Suppose there is some truth in Camus’s proposition that a man could spend the rest of his life pondering the experiences of a single day. So few such moments are held back for study. In certain dramatic public events, such as the death of a president or the declaration of war, people take internal snapshots of themselves; they look around, they get their bearings, they check their watches. They are shocked, yes, and perhaps distraught, but they know that in certain respects the river of their lives has jumped its channel, and they automatically record their thoughts. Soon the comparisons will come. Where were you when ______? These moments are benchmarks. They unify generations.
But there are private benchmarks as well, and the furious, heartbroken boy who was flying across the Atlantic for the first time on July 21, 1968, was taking soundings of himself, because he believed his life would be different from now on. He felt quite distinctly that the curtain had closed on the first act of his life and was about to open on the second. The boy he was he had left behind, but the man he would become had not yet created himself.
I flew to Europe with the vague intention of never flying home. I thought I might be done with America. The country had gone wrong; it had slipped into a violent nightmare and couldn’t wake up. I could feel the violence stirring inside me, boiling over—I was frightened of myself. And the war loomed closer: one last year of deferment, then what? It seemed to me that my destiny as an American was to become a murderer.
I was sick of America. I was sick of its billboards and bumper stickers, sick of its Chevys and Fords, sick of its freeways and rapacious suburbs, sick of the cold faces of its skyscrapers, sick of the naked spurning of beauty and art, sick of the war, and sick sick sick of the ugliness of spirit that had created all this. I felt a loathing for the creature who had grown up in this sterile American soil, for wouldn’t he necessarily be stunted in intellect, and primitive in all the important respects? Wouldn’t his mind and spirit be pot-bound? And wasn’t that me, the dwarf of the new world, making a pilgrimage to the splendid home of his ancestors?
Of course I wanted to wander through the narrow cobblestoned streets and climb the Alpine paths of my imagined Europe, the Europe of travel posters and art history classes—but I was also drawn to the political morality that assumed the right to wag its finger at America over Vietnam. Everything I had believed America stood for only a few years earlier now seemed to be all lies and illusion. My American heroes were dead, my American ideals were turned upside down, and what remained that would give me the right or even the desire to call myself an American?
I was also done with love, I told myself. My hands were bandaged from cracking my knuckles against a brick wall. After two years of loving Tamzon, I learned the day I left that she was engaged to another man. It was the biggest shock of my life. I was in the same state of mind that causes men to join the Foreign Legion.
And yet, heartsick as I was, I felt a certain detachment, as if there were two of me, a me that was onstage exhibiting grief and a me in the audience who was appreciating the performance. It is odd how periods of extreme sensation awaken this theatergoer from his nap. “Something’s happened at last!” he observes, and becomes immediately hopeful that the production will turn out to be interesting after all.
I am not making fun of my feelings, and yet an essential feature of my grief was that I couldn’t surrender myself to it, I couldn’t be swept away entirely by the tide of emotion. I was affected, I was devastated, but I was also alert and curious. Sartre spoke of this divided mentality as the for-itself and the in-itself. Even in moments of ecstasy I have felt my mind step out of itself and wander about, taking notes. I had this experience once with Tamzon on a field trip to Guatemala to see the Mayan ruins. At one of our stops we ate lunch in a coffee grove in Antigua, and after we ate I put my head in Tamzon’s lap while she talked to a small naked child with black eyes and a peculiar Indian giggle. I was staring at the fronds in the high, arching trees that shaded the coffee shrubs, when a leaf snapped off in the breeze and began to spiral slowly down. As it fell I heard the child’s laughter, I smelled the appealing odor of Tamzon’s body, and I watched the flight of the leaf. This was happiness, I thought—and yet! Where was I? Who was compiling this inventory? I was outside the moment, not in it. I shifted a bit to get more comfortable and thought about nothing, and it was in that brief vacant space of nonthinking nothingness that the leaf landed on my nose. In that electric instant I was finally happy.
It is one thing to feel grief, and another to be aware of feeling grief. I suppose the difference defines the human condition; it is the difference between what a dog feels upon losing his master and what a master feels upon losing his dog. I could not pass a mirror without checking for visible changes, for gray hairs or facial lines, evidence of the maturity I thought pain must bring. When I was alone I caught myself striking poses—I was James Dean playing me. But for whom was I playing out this drama of my unhappiness? I had the feeling of being observed, not just by my theatergoing self but by a larger audience, the community of spirits, if there is such a thing.
This was my theology as I crossed the Atlantic. I was self-conscious and slightly spooked. I would not say that I believed in anything, only that I suspected the presence of Others, and I found myself playing for their sympathy.
When I landed in Luxembourg I was under the profound influence of two authors, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Halliburton, a travel writer of my mother’s generation, whose fantastic life ended in 1939 in a typhoon in the China Sea. As his ship was sinking, he managed to get off a cable with his dying words: “Wish you were here.” My mother introduced me to him when I was fifteen by giving me a book she had treasured from her own youth, The Royal Road to Romance. It is a manifesto for romantic personalities. Halliburton presents himself as a cheerful rich boy who graduates from Princeton and decides to have one great fling at life. “From childhood I had dreamed of climbing Fujiyama and the Matterhorn, and I had planned to charge Mount Olympus in order to visit the gods that dwelled there. I wanted to swim the Hellespont where Lord Byron swam, float down the Nile in a butterfly boat, make love to a pale Kashmiri maiden beside the Shalimar, dance to the castanets of Granada gypsies, commune in solitude with the moonlit Taj Mahal, hunt tigers in a Bengal jungle—try everything once.” Read at a certain age, this stuff is irresistible. “I wanted to realize my youth while I still had it,” Halliburton continued, “and yield to temptation before increasing years and responsibilities robbed me of the courage.”
