions of American soldiers who on other battlefields and in other times of national peril have given the priceless gift of life to safeguard the blessings of freedom for their loved ones and for future generations. In Vietnam today brave Americans are defending the rights of men to choose their own destiny and to live in dignity and freedom.

All members of the United States Army join in sharing your burden of grief.

Sincerely,

s/ W. C. Westmoreland

General, United States Army

Chief of Staff

For Tim there was a straight line of words, of radical will, an intoxication of militancy perfectly matched and opposed by Walt Whitman Rostow, by the big-bellied plumbers and construction workers who now made a point of wearing on their hard hats decaled American flags and on their work shirts still another American flag. The most heavily unionized workers, the good ethnics who put their bodies on the line, had become the spearhead of American jingoism against the effete intellectuals, the pampered college brats. It was a class matter, all right. The workers wanted the war; wanted bigger defense budgets and the jobs that came with them, wanted (said they wanted) to keep strong “family life and tradition.” As I went past Columbia during the strike, a taxi-driver screamed at the “longhairs” picketing alma mater, “You fucking rich sonofabitches! I never had a chance to go to no college! I had to work!”

And covered himself with the flag. The fire engines screaming their way down Amsterdam Avenue with flags flying looked as if they were going into battle. The cops wore flag pins and miniature flags on their uniforms. Cars flew flags from their radio aerials and carried bumper stickers of the American flag:

THESE COLORS DO NOT RUN

AMERICA! LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT

THE PEACE SYMBOL IS THE FOOTPRINT OF A COWARD

The great battle of advertisements in America—Hertz versus Avis, Palmolive versus Ivory—was repeated now in the furious opposition of old ladies wearing the American flag in rhinestones glaring at peaceniks in jeans and desert boots; in “pigs” versus “Reds” and “Comsymps”; in “Washington” against “Hanoi.” At the Democrats’ convention in 1968, that great orgasm of extreme right and extreme left, Tim and his friends, sleeping on floors, were raided and beaten by Chicago cops who had carefully concealed their name plates and, while hitting them, righteously condemned them for the shit the young people’s dogs had left in a corner.

Some academicians were most “with it,” in the excitement of getting away from their everlasting “programs in criticism.” The Modern Language Association, weary of literature, elected as its president a mediocre literary ideologist whose slogan was “To Hell with Culture” and who advised his followers: “Smear the Walls of Lincoln Center with Shit.” No “modesty of scale” showed itself in the pretentiousness of Philharmonic Hall; in Boston’s John Hancock skyscraper, where the glass panels were always getting sucked out by the building’s self-generated winds; in the moral idiocy of the academic critic who taught his students to perform “an imaginative confrontation with the text” but tacitly defended the Nazified Hell’s Angels who murdered young Meredith Hunter at the hysterical Rolling Stones rock festival at Altamont.

The stylish academic critics had long had American students at their mercy. Having indoctrinated the young in the proper literary attitudes, in certain necessary “perspectives on literature,” they found that the radicalized young were now in charge of their thinking. Now it was the teachers who were being indoctrinated by their students; teachers ran after the angries and the motherfuckers and the revolutionary student brigade and venceremos in a vain effort to catch up with the young. The Performing Self, as one critic put it, succeeded what an old New Critic had called the Critical Performance. “Performance,” the great American ego trip, was as important on the campus as in bed. Many a documentary journalist of the period, not as prophetic and honestly radical as Mailer, now made himself exactly equal to the event. Nothing was more common in the sixties than the radical apocalypse served up in girlie magazines to businessmen who were still more satisfied with their “rewards” than not, but who liked a suggestion of something politically wicked as they liked in the centerpiece the flash of pubic hair.

The American system rolled with the punches, absorbed every criticism, and somehow rewarded the most aggressive critic. The “performers” were made happy by the publicity; the writers were intoxicated by their superiority to the befuddled masses in whose behalf they were openly defying the hateful system. Bellow, growing conservative and more and more contemptuous of the “wasteland intellectuals” (who were his life, his material, his favorite point of departure), indignantly insisted that “they” wanted to see blood run in the streets. This was not true. Like Bellow, they, too, wanted their moment of glory, but, having nothing in particular to say, had to act it out. There was a reception for the Chicago Six or Seven or Eight at a rich woman’s house in New York. Abbie Hoffman, like a young star in Hair, arrived in the dirtiest possible T-shirt, jeans cut off at the knee, and then proceeded to take them off, looking at the ladies in furs with the expectancy of a TV star looking for the “go” light on the camera. “Better living through chemistry!” he said, laughing, when some Weathermen blew themselves up concocting a bomb on West Eleventh Street. Publicity ruled. Publicity was the public. Nobody could resist the media. Nothing could keep the cameraman from walking into any meeting, up to any stage. The age of endless “exposure” mockingly absorbed every defiance. Tim and his friends in Cambridge became favorites of the cameramen and reporters, and were often asked to hold a certain pose, to make a particular face. The radicalized academics, at their great big revolutionary outburst in New York, put up flyers and posters around the Americana Hotel:

