My father took me to lunch at the country club with a Marine Corps general. He was a squarish person with a muscular face and muscular opinions to match. He talked about gooks. He talked about sissies. He made his points with little karate chops on the tablecloth that sent tremors through the iced tea. At one point he described me as “red-blooded,” which seemed to mean that I was okay and Marine Corps material. When he talked about duty and country and “our boys in Veetnam,” I began to twitch, since the object of this luncheon was to get this banker’s son into the general’s reserve unit and keep me out of the war.
A week later our family doctor ran into me in the bank and asked what I planned to do about the draft. I said I hadn’t decided yet. “I bet if we looked real hard at those kidneys of yours, we might find us a little problem,” he said, winking. “Come by the office sometime and let’s see what we can discover.”
I was so astounded I didn’t know how to respond. I knew my father would be furious if he discovered that one of his closest friends was helping me evade the draft. Even the general’s offer of a six-month hitch in the reserves was highly distasteful to my father—and to me, for different reasons. My father had a low opinion of the reserves as a fighting force, and I wasn’t sure that I could live with the naked exercise of privilege that had jumped me to the top of the waiting list.
And now I was being offered a way out of the draft entirely—on a trumped-up kidney complaint.
Until now I had not understood that there was a large conspiracy to keep white middle-class kids out of the war. I had thought we were doing it ourselves, through cleverness. Everybody had a secret prescription for failing the physical, such as eating twenty egg whites so that albumin would show up in the urinalysis, or drinking a pint of your own blood to simulate an ulcer (you threw it up—it had to be yours because they would test it). I had friends who declared themselves homosexuals, or who went on extreme diets to place themselves outside the minimum physical standards. About half of the eligible men in America failed their physicals during the Vietnam era, a rate of rejection that was two or three times what it was in other NATO countries. There were orthodontists who would fit you with a set of artificial braces (the Army wouldn’t take you if your dental bills were too high), battalions of psychiatrists willing to diagnose cracks in the crockery, and a full division of lawyers spinning out tangled motions and applications that had no other purpose than to drag on and on through the court, until their clients reached the age of twenty-six, when they were safe from the draft. Despite several reforms in the Selective Service laws, approximately fifteen million men—60 percent of the eligible men in the Baby Boom generation—evaded the draft in one fashion or another.
But now it struck me that our evasions were a part of a design. We were expected to find a way out of the draft in the same way that laboratory mice are supposed to puzzle through a labyrinth. It was nothing more than a social experiment being conducted by General Lewis Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, to “channel” young men into becoming “more effective human beings in the national interest.” Those who were smart enough to find the escape hatches would be protected. It was a system designed to be unfair, a system that suggested that some American boys were more expendable than others, but also that we were all just mice in the box.
Originally the draft was an appealingly democratic idea. It had worked well enough in World War II and Korea and beyond. I remembered the shock when Elvis Presley got drafted. They shaved his ducktail and sent him to Germany. There was an element of adult vengeance in this. Grown-ups hated Elvis the Pelvis; you had the feeling all along that they couldn’t wait to get him in the Army and teach him manners. And yet the fact that Elvis was not above the draft impressed me. I really believed that every American man was obligated to serve. But during Vietnam it had become clear that people who mattered wouldn’t have to go. The National Guard was stuffed with athletes who were too valuable as investments to risk in combat; at one time the Dallas Cowboys had ten players assigned to the same Guard division. A widespread call-up of the reserves would have eliminated professional sports for the duration of the war. The year I was facing graduation, 1969, there were 28,000 more college-trained men in the National Guard or the reserves than in all of the active branches of service combined. Only 1 percent of the guardsmen were black. Actor George Hamilton, who was dating Lyndon Johnson’s daughter in the White House, got a hardship deferment because his mother, who lived in a Hollywood mansion, depended on his support. Joe Namath led the Jets to the Super Bowl on his IV-F knees. These contradictions made everyone cynical.