Oh, God—so did I! And so did thousands and thousands of American students like me who made the pilgrimage to Europe in the summer of 1968. Entire airlines were created to ferry us back and forth at discount rates. I was flying Air Bahama on its second day of service, and it, like its competitor for the student market, Icelandic Airlines, landed in Luxembourg because of the lower tariffs. The point was to get to Europe—anywhere in Europe—it was all the same to us. We were a generation that had turned away from things American, preferring instead European cars and movies and foods and philosophies, all of which we had been absorbing secondhand. Although America was without dispute the most advanced nation in the world, and the richest, and the freest, in 1968 my generation looked toward Europe with a feeling of extreme inadequacy.
For me that feeling was born in the novels of Ernest Hemingway. My immediate response to reading one of Hemingway’s European novels, particularly The Sun Also Rises, was a longing to write myself into it. This was not so much a sense of identification with his world as simple envy. The ambience within his book seemed truer and more authentic than the world I lived in. I wanted to be a Hemingway man instead of a tortured adolescent. I wanted to live in his time instead of my own. I wanted to fish in his streams and drink in his bars and make love to his women and fight in his wars—not in my own. Hemingway had shown me that the proper relationship of an American artist to his country is exile. He made this choice appear noble and in many respects exquisite. I realize now that this was partly an illusion of his style, which has an infallibility about it that life itself does not.
The world abroad was filled with disconsolate Americans like me, who were on the run from the war, yes, but also from some premonitory nightmare of the people they were about to become. None of us could speak of our parents without irony, but the irony was a mirror of our future selves, the grasping and vapid selves we saw at the end of the process. We knew how it worked. You began with ideals (that was the privilege of youth), but age and compromise wore you down. You would need a job. You would marry. You would have children. Once you got the mortgage and the second car, all was lost. One day your child would stare at you ironically and you wouldn’t understand.
And so we fled before it happened, and went to live in Katmandu or a commune in Ibiza. We were inoculating ourselves against smugness and materialism. We wanted to touch bottom. Until now we had lived indoors, protected against want and discomfort, but also against joy and the raw pleasures of real life. We had been born into a country that had half the income of the world. America had been generous with its wealth; we had given it away in stupefying quantities, but the money returned itself to us in the form of power. What had we done to deserve the curse of such good fortune? We embraced the globe with military bases and submarines and Peace Corps volunteers and multinational corporations, but we suffered the lovelessness of Midas. Was there any ally whose loyalty was not paid for? Was there anyone who didn’t hate us for our wealth and and feel the impress of our power? We were the heirs of a newly created empire, but we were in flight from privilege. In Crete, old women in black dresses would go down to the beach to laugh at the Americans living in caves. All humanity wanted to live like Americans, and here were the Americans living like squirrels on nuts and seeds.
Of course the test of these swollen spiritual feelings was unfairly applied in Luxembourg; in relative terms one might as well be landing in Indianapolis. But it was Europe all right, with its well-advertised authentic Old World charm. I wanted it to be charming, and I wanted it to be authentic, but my experience in the new world was that each category excluded the other.
In the country I grew up in, charm—by which I mean a beguiling sense of place—was so rare it had to be captured and incarcerated like an animal in a zoo. Part of our American problem with charm is that it is usually an obstacle to progress, unless the charm itself can be merchandised. If there is a single charming house left unrazed in town, it necessarily becomes a restaurant or an antique store; no doubt it will have a historical marker in front of it as well, chronicling some negligible transaction but serving to point out that this house was once, after all, a charming home. Any city with a large enough claim on charm sets about turning itself into a resort or a convention center, with the result that whatever was charming about the city in the first place is either obliterated or else “preserved” in such a way that the charming becomes quaint—i.e., dead. I have watched this process happen in the New Orleans French Quarter. For years the city fathers wanted to build an expressway that would cut off the Quarter from the Mississippi River; there was even a proposal to line the expressway with Gay Nineties gaslights to help it blend in (gaslights = charm). In order to save the Quarter, the preservationists had it declared a historical district. That stopped the expressway, but the Quarter, as a living part of the city, was finished. It was now officially charming, with the result that oilmen and orthodontists from Houston and Dallas began buying it up, hotel chains surrounded the perimeter, the city renovated the funky areas near the waterfront, boutiques replaced the sailors’ bars, and citizens were displaced by tourists. Now the French Quarter is no more authentic, in terms of being a real place to live, than is Williamsburg, Virginia.
It doesn’t take long for an American to associate charm with doom. You stand, let us say, on some bright, untouched promontory on the edge of the sea and say to yourself: What a loss. What you are thinking is, Yes, it’s lovely now, but wait until the Holiday Inn pops up, and the Burger King, and the Exxon station, and the usual retinue of billboards and trailer courts and strip joints and clapboard shacks that make up an American coastal community. Or else you are sitting in a little dive listening to jazz; there is an agreeable feeling of inconsequence; you almost—almost—dare to unwind and give yourself up to the genius of the place, but just let yourself do so and next week the bulldozer arrives, or the renovator appears. I think this is part of the appeal of amusement parks in America, such as Disneyland. They are artificially charming, authentically inauthentic; nothing more can happen here; one wanders through them with no feeling of loss.
