HOW I GOT MY FIRST JOB AS A REPORTER AND LEARNED TO WRITE IN A SIMPLE, DIRECT WAY, WHILE NOT GETTING A DEGREE IN ANTHROPOLOGY
“I’m not even sure what my message as a novelist is. But I would like to infect people with humane ideas before they’re able to defend themselves.”
I though a hell of a lot of the University of Chicago, and Chicago didn’t think a damn thing about me. I was a very fringe character in the anthropology department.
Before Chicago, I had never been a liberal arts or social science major; I’d had chemistry at Cornell. And after Cornell, I was three years in the goddamned infantry in World War II. That tore a big chunk out of my life.
The University of Chicago gave returning veterans a test on what they knew generally. They took my credits, which were in physics, chemistry, and math, and admitted me as a graduate student in anthropology.
After going through the war and all, I thought man was the thing to study. I really think it ought to be done in second grade, but better in graduate school than nowhere else. And it was interesting.
I had about three more years of credits from Cornell, so I was one year short of a bachelor’s. But in the Hutchins system, a bachelor’s degree was given after two years, and I couldn’t get one.
And so, I had at least three years to go for a master’s. That was okay with me, because it was a very exciting time in my life.
I was ready. I was like Thomas Wolfe when he got to college, so excited that he was running through the woods and jumping over stone walls and barking like a dog.
Hell, I’d been an army private—I’d had a lousy life for three years. So the university was sheer luxury. The intellectual kick was great.
But I had a wife and kids, and I wrote a thesis which was rejected by U of C. When I wasn’t in class, I was working as a reporter at the Chicago City News Bureau. I also spent a lot of time with my family, rather than at the university. I led a pretty separate life, because I had a wife and kids. Most students didn’t. And in the summers, other people would go off on digs or do fieldwork, but I couldn’t. Because I had a wife and kids, I had to keep working.
We had one superstar in the anthropology department, Robert Redfield. Victorian anthropology had been completely discredited, because cultural as well as physical evolution was assumed by the Victorians: they believed that people progressed from polygamy to monogamy, from many gods to one, and so on. Redfield said, “Now, wait a minute: there is one stage that every society goes through, and I’ll describe it.” He called it the folk society.
The folk society was closed, isolated, from outsiders. It included a common belief system and extensive kinship relationships. It sounds comfortable, like what everybody’s looking for.
I looked on the University of Chicago community as a folk society—and I felt like an outsider in it. I felt excluded by that bunch in the department, although they had admitted me. I wasn’t treated badly, but they already had a family.
My ironic distance as a novelist has a lot to do with having been an anthropology student. Anthropology made me a cultural relativist, which is what everybody ought to be. People in the world over ought to be taught, seriously, that culture is a gadget, and that one culture is as arbitrary as another.
That’s an important lesson, yet some people never hear of it. Then, when they’re adult, they can’t bear to hear of it.
Culture is a gadget; it’s something we inherit. And you can fix it the way you fix a broken oil burner. You can fix it continuously.
*
In my master’s thesis, I studied what it takes to effect radical cultural change. What kind of a group do you need to put society through a 45-degree turn, or a 90-degree turn? It appeared that what you needed was an authentic genius. Really, you need two very bright guys who have status in the community. One of them says, about the genius, “This guy is not nuts.” And then, you also need an explainer. For the Cubists, there was Picasso, and there were Braque and Apollinaire, who explained what they were doing. (Picasso wasn’t about to explain what the hell he was doing. That would have been too tiresome.)
My thesis considered the Cubists and the Native American ghost dance. An intensely bright professor named Sidney Slotkin worked with me on it. Slotkin, too, was marginal in the anthropology department, although he had come out of it; he just wasn’t their kind.
I studied how change can be made—but a novelist can’t make change. You can’t. There’s no willpower. How dare somebody who is not a journalist or does not hold rank of some kind comment on something as complicated as military logistics or foreign policy or petroleum? Who the hell are you? And you’re gonna say what the government should do next?
The novelist is in a funny position: utterly unqualified. Having no badge or rank, and cracking off about this or that. It peeves a lot of people. How dare we do what we do?
Yet novelists can have a great effect on young people. When I was between the ages of fourteen and twenty and starting to read just about anything, I had no immunity whatsoever to ideas. I would read Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell—and their political opinions would become mine.
I would assume that some kids have become pacifists because of me. Actually, I’m not even sure what my message as a novelist is. But I would like to infect people with humane ideas before they’re able to defend themselves.