The only really conspicuous, important American to be hounded by the draft board during the sixties was Muhammad Ali. There was that same element of vindictiveness toward Ali as there had been with Elvis. Ali had to be disciplined because he was an egotistical black man, a sexual threat as well as a racial one. By the Army’s own standards Ali was unfit to serve. He had scored 78 on the IQ test, below the minimum, and was classified I-Y, a limbo for undesirables who would be called only in the case of a national emergency. But after Ali became the heavyweight champion and converted to the Black Muslim religion, his hometown draft board in Louisville, Kentucky, reclassified him I-A, fit for service. Ali applied for conscientious objector status as a Muslim minister. He also hired the most prominent draft lawyer in the country, Hayden Covington, who was married to General Hershey’s sister. Covington advised Ali to move to Houston, where he thought the fighter might get a fairer hearing. This was an unfathomable piece of strategy to anyone living in Texas, where the antiwar movement had only the most tentative hold. After he refused to step forward at his induction, Ali was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison. He was stripped of his title and forbidden to fight, but he stayed free on bond until the Supreme Court overruled the lower-court decision four years later, on technical grounds. About a hundred other Black Muslims went to jail for the same offense.
I had grown up with complicated feelings about Ali. We used to watch the “Cavalcade of Sports” every Friday night when I was a child, and I became a fan of Floyd Patterson. He was the first black man I consciously admired. Patterson was dignified and handsome, a favorite of John Kennedy’s, and never the Uncle Tom he was sometimes depicted as during the Ali era. He belonged to that solemn train of black notables that included Ralph Bunche and Marian Anderson and Sidney Poitier, whose gravity and sense of personal fineness were so profound that the casual racism of the suburbs was completely refuted. But Patterson was demolished in two fights by a black ex-con named Sonny Liston. Liston was so devastating (Patterson hadn’t lasted six minutes, total, in both fights) that we thought he’d never be beaten, that he’d be champion forever, with his scowling countenance and fourteen-inch knuckles. At the end of the first Patterson fight in 1962 a young fighter named Cassius Clay barged into the ring and began screaming at Liston, calling him an ugly bear, offering to fight him right now—it was an act, of course, but it was wild, chaotic, and with Patterson stretched out on the canvas it seemed that the era of the dignified black man was over, and some berserk force had arrived.
Like nearly every white person in America, I was put off by Clay’s vanity. “I’m so pretty,” he was always crying. By saying it he made us look at him. He was good-looking, even my mother admitted it. Maybe it was true he had stolen his act from Gorgeous George, the professional wrestler with the golden locks, but the notion of a black person being beautiful was entirely new to us. Already he was a revolution, this fantastically brash Negro—a revolution in sensibility. We tolerated him because we fully expected him to die in the ring.
Liston had the reputation of being a cat’s-paw of the mob, and he liked to play with his image as the world’s toughest man. He kept a pistol filled with blanks to shoot the occasional reporter, and once he played that trick on Clay when a member of the Liston entourage tipped off the challenger that the champion might be found in a particular casino shooting craps. Clay burst in and shouted, “I want you out of town by sunup! Las Vegas ain’t big enough for both of us.” Liston pulled his gun out of his pocket and began blazing away, although by the time the last shot was fired, Cassius Clay was back in his hotel room under the bed.
After loving Patterson so, I thought I would cheer for anyone who could knock Liston off the throne, but I could hardly bear to see him replaced by a twenty-two-year-old boy with the world’s highest self-esteem, who had hurled his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River. I couldn’t cheer for either man. Symbolically and psychologically, it wasn’t my fight.
In the seventh round Liston refused to answer the bell, and on February 25, 1964, the new champion became Cassius Clay—or Muhammad Ali, as he instructed us to call him the next day. He was determined to make us choke on him. It’s a miracle he sailed through the sixties unmurdered. Maybe he saved himself because he expressed no interest in white women, although that disinterest was in itself the most extreme insult imaginable.