The American approaches Europe mystified by the apparent permanence of charm. As I walked through Luxembourg on my first afternoon, absorbed in its beauty and relieved by the lowered tone of commerce, my thoughts were trailed by dread and suspicion. Could this last? Or was Europe itself actually a kind of amusement park for American tourists (and not to be trusted)? Perhaps the boulevards were lined with propped-up facades; perhaps the natives in their berets or their dirndls and lederhosen were paid by the management to affect a culture they no longer endorsed. It was charming, all right, but my American instinct was on the lookout for phoniness.
Still, I had to ask myself how charm could persist in Europe and exist hardly at all in my own country. The most immediate answer was age, which does bestow its dignity on even very ordinary man-made objects. One sees this in the older sections of the United States, New England and parts of the South, which have been civilized for a sufficient period of time that charm has built up an account. My own section of the country, the new world, is too recent for time to have had much effect, but in any case there is an indigenous loathing for old things. Most older buildings with any promise have long since been pushed down to make way for the new. Sunbelt cities that are themselves little more than a century old already have an archaeology comparable to that of Troy or Thebes; it’s just that the civilizations that underlie the present have the lifespans of butterflies. In Texas the only old buildings that have been permitted to stand are the Spanish missions, which are so full of charm that they make a person woozy.
But it is not merely age that generates charm, or rather, allows charm to exist. Washington, D.C., and Dallas are both young cities, and yet Washington is charming in ways Dallas will never be. Washington is geologically prettier, but it is also built on a more human scale, owing to a height restriction that prevents commercial buildings from eclipsing the Capitol. Most of Europe was constructed before the advent of elevators—a growth hormone for American skylines, which are limited now only by their capacity to interfere with airline traffic. Dallas is just such a city of egotistical, heaven-aspiring skyscrapers, which are impressive from a distance, but when a person walks among them they make him feel puny and insignificant—he would have to be a hundred feet tall to feel at home on the sidewalks. In terms of proportion Washington is our only European city; it is also, like Paris and London and Berlin, a city of monuments and bureaucrats, benefiting from the carefree expenditure of public moneys.
I saw the European recipe for charm as being stone, Catholicism, stairways, bureaucracy, espresso, pigeons, and millennia.
It was too early for me to tell what effect all this charm had on the Europeans, but my own immediate response to it was relief, as if a tooth had suddenly stopped hurting. Leaving America, I had also left behind the ordinary garishness that crowds the American streets, the barrage of commercials filling the airwaves, the five o’clock rush, the frenzied pursuit by many million egos of wealth and stardom. These nuisances were present in Europe, but at a tolerable level, below what I now had to realize was the threshold of pain. Capitalism, at least in its ruthless new world incarnation, must be incompatible with charm.
Along with the environmental relief I was enjoying, there was the anonymity of travel. Until now I had been surrounded all my life by people who knew me and who expected me to behave in a particular way. For the first time I was traveling alone, and I discovered that luxurious, uncorseted feeling of being unknown. I might be anybody. It was a joy to leave behind the self I had always been, the person everyone knew, and become—what? I had come to Europe determined to drop off the boy and find the man, but I was caught in the middle of this exchange and was neither one nor the other. I was in the zone of Anything’s Possible, the ideal romantic state, and yet one can exist in that atmosphere only briefly before the ego begins to dissolve.
In the Luxembourg twilight I passed a boy smoking a cigarette. I turned around and followed him. He was about my age. He was slender, and he walked with an abstracted, important air. A blue sweater hung around his shoulders. Something about the intensity of his smoking and thinking made me decide: that’s my new self. I could smell his black tobacco and could nearly imagine the profundity of his thoughts. I followed my new self for several blocks, wondering where he might lead me, until some awareness of me broke his concentration, and he nervously speeded up and then boarded a bus. When he was gone I stopped at a kiosk and bought a package of Gauloise cigarettes and then retraced our steps, smoking and thinking, while the theatergoing me trailed behind, withholding judgment.
I spent my first night in Europe in the Bern railway station on a bench, my backpack at my feet, struggling for sleep along with a dozen other travelers, as a pair of German tourists talked loudly all through the night. I tried to hush them several times, but they stared at me furiously and only talked louder. Their rudeness was marvelous; they were simply inhuman. The other travelers were mostly Italians and Greeks, large families with shopping bags full of sausages and gifts, and they twisted about on the benches in various woefully resentful but acquiescent attitudes. I thought how all of us carry history about inside us, that centuries of conflict and struggle, prejudices, successes and failures, are hammered into us in the form of traits, which are as irrefutable as genes. I was suddenly very grateful to my father for winning the war.
How nice—I thought the next morning as the cog-rail train ascended beside the gorged Alpine streambeds—how nice to be Swiss. I was trying on nationalities. How enviable simply to withdraw from the quarrels of international strife. And yet, even as I thought that, I realized how foreign the idea of neutrality was to me; it rang of shirking, or cowardice; it brought to mind the schoolchild who shuns rough games and refuses to shout down injustice.