WE DEMAND AN END TO AMERICA’S WAR ON VIETNAM

            TO PROFESSIONAL IRRELEVANCE

JOIN US IN BUILDING

            A HUMANE PROFESSION IN A HUMANE NATION

            A FREE UNIVERSITY IN A FREE SOCIETY

LET’S PUT HUMANITY BACK IN THE HUMANITIES

When the foot-weary security men (retired waiters and post-office workers) were ordered by the hotel management to take the posters down, they were attacked as “Fascist goons.” Meanwhile, the president of the University of California was saying: “The university has become a prime instrument of national purpose.… What the railroads did for the second half of the nineteenth and the automobile for the first half of this century, the knowledge industry may do for the second half of this century; that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth. And the university is at the center of the knowledge process.”

Dear Professor Kazin:

I am (or I was, until about a year and a half ago) a graduate student in English at the University of —–. I’ve been in New York for two weeks, trying to tell someone (anyone) that the country is going to collapse, probably sometime this summer and certainly by the end of the year. But no one will listen. Two years ago, in a class on American literature in the twenties, I saw through the styles of the twenties and the sixties to the pattern that correlates them and realized that a process was being repeated, that the final event in the process must be the collapse of the system. That another collapse would be fatal. Huge and apparently unrelated bodies of information—from history, philosophy, theology, sociology, literature, learning theory, linguistics, logic—began to click suddenly into place to reveal their relationship to each other and the pattern behind them. When all the data was integrated, the pattern was complete … a precise description of beauty.

The test of a theory is the number of facts it correlates and explains.  … This one correlates them all; once someone recognizes this, it will gain a momentum of its own. Until then I will run into the system’s inherent resistance to new ideas. I have been bucking it for two years and I am growing desperate. Since I realized that the collapse is inevitable, I have followed the process with an ever-increasing precision. We have reached the brink of chaos, and still no one has listened, not even for half an hour.

Meanwhile the great American state, as opposed to this vast Jell-O-like society, pursued the mirage of victory and “peace with honor.” The war went on and on; went on television every night, regular as clockwork. Every night, right on your own home movie screen, you could see flamethrowers bursting into bunkers; American ships firing into a jungle as they floated down a river; “choppers” dizzily whirling up into the sky, pouncing down onto the ground with a flashing retardation like the slowing of a wheel made up entirely of knife blades.

I am an onlooker; there are now millions of onlookers at ringside, and no doubt the time is getting short for some of them, too. The war is outside me. “Before each scene,” said Henry James, I “wish really to get into the picture, to cross, as it were, the threshold of the frame.” Beads of fire; starbursts of light that hit me like sound. I am unresigned to this performance night after night. Here is a shot, on the front page of the Times, of the Saigon police chief Loan, with rolled-up sleeves and a revolver in his hand, about to shoot a captured “V.C.” wearing a sports shirt. The photographer is as close as the “executioner.” The shirt stripes on the man being shot are just as clear as the grimace, anguish, contortion, shock, and horror in his face, an inch away from the revolver about to blast his head. Screaming with pain, tearing off their clothes, Vietnamese children are fleeing a “misdirected” bombardment of napalm. The eye runs quickly over these items of someone else’s pain, the daily score of someone else being shot, mauled, gassed, penetrated, burned, concussed, bombarded.

The war is an interruption between drinks and dinner on the six-o’clock news; between dinner and bed on the eleven-o’clock news. The onlooker, grateful that his son is not in a foxhole, his daughter not one of the girls who are running screaming on the highway tearing their clothes off after that “misdirected” napalm attack, thinks out his writing and teaching schedule for the morrow as he goes to bed. And in bed, even in the starburst of making love, he definitely feels that time is getting short, shorter. The nausea of this war is eating him away. A loneliness in the world, a loneliness of repetition with this world, a loneliness that cannot, should not be appeased.

Watching the war, death steals into my soul on faint, almost imperceptible wings. It does not feel like the flashing, whirring, flashing knife blades on top of the chopper in Vietnam. Here in New York it comes on little cat’s feet. In the street a raised Hispanic voice somehow as compact and measured as a voice imprisoned on tape cries aloud. Imprisoned by the walls of my bedroom and a real crazy New York moon shining right at me, I try to make out the words, the sense. I should like to discover the claim someone is making of his self-enclosed trouble. The high sharp parrot voice in the street says the same thing over and over, but I cannot make out the words. Just another cry in the street from someone sounding off; and listening to nothing in particular.