My hero, Patterson, came out of retirement to fight Ali. He said he was going to bring the title back to America. He refused to call the champion by his Muslim name. Patterson became a stand-in for the Great White Hope, and virtually every white sportswriter, politician, and editorialist was praying aloud that Patterson would regain the championship. Ali did not merely beat Patterson; he tortured him, keeping him on his feet for twelve rounds as he lectured him through his mouthpiece. I felt sick watching Patterson stagger around the ring, searching for the withheld right that would have finished him, but finding instead that beckoning, teasing, tormenting left jab. You could see the hate flooding out of Ali. Whatever he was saying to Patterson I felt he was saying to me as well. He was rebuking me for making a hero of such a man.
Patterson was never replaced in my pantheon; he was simply crushed and pushed aside. Ali didn’t ask us to make him a hero in the same quiet, dignified, demanding way that Patterson had. Ali didn’t care about being liked, and that gave him extraordinary power. It was strange that a man with a measured intelligence just above that of a moron could hold the nation enthralled with quick flicks of his jabbing wit. He said what he thought without thinking. On the day Ali was reclassified I-A, in February 1966, a television reporter asked for his reaction, and Ali said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.”
At that time the antiwar movement was still small and tied mostly to the coasts, to Berkeley and Boston. Virtually every newspaper and magazine in the country supported the war, and so did the preponderance of politicians and the great majority of citizens. But underneath—that is to say, in my generation, among the students whose voices had not yet been heard—there was a smoldering apprehension that we were headed for disaster. It was the timing, in other words, that made Ali’s statement so inflammatory. He was already an international potentate, almost a nation unto himself, and it was typical of his egotism that he would negotiate his own foreign policy. But as soon as he said it, I realized that I agreed with him; I had no quarrel with the Viet Cong either. Just having the heavyweight champion say that released a vast sense of permission inside me. I could allow myself to think about not going to war. It was not such a test of manhood after all.
As I faced the beginning of my senior year and the inevitability of graduation, all choices were available to me. I could enlist, as I had nearly done before. I could be drafted (and would be, if I did nothing). I could go to prison. I could choose exile. I could get out of it all on a doctor’s lie. Since there was no clear ethical winner, in my opinion, the choice became aesthetic, a matter of style. Each role had its attraction—even prison, the most sincere alternative—but each was dreadful in its particulars. What kind of country, I wondered, would put all of its young men in a position where they had to do something morally wrong? On the other hand, what kind of young men were we, who would lie and cheat, and pull strings, and run away, to avoid duty to our country or danger to ourselves?
The fall of 1968 would be a season of significant encounters.
The first paragraph I read of the work of Søren Kierkegaard was this famous, but to me hilarious, passage from The Sickness Unto Death:
Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is the relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation which accounts for it that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but consists in the fact that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded man is not yet a self.
And of course I closed the book immediately. Who could digest such nonsense? It was like trying to eat spaghetti politely; the noodles were too long to get on the fork. And yet, forced to read The Sickness Unto Death, I went on to Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, Concluding Unscientific Postscript—in short, I had run upon one of those writers whose authority I found compelling, who seemed to be speaking about my condition in particular, and whose work was filled with such humor, irony, and bell-ringing insights that I sometimes had to read him standing up.
Either/Or, a pseudonymous work in two volumes, was the book that most affected me. It was easy to see myself in the first part, which consisted of the papers of a purely aesthetic man, whom Kierkegaard refers to only as A, and my father in the second, which is the work of B, an ethical man, a civil magistrate, who attempts to correct the melancholy romanticism of his young friend. A is open to the pleasures of the world, but he cannot enjoy them because he cannot choose from among them; he cannot limit himself; he must be arbitrary; he cherishes the accidental; he is lost in the infinity of alternatives. His greatest enemy is boredom and “everydayness,” which he combats by constantly seeking new experiences, new women, new pleasures—all of which invariably disappoint him and keep him in despair. B has made his choices, he is settled down and content, but he is also in despair because he has not entered into the final stage of spiritual growth, in which one develops an absolute relation to God.