Richard Halliburton had given me my immediate destination: Zermatt, at the base of the Matterhorn, which Halliburton climbed in Chapter Two. I had never climbed anything greater than several flights of stairs; in fact, I had a fear of heights inherited from my father. My new self was an adventurer determined to cast aside all former neuroses. My old self, however, was grateful to discover that bad weather had closed the mountain to climbers.
I rolled out of Switzerland and into Spain, and then on to France, England, Scotland—I was determined to see it all—I was like a contest winner in a grocery store with five minutes of free shopping. As a consequence I spent most of my time on trains, or else standing on the side of a road with my thumb in the air. It didn’t matter. Motion was the important thing, being free to bum along in my anonymous mode, Mr. Nobody on the road to Nowhere, in my blue jeans and an army jacket I acquired in Belfast, my backpack loaded with several changes of underwear and socks, a poncho, a handy clothesline my mother had given me, a washable Haspel suit I wore once, a copy of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day, and four china plates I had purchased in Delft as a present for my mother (three survived).
I held on to my money jealously. My great temptation everywhere was food. Europe was filled with appetizing aromas I had never encountered. Even the most ordinary staples, bread and cheese, revealed unexpected nuances. I thought resentfully that I had never eaten real food until now, it had only been an American approximation; that my bread was not real bread, it was breadlike; and that the flavors of my life had been washed clean of subtlety.
On August 2, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday in the town of Montauban in southern France. I stopped at a small café on the roadside and examined the menu written on the blackboard outside. At the table I enjoyed a moment of self-pity as I thought about being alone on this significant anniversary, and I consoled myself with a glass of Beaujolais. The owner came by after my meal to serve the fruit. “Americain?” he asked. When I nodded he sat down.
“You pappa, he bang-bang in ze guerre?”
“Oui,” I said, my one word of French.
The owner pointed to his eye. “I see him in Paris. Eisenhower—bravo!” Then he poured us each a brandy and offered a toast to America—a toast I myself would never have offered—and waived aside my check. That was a birthday present I have never forgotten.
I arrived at the Gare du Nord the following dawn, and rode the Métro to the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Never have I entered a city more wonderfully than on that morning, when I ascended from the subway tunnel into the heart of Paris before it had awakened. Only a few shopkeepers were out, sweeping the sidewalks and setting out their wares. What was beautiful about it was the absence of transition; I had slipped in through the night and under the suburbs, materializing in what I thought must be the center of life—Paris, at last.
There was a woman I wanted to see. Her name was Edith. She had been an exchange student at Sophie Newcomb College and a friend of Tamzon’s. I remembered how pretty she was and how French, with her black eyes and black-black hair and her voluptuous European body. I wasn’t certain what she thought of me, but she had given me her telephone number months ago, on the unlikely chance that I would ever get to Paris. I got a room in a cheap pension and waited until midmorning to call.
“Larry, you’re here!”
She certainly was excited to hear from me. She insisted that I check out of the pension at once and come stay with her. “My parents are away for the month,” she informed me.
Edith lived on Rue Gay-Lussac, a street named after the physicist who discovered that the density of a gas varies inversely with its temperature. I think there is a corollary in the realm of human behavior, in which heated expectations vaporize into—ah, lost hopes. I was walking on Edith’s street, looking for her door, when I saw her coming in the other direction with a load of groceries and a large loaf of bread. She was beautiful. She was smiling. I thought about the wonderful meal she was going to prepare … and so on.
“Edith!” I cried. I had a tremendous grin on my face.
She looked up uncertainly. Recognition came slowly into her eyes. “Hello,” she said. “What a coincidence this is! Do you know who else is in town?”
“No,” I said, still grinning, but wondering.
“It’s Larry Wright!” she said. “He’s on his way over now!”
My hold on identity was shaky enough. Was there really another Larry Wright in town? Probably not. But clearly there was another Larry Wright—an ideal, non-me version—in her mind.
We enjoyed a polite dinner. Once reconciled to the me she had before her, Edith had been gracious enough to invite me in anyway. Of course I couldn’t stay the night. All during the meal I could only think of my rival Larry Wright. I felt less than nothing. There was surely no possibility that someone would pretend to be me. But this someone, whoever he was, obviously possessed qualities I didn’t have and hardly knew about. You can’t fully appreciate the possibilities life offers to others until you’ve been confused with someone else and discovered how people might react to you if you weren’t you. Now I knew with dismal clarity that there were men in the world who might call beautiful women in strange cities and send them scurrying to the grocery store for steak and candles, and in all innocence I could only pretend to be such a man.
After dinner Edith took me to see a Gary Cooper double feature that was playing in the basement of a coffeehouse. So this, I thought meanly, was the French underground now—a roomful of intellectuals sitting in folding chairs under the plumbing and electrical wiring watching High Noon and The Hanging Tree in 16 millimeter.
When I was in high school there was a single movie house in Dallas that would occasionally show European films. My mother would take me, if they weren’t too naughty (if they were, she would go alone). We were dying for sophistication. For two hours we could leave our repressed and moralistic hometown and watch life unfold in an alternative fashion—a more honest fashion, it seemed to me, and certainly more permissive and forgiving. If American movies were all action, French movies were all mood. Their comedies, which my mother loved, were concocted entirely out of nuance and whim. Once Mother took all three children to see Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, the Jacques Tati comedy, and she laughed so hard that the manager asked her to watch from the lobby. In college I discovered Truffaut, and then Renoir and Cocteau and Godard. In the early days of my love affair with Tamzon we went to see A Man and a Woman, and we were nearly incapacitated by passion. The final scene of that movie, when the lovers are embracing in the train station and the camera is revolving around them, made me dizzy with joy, and for days afterward I was humming the sound track and viewing life through the sentimental lens of Claude Lelouch. This was at a time when I was reading the French philosophers and novelists, and I had decided that the French mind floated above the ordinary world in some elevated atmosphere of its own.