My boyhood dream was to cure cancer. Not much chance of that. My brother was a scientist, so I was going to be a scientist.
There were all these things I wanted to be, instead of what I am.
My father had talked for a long time about my becoming an architect, but then he became filled with self-pity and said, “Be anything but an architect.”
If everything had gone right, right now I would be an architect in Indianapolis. But instead I went to Cornell to become a chemist.
And if everything had gone right in Chicago, I would be a newspaper reporter or a managing editor—or busting a strike!
The Chicago City News Bureau, where I worked when I was in graduate school, was a cocky operation. We were outlaws. It’s where a lot of journalists in Chicago start. The theory was that working for City News was the only way you’d be able to get a job on a Chicago newspaper. You had to start there.
I could do at City News what I can’t do right now, which is walk into any part of town anywhere and start talking to people about their lives.
As a reporter, I’d go to police station after police station after police station, call on firehouses, and then I’d go and call the coast guard: “Anything going on?” For eight hours I’d be on the South Side, the North Side, the West Side.
We were all looking around for everything. Some of the reporters carried guns.
One time I found a body.
I started out as copyboy, just stuck there in the office, waiting for somebody to move on so I could become a reporter. One Sunday I was there and had the police radio on. I heard that in an office building three blocks over, a guy had just been killed in an elevator accident. There was nobody else to go, so I went over, and I got there as soon as the fire department and police did.
The top of the elevator had come down and crushed the elevator operator. And I got to see this guy squashed and dead.
I phoned the story in, and my editor said, “Okay, call up his wife. What does his wife say?”
I said, “I can’t do that.”
He said, “Yes, you can.”
Oh it was so dishonorable! I wouldn’t do it now. If I had worked at City News much longer, I probably would have gotten sick of it.
Still, being a journalist influenced me as a novelist. I mean, a lot of critics think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.
In journalism you learn to write a story so someone can cut it without even reading it, putting all the most important stuff in the beginning. And in my books, for the first few pages I say what the hell is going to happen. When I taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I told my students, “Look, I want you to write in such a way that should you drop dead, the reader ought to be able to finish the story for you.”
I wasn’t writing fiction in Chicago, just news and anthropology papers. Later, I started writing short stories and selling them. So I said, Hey, I’m a writer, I guess!
When I left the university, there was a list of jobs open for anthropologists tacked on the department bulletin board. All of those jobs were for the PhDs, of course.
I got offered a job in public relations by General Electric and figured I’d better take it. I had a wife and kids, and just couldn’t hold on any longer. So they hired me.
Particularly if you were a child of the Depression, in those days you just got a job. And you didn’t feel destined for this or that job—you just got any goddamned job.
Later on, I was living on Cape Cod and needed to make a living. I wanted to teach high school, but I had no college degree. Since Chicago had turned down my thesis, I had about seven years of college and no degree.
So I wrote the people at Chicago a letter saying, “Hey, look, you guys, I’m way past a bachelor’s. Won’t you at least give me my bachelor’s degree?”
And they said, “No. We’re sorry, but you would have to come back here and take a course.” It was Survey of Civilization, or something. There was no chance of my doing that; by then I had six kids.
So there I was, without any degree. Otherwise I would have become a teacher. I was quite angry about it.
I wrote another thesis, about the mathematical shapes of stories. That one was rejected too.
It got worse. Finally, I was on the faculty at Harvard, without a degree, and I had stopped bothering Chicago. I received a letter from a guy at Chicago who had taken over the division of social sciences.
He wrote, “I have just become dean of social sciences here, I was looking through a file, and I found an enormous envelope with your name on it. So I read it.” And he added, “I am pleased to tell you that under the rules of the university, you have always been entitled to a master’s degree, for having published a book of quality.”
Cat’s Cradle is what qualified me for a master’s degree.
That novel was anthropology, but invented anthropology: in it, I wrote about an invented society.
So I had been entitled to an MA all along. When my father was dying, he said, “I want to thank you, because you’ve never put a villain in any of your stories.” The secret ingredient in my books is, there has never been a villain.
Some cultures we studied at Chicago were quite gruesome. The Aztecs were really scary, cutting people’s hearts out. The Mayans weren’t much better. And there have been instances of terrible cruelty even in benign societies, living in peace.
Society can be a villain, just the way a mother can be.
Yet it seems to me that it’s no more trouble to be virtuous than to be vicious. I’m critical, but not a pessimist.
Look at all that humans can do! They’re versatile. They can ride a unicycle. They can play the harp. They can, apparently, do anything.
Anyway, I liked the University of Chicago. They didn’t like me.