In the middle of my Kierkegaard sojourn my philosophy professor suggested that I might be interested in doing a paper on the influence of Kierkegaard on the work of a local writer, who was a former doctor, an amateur theologian and philosopher, and even something of a linguist. He had lately turned to writing fiction, and had won the National Book Award in 1962 for his first novel, The Moviegoer. His name was Walker Percy.
As soon as I encountered Binx Bolling, the hero of The Moviegoer, I experienced a nervous sense of recognition, for here was Kierkegaard’s aesthetic man—detached and ironic, but curious and aware of mystery in the world, and he even, like me, drove a red MG (to “break the grip of everydayness”). Binx floats among the possibilities, unable to choose this or that. The specific character of his despair, or “malaise,” is the feeling that “the world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.”
A month later I drove my MG over the Pontchartrain causeway to Covington, Louisiana, to interview Percy for the paper I was writing. For years I had idolized writers without ever having met one, and so as I approached Percy’s handsome brick house, which was tucked under moss-draped live oaks above a sluggish bayou, I was giddy, nervous, and swollen with expectation. Also, I thought that Percy already knew everything about me, he knew my interior life. I felt like Binx Bolling going to meet his creator.
Indeed, Percy greeted me with a raised brow when he saw the MG wheel into his drive. He was out by the duck pond, introducing some new ducks he had just acquired to the older residents. We sat beside the pond in lawn chairs, with a bottle of whiskey between us, which steadily diminished as the afternoon wore on, and talked about writing and philosophy. He recalled for me the time he and his friend Shelby Foote drove to Oxford, Mississippi, to see Faulkner, but Percy had refused to get out of the car. “I just sat there reading Gone With the Wind,” he said.
The sun dropped behind the trees. Time was passing, the world was spinning, I was spinning, but I was full, I was overflowing. In the twilight—almost, I might say, under cover of darkness—I was moved to blurt out that I wanted to be a writer. It was the first time I had ever said it aloud. “Have you got any money?” Percy asked me solemnly.
“A couple of dollars,” I said.
“I mean family money.”
“We’re just sorta middle class.”
“It’s a lot easier if you have money.”
I stared into the black pond with a woozy smile. Here I am, talking to Walker Percy, and he’s worried about my finances! I must be a serious person after all.
I met a woman in Archeology 301. She came wafting in ten minutes late on the first day of class, wearing a purple blouse with a scarf at her neck—a little too turned out, I thought, for the archeologists. She had an attractive vague way of not being embarrassed. “You must be Miss Murphy,” the professor observed. She was. Roberta Murphy.
All semester we dug up Indian artifacts in a backwater slough in the sugarcane country called Lac des Allemands. A band of oystereaters had camped there a thousand years before. They had been a lazy and unimaginative tribe. The entire product of our dig was several baskets of broken shards and an unaccountable crumpled carton of Lucky Strikes that had somehow slipped into prehistory. Our professor was a bearded misanthrope who drank from a hip flask and spent the afternoons observing the legs of the Newcomb girls, which were fully revealed thanks to the current style of short shorts and miniskirts. At the end of the day busloads of convicts would pass by, on their way back to Angola Prison from the cane fields, and you could hear them moan when they passed the coeds. Fashion was having an effect.