But here was Gary Cooper, the new French idol. How many times had I seen these movies on late-night television! To see them again in France was to understand at last the power of the American Western, which is really the creation myth of America. I understood at once the appeal of America as an idea, as a possibility. America-as-Western was not sophisticated but elemental. I could see, as I glanced at the faces around me, that this was a European dream. It was individual man, called to his limits, facing evil and the prospect of death, but standing alone and in the cause of goodness, truth, justice.
However, making American Westerns requires a moral authority Hollywood had lost. The only good Westerns in the sixties were being made by the cynical Italians, and to see them as an American was to feel that a valuable legacy had been stolen and put to wrongful use. The whole point of the American Western was to show good triumphing over evil, to tell ourselves that fable again and again. It was no accident that the best Westerns tumbled out of the studios in the smug days of victory following World War II. The Western reaffirmed our vision of ourselves as a righteous people in an evil world, and it reminded us that by being courageous and true we would never fail to win.
And yet we had come to discover in Vietnam that the highhanded morality that was our most distinguishing characteristic as a nation had led us into an international comeuppance. What discouraged me as an American was the glee with which the world responded to our chastisement. We were to be made humble again. Now you could no longer show Gary Cooper movies to American students—we would hoot them off the screen. But in Paris I saw again in Gary Cooper the nobility of American innocence and its simple calling to goodness. I was touched, and felt singled out as an American.
All up and down the Boulevard Saint-Michel the cafés were crowded with American students and draft evaders—I even ran into several people I knew. English was the most common language on the street. There was a group of college boys from Auburn sitting next to me, drinking cappuccino and talking interestingly about the odor of European pussy. There were as well a number of American blacks on the street, who seemed to have captured a monopoly on the hashish trade. Most of them were ex-GIs, and they took me for a deserter because of my army jacket. One evening I bought a lid of hashish for ten francs and sat on the floor of my hotel room to smoke it. In a little while I began to hear distant sounds of thunder, then women’s voices, and vacuum cleaners, and then the knock of the maid at my door. It was ten o’clock in the morning.
This was the day I went to the American embassy. I put on my Haspel suit for the occasion. At the desk I said I wanted to speak to someone about the consequences of exile. I was shown to the office of a young consular officer named Mr. Levine, who looked at the note the secretary handed him and said to me, “Don’t do it.”
“If you had to choose between Saigon and Paris,” I said in an assured, perhaps derisive tone, “which would you prefer?”
Levine looked outside at the rain. It was a typically gloomy Parisian summer day. “This city’s filled with kids like you. They don’t do very well, most of them. They don’t speak French, they can’t get jobs, they just feel lonely and out of place. After a while they realize what they’ve given up—their home, their family, their language—”
“But not their lives.”
“Well, no.” Levine went on to explain, however, that if I went so far as to renounce my country and seek citizenship elsewhere, I would lose certain liberties I had come to appreciate as an American. If I just decided to lay low in Paris until the end of the war, I would be subject to prosecution.
Jail, exile, or war—those were my alternatives.
Levine shrugged. What was he supposed to say? He was speaking for the United States of America. If he were speaking for Levine he might have had an answer for me, but I doubt it. Nobody did, those days. I left his office wondering why I had gone there. Perhaps I was just trying it on, the role of Exile, the part Hemingway played so well (except that Hemingway could always go home).
I don’t know why it is so much more pleasurable to read a book on a train coach than in an armchair at home. There must be a parallel between one’s life and one’s book, each of them pleasingly held in suspense as they roll through possibilities. To be in that parenthetical state between Point A and Point B, and Chapter One and The End, is to be in a state of hammocky contentment, and to arrive at both destinations simultaneously is, for me, a nearly orgasmic form of melancholy.
In Dublin I went to the Martello Tower, where James Joyce lived briefly, and where Ulysses begins. Near the castle on a springboard, pale naked men were diving into the chill Irish sea. In the room where Buck Mulligan served a breakfast of toast and butter and honey, I bought a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and read again the passage in which Stephen Dedalus declares his principles:
You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.
I repeated this credo again and again, and even wrote it down on the flyleaf. Silence, exile, and cunning: it was a slogan for me then, and perhaps a solution. On the other hand, I thought about living a small Joycean existence, avoiding the war and teaching languages in Trieste or Geneva. Was I really prepared to pay such a price to be in the service of Art? What opportunities for happiness was I willing to surrender for the chance to write? Silence, exile, and cunning: it suddenly seemed like a prescription for a life of bitter reclusion, a motto for a troll. I wanted to write, but I didn’t care to disengage myself from the world.