Roberta had grown up in Mobile, Alabama, a doctor’s daughter, the product of a “dilapidated aristocracy,” as she called it, and she had a patina of learning and culture that brought up my old feelings of backwardness. She listened to opera. The only opera I had ever heard was on an experimental excursion to the Music Hall in Dallas when the Metropolitan came to town. My father and I had both fallen asleep. But when Roberta listened to opera she cried. “Can’t you hear how beautiful it is?” she asked. I was dumbfounded and a little scared, but one day at twilight I lay on the floor of her apartment and listened to Leontyne Price sing Tosca. The windows were open, the curtains moved in the breeze, shadows of the oak trees swayed across the ceiling, and Puccini’s wild sentiments crashed through me like a summer storm. Roberta was majoring in classical languages. In the evenings after she bathed, she would wrap her beautiful chestnut hair in a damp bun, put on a flannel robe and granny glasses, and translate Cicero, while Erik Satie’s ethereal melodies played in the background. I was at a point in my life where I was acquiring new passions, new tastes that were individual and would last the rest of my life. The first time I heard Thelonious Monk was in Roberta’s apartment, and it sounded like something that came from inside me. His quirky rendition of Irving Berlin’s forgotten tune “(Just One Way to Say) I Love You” became, through a thousand playings, our song. It was not just Monk and Satie and Puccini I had a taste for, I realized now; it was Roberta—her company, the ambience she created, her laugh, the special way she used language. For her birthday I gave her an Irish setter which peed in every room of her apartment.
This was an entirely new kind of love affair, calmer but also friendlier, less turbulent but also more complex. Roberta was like ballast for me; when I was with her I felt that I was in the world, and not floating apart from it like a man in space. And yet even when I moved in with her, neither of us saw our relationship as a “romance.” We were buddies.
On the night before graduation my parents came to town. Roberta and I were having a drink with a friend when they arrived, and before I finished the introductions my father and my friend began to argue about the war. I hadn’t known how much anger my father still had; I thought after our many battles that there was no force left in his attack, that we were permanently stalemated. But now that my student deferment was ending and I was staring into the face of the war, something long deferred in my father was boiling to the surface.
We went to dinner at my favorite restaurant, Galatoire’s, and when Mother asked what I recommended, I suggested the pompano.
What was it about my suggestion that set my father off? Perhaps it was the galling thought that I had been here before, educating my tastes with his money—pompano!—it was another measure of the waste of my life, at such an expense to him. Look at how I had turned out, full of half-baked opinions offered with a supercilious and patronizing air, just like the damn waiters in this place.…
We were sitting at a middle table, where my father’s voice filled the room. I thought I might slit his throat with my steak knife. It was true I had more expensive tastes than my father, who had a begrudging attitude toward restaurants anyway—but then he was the son of a broken farmer and I was the son of a successful banker, and we were bound to have different values. In some way he couldn’t prevent, he had made me into his opposite. He had wanted my life to be better than his, and easier, and it had been. But look at the consequences! Did he want a son who was at home with the wine list? Yes, in theory, to be at ease in society was a good thing—if it weren’t for the truckload of attitudes that came with it. What kind of education had he bought for me after all? In my father’s eyes I was a middle-class Fauntleroy, despite my posturing about radical politics. How dare I order pompano and attack capitalism?
The issue between us wasn’t really the pompano, it was still and always the war. We both knew that a decision would have to be made within weeks, and my father was hating me in advance for making the wrong decision—whatever it was.
At this, their first meeting, my mother and Roberta seized the conversation with some aggressive small talk. My father and I looked at each other in fury, then turned away. At any moment we might have jumped up and exchanged blows, so we forced ourselves to stare at our nervous female companions. Vividly I understood why women despise the tyranny of men, those monsters of ego, who bring their wars into the family and fight them in public places.
“What are you doing after graduation?” Mother asked. Roberta didn’t know. It was impossible to think about our relationship beyond the next several days. Within a month or two I would be in exile or in the Army or on my way to jail, so there certainly didn’t seem to be much future in pursuing me. Roberta thought she might go to graduate school.
My own limited plans were to take a summer course in publishing at Radcliffe College and wait for the ax to fall. Graduation was a dismal prospect. I was going to have to leave behind two things I valued highly, love and safety.
After dinner, when I had driven my parents to their hotel, Mother made the mistake of asking me to come up to their room. The argument picked up again and finally spilled out into the parking lot, where it raged loud and clear, for everyone in the Fountainbleu to appreciate. “You have wasted your life and my money,” my father charged. “You are fit for nothing. You understand nothing. I have spent a small fortune educating a snob and a traitor.”
“I am not a snob.”
“You’re a disgrace!” my father shouted. “Look at you! You’re not worthy to be an American. You don’t care enough to defend your country!”
“My country is not under attack.”
“The hell you say! The hell you say! You’ll never get another cent out of me. I’m not going to support a subversive.”
“I don’t want your money,” I said carelessly.
Mother was sobbing on the bed, begging us to stop, but we were alike in too many ways, and we had too many scores to settle, not only with each other but with the future and the past. It was my father’s generation that had brought me to this point of having my life twisted by a war no one wanted to fight. How could he blame me if I hated him and his generation for being so goddamned wrongheaded and sure of themselves, for pushing the world around and picking fights they would send their sons to settle? Well, thanks very much! I don’t want your fucking war! My father’s face went purple. He said it was a damn shame the country was going to have to be handed over to the likes of me, a bunch of brainwashed sissies—!
When the management finally appeared we were screaming at each other about America. My father’s last words to me were a slogan of the age, all the wisdom of his generation boiled down to a bumper sticker. “Love it or leave it,” he said.
A few days later I drove across America from Dallas to Boston with the top down, hopped up on Dexedrine, my mind flying. I rode between the wheat fields and cow pastures, past the shotgunned road signs, across a country that was at war abroad and at war with itself, a country that was stewing in its own bitter juices. I despised America. I hated its meanness. It wasn’t my country anymore. It had resurrected Richard Nixon from his own angry exile and made him President—Nixon, the hit man of the bourgeoisie—and as I drove across the vast belly of Nixon’s America I felt defeated and afraid. Somehow, with graduation, the prospect of revolution had popped like a soap bubble; it had been an undergraduate fantasy after all, too embarrassing to even talk about now.
A revolution had come, all right, but it hadn’t been mine. It was the victory of the new world. At the time it seemed that Nixon’s election was a fluke, a detour in the march toward liberalism, brought about by the coincidence of Humphrey’s unfortunate nomination and the vindictive response of the middle class toward the poor, the minorities, and the young. It was a choice that made no one very happy; the turnout was so low (61 percent) and the margin of victory so slim (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent), that in the end little more than a fourth of the electorate cast ballots for the man who became our president. It was a revolution nonetheless; the power had shifted inexorably to the new world, and Nixon was its first true expression.
My drive from Dallas to Boston was, in its way, a retreat from the victorious new world to the defeated old one. I came into the city after midnight, got lost, and finally came upon Harvard Square in the middle of the night—Harvard, the inner sanctum of the Eastern Establishment. It was like crossing the lines into the enemy camp. Spiritually, I felt that I must be home. (Of course, no one is less at home than the wandering Confederate.) I was too thrilled to sleep. When dawn came I was already walking across the campus in a state of worship, nodding at the few early risers, who avoided my dizzy smile as if it were an infection.
I was housed in a Radcliffe dorm with a boy from Kentucky, the only other southern male. We discovered that there was a certain exoticism attached to us, as if we were exchange students. One woman asked me, “Is that really the way you talk?” Most of the other students in the Publishing Procedures Course were from Ivy League schools, and some of them carried surnames I knew as brands of cake mix or automobiles. Here, firsthand, was Old Money. It was different from the New Money I had met in Texas. New Money had come out of the oil fields; it had come suddenly, in geysers, and was often just as suddenly gone, sucked away in a dry hole. New Money liked to display itself, in the form of heavy diamonds, even on men, but along with the plush cars and suburban mansions came a hostile attitude toward real elegance. There was a phrase in Texas that a man was “rich enough to wear white socks,” which meant that he could walk into the Petroleum Club dressed like a field hand, cussin’ and spittin’ and scratchin’ where it itches, and the men in the room would wink at each other and make knowing comments about his net worth.
Old Money didn’t behave like that. Old Money invested itself cautiously, almost stingily; it did not reach for the check. Old Money was a lodge with secret ways of revealing itself, having to do with fashions and attitudes. By contrast with the windblown characters I had known in Texas, Old Money was like the pig who built his house of bricks; it spent itself on pedigrees and social connections designed to avoid failure. New Money was politically conservative but personally generous and openhanded. Old Money was oriented in the opposite direction; here people were politically liberal but sorry tippers.