I was measuring myself, as anyone who is twenty-one must do. Life until then had been all promise and possibility; now choices would have to be made. What did I want to be when I grew up? This was the river boundary I would have to cross into manhood. When I tried to summon the courage to declare myself a writer, I would remember the effrontery of that ambition, and I would well up with shame and resentment. I was nobody. I was empty inside. My life was no more than ordinary. I recalled the private conference I had had with my writing teacher at Tulane, after he had read a turbulent short story I had written about a doomed love affair, which was set beneath the equestrian statue in Jackson Square. My professor was not a successful writer himself. He published occasional poems in academic journals, and collected them in small vanity printings, but he was a handsome, gray-bearded man with the gravitas of Tolstoy. He told me sadly in his office that my writing reminded him of—what’s that fellow’s name? His eyes searched the ceiling. Who? Who? I was afraid he was going to say Flaubert, since I had been imitating him shamelessly. In any case, I knew my whole life was waiting for my teacher’s judgment. “What’s the name of that fellow who wrote Exodus?” he asked.
“Leon Uris?” I said in complete horror.
“Yeah. You write like Leon Uris.”
He might as well have told me I had three days to live. It was an unbearable prognosis. I was doomed with the talents of a popular writer. No one would ever take me seriously.
I began reading The Tin Drum in Dublin and read it as I traveled past the graveyards of Holland and the battlefields of Belgium. I was reading it in a pension in Amsterdam near Anne Frank’s house. I was putting off Germany. All over Europe there was testimony of the evil that the Nazis had let loose on the world. Were the Germans peculiarly capable of evil? Or were they merely victims of a political culture they couldn’t control? These were the questions Günter Grass was asking in The Tin Drum. I was asking myself the same questions, because I was also a product of political cultures widely regarded as evil—the Dallas of 1963, and the United States of 1968.
I recalled the puzzlement in my father’s voice when he spoke of the Germans. He had admired them as an enemy. They were civilized in their approach to combat—not like the fanatical, suicidal Japanese, or the half-savage Chinese in Korea—and their skill was unsurpassed. They would have won the war, my father believed, if it hadn’t been for Hitler’s frequent stupid meddling. One of his most vivid memories of the war is the day he entered a village near Cologne and came across the body of a dead German child, a victim of artillery fire. German children are, of course, famously beautiful, like porcelain dolls, and the sight of this dead boy stopped my father in his tracks. Why? What caused the Germans to begin this war, which would cost so many lives, including twenty million civilians such as this boy in the street? Were the Germans evil? A stupid question—but how else can it be framed? Was this dead child evil? My father remembered seeing the slave girls in the German homes, who had been torn away from their families in Czechoslovakia and Poland. “How could a great religious, cultured people do this kind of thing?” my father asked himself. Was this the destiny of civilization, to destroy itself in some fantastic barbaric urge?
There is a moral transfer that takes place between the victor and the vanquished, which George Bailey writes about in his splendid book, Germans. The loss of German dignity after the war was followed by “a collateral loss of shame” on the part of the victors. We can see this, as Bailey points out, in the expulsion of nearly three million Czechs of German ancestry from the Sudeten portion of Czechoslovakia immediately after the war, and the renewed persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union, for reasons that were substantially the same as the Nazi persecution. “For me the most disgusting and dismaying result of World War II and its aftermath is this: that the exposure and universal condemnation of the moral insanity of the Nazis ministered to the reinforcement of the moral insanity of the Communists,” writes Bailey. But wasn’t there also a similar if not identical loss of shame in our own country? Not immediately after the war—the rebuilding of Europe was all to our credit—but later, wasn’t there a kind of delayed reaction, which turned us from the Good Samaritan into a dangerously prideful bully, convinced we could do no wrong? Had we somehow been transformed into the enemy we had once destroyed? Isn’t that the danger of victory?
Now the children of the victors of that war were naming their own country “Amerika.” You saw it spray-painted on the public walls and written into the headlines of underground newspapers, followed by swastikas. It was all over Europe as well. We were the successors of the Third Reich. My father was sputteringly furious at the comparison, but I was ambivalent. Were we so different from the Germans? Was there a real parallel between our engagement in Southeast Asia and the German occupation of Poland? What was the difference between our chosen role as the world’s policeman and the German drive for international dominion?
I closed The Tin Drum in Bremen and sat in a café beside the square with the whimsical statue of the Musicians of Bremen—the donkey, the dog, the cat, and the rooster of the fairy tale. I was drinking good German beer. A pregnant mother was strolling an angelic child, who was laughing at a pigeon trying to mate. The pigeon was chasing his female quarry all over the square. It was comical; people stopped and pointed at the birds; the female was quick-walking and cutting sharp corners, and the male followed precisely behind her. He seemed to have a sense of irony about the occasion—he was looking about for sympathy—and he certainly had crowd appeal. He was the Chaplin of pigeons. We were all laughing now.
Later, as I stood on the autobahn waiting for a ride, I wondered how evil moves among us, like a virus. It was too simple to say that the Germans were evil and now they are not, or that we had been good once and now we were not. Our victory cheated us of a measure of self-knowledge. We had come away from that war thinking evil was far away, and we were immune, while the Europeans learned that it was always close at hand.