Famous writers came to speak to us, or else we went to them. We took a bus trip to Cape Cod to meet Kurt Vonnegut, who addressed us while wearing a bright yellow nor’easter rain slicker on a warm, sunny day, and we were invited to Ipswich, where we bumped into John Updike in the movie theater. I was hungry for these encounters. If I had any doubt about my ambition it vanished when I returned to my dormitory room one evening to find the author of a recent best-selling potboiler sitting on my bed, surrounded by three fourths of the women in the course, several of whom were quite literally stroking him, rubbing his knees and hair—a vision of literary reward.
Roberta came to visit and brought our dog. We hid Stewart in the dorm, and when I finally took him out for a walk in the evening he was nearly delirious. He was in that state of frenzy when he bit a renowned liberal journalist who was our speaker for the day. For the rest of the course I was known as The Man Who Owns the Dog That Bit Jack Newfield.
In Harvard Square on a Sunday morning I first said the word “marriage” aloud to Roberta, not as a proposal, exactly, but as a possibility. Harvard Square was filled with dope addicts and spare-change panhandlers and student minstrels; everyone seemed to be drifting, unattached and unconcerned; there was a blissed-out tranquillity in the air that traveled on the mindless strains of a flute being badly played by an old man in hippie clothes and the rattle of tambourines from a conga line of Hare Krishnas who snaked around the trees. One felt a sense of insubstantialness, as if people might fly. A strong gust of wind would have cleared the park in a swirl of saffron robes and miniskirts. Marriage did not belong to life in this dimension; it was too nontranscendent, too troublesome, too square, too limiting. My voice cracked when I said it.
I was afraid I had offended her. The conceit of the times was that marriage was a sellout, a truckling under to the conventions of society. Roberta and I were in love, but to formalize that relationship through marriage would be a signal that we were caving in to the button-down mind-set of our parents’ generation. Our generation was on the road to individual freedom, and marriage was a perverse detour, it was voluntary servitude, a cop-out in an age when all options should remain open.
“If you marry, you will regret it,” warned Kierkegaard’s aesthetic man; “if you do not marry, you will regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or do not marry, you will regret both.” I didn’t want to lose Roberta. I wanted companionship, I wanted to feel grounded, to build up the lifelong intimacies that make up a profound relationship; on the other hand, I didn’t want to remove myself from the possibility of other women, from the joys of superficial encounters. It was the age of the Pill and the Playboy Philosophy. Harvard Square was crowded with available but increasingly complicated women, who were in the middle of the sexual revolution. Bralessness had announced itself at the Miss America pageant the year before, when a TV actress stormed the stage trailing a string of burning brassieres. Women said they were turning against fashion; they no longer wanted to be treated as sex objects. And yet—my God! Nipples! On display! You could see them racing up and down inside T-shirts, like buoys in the surf. Moving breasts! My imagination was fully stoked all the time. Never before had there been so much to surrender. As a man I had the feeling of finally owning Boardwalk and Park Place; marriage did not seem to be a clever investment of my sexual capital.
And yet I could sense trouble brewing. On the edge of the square a woman with unshaven armpits cast a deprecating glance at me, then handed Roberta a flier entitled “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Until I read the flier I had never heard of the clitoris. Now it reared up like an angry and unsatisfied customer, demanding gratification. The flier was advising masturbation as a superior sexual experience. I felt ignorant, I felt threatened. Were men becoming optional? I had no doubt that women would give up men entirely once the reproduction problems were worked out; they would become self-propagating, like sponges.
Was marriage a form of oppression? I wasn’t sure of Roberta’s views on this, nor had I given much thought to the kind of wife I wanted to have. I wanted a partner, but did I want a full partner? “Equality” was a nervous word for me. Was it possible to have a marriage of equals? Was it desirable? What did it mean in 1969 for a man to mention marriage, even as a hypothesis, to a strong-willed woman? Roberta was noncommittal. “It’s something to think about,” she said, and I was relieved. At least she wasn’t offended.
In the middle of the night I sat on a park bench, under the statue of the seated John Harvard, and I began to cry. My I-A draft notice had arrived in the mail.
Who was I? Suddenly everyone needed to know: the government, Roberta, my parents. I was going to have to declare myself, but I was invisible. There was no self to declare. I was just as much one thing as another, as much a soldier as a peacenik, as much a bachelor as a spouse, as much a patriot as a traitor. How could I say yes to one part of me and no to another?
Choose! Choose something!
But choosing was awful, it was like amputating limbs. There were so many consequences, involving life and death, love and sex, duty and honor. Every choice would define me, and limit me. I would become something, and not something else. I would have to have beliefs. And I would have to choose now.
Until this moment, birth and circumstance had defined me as the enemy. I had been a Dallasite during the Kennedy assassination, a white southerner during the civil rights movement, a man during the women’s movement, and an American during the Vietnam War. As a consequence my life had been a series of disavowals. I had left Dallas, I had left the South. I was leaving the kind of man I had expected to become. Now the strongest urge I felt was to leave America.
But this was not an identity, this continual leaving. I must believe something.
When I was a child we had a toy called the Magic 8 Ball. You would ask it a question and shake the ball, and the answer would appear in a window. As I lay on the park bench the single answer that floated out of the obscure recesses of my mind was “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” It was not very much of an answer, and certainly not an identity, but it was a beginning.
I decided to become a conscientious objector, or to try to, given that my draft board was in Dallas and could not be expected to hear my plea with much sympathy, and given as well my own ambivalence about my motives. That summer Henry Kissinger said in Look magazine, “Conscientious objection must be reserved for only the great moral issues, and Vietnam is not of this magnitude.” What an infuriating piece of sophistry! In my opinion it was only in the great moral contests, for instance in the war against Nazi aggression, that a violent response could be justified. I would defend my country if it were attacked. I would have fought in World War II. I was not a pacifist. Moreover, I was not a member of any organized religion. There were 172,000 COs during the Vietnam era, and nearly all of them were members of nonviolent sects such as the Quakers or Mennonites or Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was merely a lapsed Methodist. I doubted that I would be considered very seriously.
In my application to the Selective Service board, I described myself as a “Christian Existentialist,” which meant—to me, at least—that I believed in the values of Christianity without really believing in God. I quoted Paul Tillich, who had written of “this affirmation of meaning within meaninglessness, of certitude within doubt,” which is “not the God of traditional theism but the ‘God above God,’ the power of being, which works through those who have no name for it, not even God.” I accepted the possibility that my conscience was tied to some larger power or urge, but even if it were not, my conscience had told me not to kill, and I would not. My conscience was all I had.
To my astonishment, my application was quickly approved. When I got the news I slept for two days. It was like the exhaustion that comes after a final lovers’ quarrel. I was emotionally spent.
I had two weeks to find alternative service—typically, two years in a low-paying public service job, in a place that was not within commuting distance of your home. Many hospital orderlies were COs; however, since we were in the middle of a recession most of the bedpan jobs had been taken by people who really needed them. Also, I wanted desperately to get out of the country. I took a bus to New York, with the idea of getting a job at the United Nations. There were no positions available to me there, but I did get a list of American institutions abroad, many of which had offices nearby. At the top of the list was the American University in Cairo, whose office was across the street. I walked into the office and spoke to a man for ten minutes. He asked if I could leave for Egypt that night. I gathered he was short of teachers.
“No! I’d have to pack. My clothes are all in Boston.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
I hadn’t expected it to be so easy. I hadn’t even had a moment to think about what it might be like to spend the next two years in Egypt. I went back to Boston for a confused farewell to Roberta. The next day I was standing in John F. Kennedy Airport calling my parents to say that I was leaving America after all.