I went north to Denmark with a double purpose. I wanted to scout the Scandinavian countries, which were popular with draft resisters, and I had thoughts about going to Russia. All my life I had heard about Communism—my God, it was the subject of such hysteria in Dallas that … well, only incest and devil worship could be spoken of with the same degree of outrage. During the fifties our governor, Allan Shivers, had tried to make membership in the Communist party a capital crime (the legislature moderated the penalty to twenty years in prison). My image of Communism was formed by Herbert Philbrick, the double agent of Lee Harvey Oswald’s favorite television show, “I Led Three Lives,” who was always tracking down subversives in the suburbs, and by J. Edgar Hoover in Masters of Deceit, which was the text for virtually every high-school civics class in the state of Texas. Hoover made the lure of Communism seem irresistible, like heroin. Take the example of Jack, in what Hoover called “the Case of Lost Faith.” Jack was an ordinary boy with nice manners and an inquiring mind—until “something started to happen to him, slowly but surely. His faith in God and religion seemed to be fading. As he later told FBI agents, he felt this loss already in high school.” (Uh oh.) By the time he entered college, Jack was a “spiritual vacuum” into which rushed the philosophy of Marx and Engels. Jack’s case was typical of the high-minded but misguided idealists who were drawn to Communism through a sincere—“though perverted”—desire to replace the faith of their childhood. “Many reasons cause individuals to join the Party,” warned Hoover, “but undoubtedly most important is the Party’s appeal to idealistic motivations, to a ‘bright new world’ where justice, peace, and freedom will replace strife, injustice and inhumanity.”
Like Jack, I saw the appeal of the new world of Communism, even through the curtain of hysteria in Dallas. We talked about freedom all the time in Texas, and on my side of town we had plenty of it, but we seldom talked seriously about equality. As an American schoolchild I knew that all men were created equal, according to the Declaration of Independence, although if I looked at the child who was created in Highland Park versus the child born in South Dallas, it was hard to understand exactly what that proposition meant. What came clear to me was that freedom and equality were mutually exclusive; one came at the expense of the other. In the United States we were free but distressingly unequal; in the Soviet Union, as my father would say, all people were “equally unfree.” In our arguments I found myself becoming a devil’s advocate for Communism, especially in China or Vietnam, or any place where the downward pull of poverty and overpopulation was greater than the power of capitalism to save it. My father would point to Taiwan and South Korea and of course Japan, the capitalist response to Asian Communism. Name one successful Marxist economy, he would say. Well, Russia. Compared with the United States? East Germany. Compared with West Germany? And so it went, an argument I never won.
Could Communism tolerate freedom? This was the question posed to the whole world in 1968 by Czechoslovakia, which had suddenly decided to exercise freedom and see what happened. Communism was still such a mystery to me that the big surprise of the Prague Spring was that the Czechs wanted to be just like us, especially the young Czechs, who began to grow their hair long and play guitars. On the news we saw people celebrating religious festivals that had been banned for twenty years, and speaking out against the Soviets, and performing forbidden plays. In their exuberance one could measure the cost of the spiritual oppression they had endured, until now. This was the great experiment of 1968: the attempt to be equal but free, to reconcile the two great doctrines of government, to “give Communism a human face,” in the words of the new Czech leader, Alexander Dubček.
America was also bending toward a new balance, through Johnson’s Great Society. He was the first president to talk with real passion about equality in our own country. “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want and do as you desire and choose the leaders you please,” Johnson said in a memorable speech at Howard University in 1965. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still just believe that you have been completely fair.… This is the next and more profound stage of civil rights. We seek not just … equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Three years later it was obvious that the Great Society was sinking into the quicksand of Vietnam, along with everything else that was worthy about America, and yet it still seemed to me in 1968 that both sides, the Communist and the capitalist, were inclining toward the center, and that if Czechoslovakia succeeded the world would change.
That possibility ended on the night of August 20. I was in the state of newslessness that is usual with foreign travel. I had heard nothing, for instance, of the impending Democratic convention in Chicago, or of Mayor Richard Daley’s plans to shut out the protesters. The morning after I arrived in Copenhagen I went to the Tourist Information Office and asked for directions to the Russian embassy. The girl at the desk looked at me queerly and told me how to get there by bus.
Several hundred people were standing in the street in front of the embassy, which had been cordoned off by Danish policemen. They were not a mob; they were well dressed and orderly, but they were standing there in tears, nearly all of them sobbing, and without having any idea of what had happened I approached the scene like an onlooker at a funeral. “You did not hear?” a policeman said incredulously. “The Russians invaded Czechoslovakia.”
Surprisingly, I was admitted to the embassy to make my visa request. I waited in an anteroom with another man who was crying politely and holding a newspaper with the headline DUBČEK DøD. (Later in the afternoon we would learn that Dubček actually had been spared.) A consular officer came and spoke to the man briefly in Danish. I observed the proceedings as a mime of international relations: There was the Danish man’s futile entreaty (perhaps he had relatives in Czechoslovakia), the Russian’s imperious shrug, the Dane’s rising anger and frustration, then a frozen look on the Russian’s face that said “enough.” The Dane threw the newspaper down on the table and left. Then the Russian turned to me.
“I’d like a visa.”
The Russian laughed. He was, I realized, the first Russian I had ever seen. After hearing about them for so long, I was curious to see that he did not seem like a devil, just a beleaguered bureaucrat. “You can apply,” he said, “but I can assure you it will be refused.”
I was not the only American whose trip to Moscow was blocked by the invasion. In Washington, Lyndon Johnson was making plans for a secret summit meeting with Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin. Soon after Robert Kennedy’s death Johnson developed misgivings about his declaration not to seek a second term. The polls showed Humphrey, the inevitable nominee, trailing Nixon by an apparently insuperable margin. Johnson imagined that if he could create a sudden, unexpected triumph, his party and his country might turn to him again. His first thought was a surprise escalation of the war, but at that point nothing short of victory could have brought him the renomination he desired. The other possibility was a significant change in our relations with the Soviets. Johnson made plans to fly to Moscow and return just in time to address the divided Democratic convention. It is still not known publicly what Johnson hoped to gain from the Soviets and what he was willing to concede, although scholars at the Johnson library say informally that what he had in mind was a freeze on development and deployment of nuclear weapons, an end to a nuclear arms race that has now cost America 750 billion dollars since 1945.
What if Johnson had gone to Moscow? Perhaps nothing; after all, the Soviets didn’t think enough of the prospects for an agreement to cancel their invasion of Czechoslovakia on the evening before Johnson was scheduled to depart for the summit. Had he gone earlier, perhaps he would have gained the agreement he sought, perhaps the Soviets would not have sent their tanks rolling into Prague, perhaps Johnson would have been reelected, and so on. But this is a frustrating exercise. What happened is that freedom died in Czechoslovakia, and the goal of equality in America sank with the Great Society.
I read Henderson the Rain King on the Orient Express. A book read at exactly the right moment can change your life, and probably I needed to be outside of America to love Saul Bellow’s American voice, the sound of the vivid democrat, overgrown and rude and too enthusiastic but full of humor and goodwill. As I read it I thought: I am that. I am that voice; that voice is America speaking in the person of Eugene Henderson, explaining himself, recognizing his huge flaws, and like me trying to find his real worth in the world. Outside the train windows the Austrian Alps lurched toward heaven in an absurdly beautiful tableau that set my American mind to thinking of beer commercials. And yet Bellow’s voice, ironical, offhand, but also passionate and sincere, was riding with me, and as I listened I began to soften and forgive. I was going to the end of the continent, to Istanbul, but my mind was on America.
We leveled off in the long plains of Yugoslavia, which reminded me of Kansas, with its fields of grain and the sunflowers growing along the railroad track. Some Yugoslav workers got on the train, smelling of hard labor, and a student who rode in my coach for a hundred miles. He spoke a bit of English. He wanted my address. People frequently did. There seemed to be something important about having someone’s address in America, as if it were a refuge.
We changed locomotives in Bulgaria. We were going backward through the age of technology. We had begun the trip with a swift German diesel that powered us over the Alps, but when we crossed through the Iron Curtain we picked up another engine, of Czechoslovakian manufacture. Now we hitched ourselves to a creeping Soviet castoff that made Bulgaria seem like the world’s largest country. The passport control officer came aboard, wearing a hat with a big red star, like a cartoon Communist. In one little town, I think it was Popovica, we were held up for two hours. I tried to get off the train for a few moments to stretch my legs and smoke, but the train was surrounded by plainclothes security men, who shouted at me and pushed me back to my coach. We saw them taking a man off the train in handcuffs. Everyone was quiet for a while.
But we were finally out of Bulgaria and lumbering into Turkey, leaving behind the Communist world and entering the “free” one. Outside, on the blistered Turkish plains, emaciated cattle hid from the sun in the slender shadows of telephone poles. Inside, Henderson was talking to the noble African, King Dahfu, who asked him, “What kind of traveler are you?”
I wondered the same about myself. What was I after? Why was it so important to me, as it was to Henderson, to go far, far—as if I could leave myself behind?
“Oh … that depends,” Henderson replied. “I don’t know yet. It remains to be seen.” And then he said, “I seem to be some kind of tourist.”
“Or a wanderer,” the King corrected.
I had no interest in seeing the sights in Istanbul, but somehow I saw them: the Blue Mosque, Haga Sophia, Topkapi Palace. There was something morose about visiting a collapsed empire, even if one was grateful for the collapse.
I had come far—not so far as Henderson, but far enough to feel that I was over the horizon. I could feel the stretch of time and space. But what was I here for? To find myself? Or just to go farther?
In part, of course, I was simply fleeing the pain of my ruined love affair. The conventional wisdom was oddly true: that the greater the distance between Tamzon and me, the less I felt the loss. At night, when I tried to shut her out of my mind, I imagined digging a hole the size of a grave and crawling inside it. In Istanbul I was finally able to sleep without this imaginary burial.
I met a Dutchman in a café near the Haga Sophia who asked me to join him for some hashish. We went to his room at the Hotel Gülhane around the corner. His roommate, a German artist, unwrapped a package of freshly pressed hash, which was still as pliable as modeling clay, and we smoked four joints in the little blue-and-white room with the chipped plaster and graffiti in many languages. Then the artist took a bottle of Dexedrine and emptied ten tablets into his hand, which he swallowed two by two.
We went onto the roof. It was half-covered by an awning. You could sleep here for two lira a day—about fifteen cents—and the roof was crowded with hippies propped against the walls in various states of stupor or lying in bedrolls. Nearly all of them were Americans.
All at once I knew—despite my melancholy and a certain will toward self-destruction, and despite the authentically romantic call of the mullahs from the minarets and the violent sunset over the Golden Horn, and despite the flight of hashish that was transporting my thoughts in and out of time and dimension—I suddenly knew that I had come far enough. There were no answers here, only a loss of questions in the fog of drugs and exile and loneliness. For years I had been running away from Dallas, and now from America, but I understood with something other than bitterness that I carried them inside me. I was Dallas. I was America. Here on the roof of the Hotel Gülhane I stopped running away from myself.