FIVE: Pictures from an Institution

For cooping up all these lunatics in this old cloister becomes, I think, a dangerous thing, in which you risk losing the little good sense that you may still have kept. Not that I am set on this or that by preference. I am used to the life here, but one must not forget to make a little trial of the opposite.

—Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother, Theo. December 31, 1889.

Near the end of my second month at Saddle River, after eating supper with Stiney in the school kitchen one night, I went upstairs to my room, took my typewriter from my closet, and carried it with me into the classroom building. I repeated one sentence to myself, again and again—a sentence from one of my unpublished novels: If you’re a writer, you write; if you don’t write, you’re not a writer. In the novel—the one I wrote during the year I cut graduate-school classes—the sentence is directed at a forty-year-old professor by his wife. He is in the midst of a crisis, brought on in part by the fact that he is a famous critic, a popular teacher, yet still yearns to be a novelist. At the point in the novel when she says this to him, he has just returned home from a brief and wild affair with a woman he had lived with in his early twenties, when he was trying to write novels. The former girlfriend is now a well-known poet and has been visiting the small New England college where he teaches, in order to give a poetry reading.

I put the lights on in my ninth-grade home room, and waited. At the end of the second hour I began writing, and what I’d taken for the most severe crisis of my life was over—it had, in fact, lasted little more than a month.

I was pleased with what I wrote—a satirical protest against bomb shelters written in the form of a letter from John F. Kennedy’s cat. What pleased and relieved me most was that I’d tried to deal humorously with something that I had, until then, been able to regard only with dead seriousness.

I mailed the piece out that week, and it was quickly rejected by several magazines; I was, however, prepared for such an eventuality; a letter involving Kennedy and bomb shelters led directly to the mimeograph machine; making use of the school facilities one night, I ran off several hundred copies of the letter and mailed them to friends, magazines, peace organizations, newspapers, and prominent individuals. One of the peace organizations, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, asked if I would permit them to publish the letter in their magazine, Fellowship. I was in possession of my first “acceptance,” and I telephoned everybody I knew to tell them so.

I was back at work on the automobile plant novel immediately, and I finished it sometime in November or December and sent it out. By this time I had bought an old 1951 Buick, and had moved from my back room in the school to an apartment in Teaneck, New Jersey.

I had, then, within a year of leaving GM, written two books that derived from my experiences there. More important, I thought, I was—my political activities being the evidence—a totally different person than I’d been when I’d left graduate school in the spring of 1960. That year, and in all the years since, I would seize on the fact of my GM experience as a way of explaining to others why I had (as I thought), suddenly—at the age of twenty-two—changed, become politically radical.

The emotions, feelings, concerns that were aroused during my days at Chevrolet-Indianapolis—these had probably, in some form, been in me before, I’d admit, but it was GM which had caused them to surface. Moreover, I would often claim—as I did in the political book I wrote that year, and as I thought I’d be doing when I began this narrative—almost all the political activities and emotions which have engaged me in the years since have been a working out of what I felt during my half year there, much, I would sometimes note, in the way a novel is the working out, the unwinding of a single vivid feeling or impression—an attempt to recapture and to give narrative life to a single moment.

Things are not—have never been—that simple. Though a brief explanation of the effect my six months at GM had on me often seemed a persuasive enough reason for some changes in me, the explanation always seemed too easy, too neat. Still, even here, I shy away from delving into other, more personal origins for whatever changes I’ve undergone in the last ten years. I find, though I touch on things in my family, my childhood, that my motivations do not really interest me so much, or rather, that I resist analysis of my motivations. Not only because I rest in this essay on a prejudice (a defense mechanism) which derives from my sense of myself as a novelist—from my feeling that my job as a writer is to describe action in such a way that motivation is implied—but from a feeling that whatever motivations a reader may infer should themselves be permeated with mystery. My way—inevitably romantic—of defending myself against the possibility that there may be clear, mechanistic, deterministic, unmysterious, and unambiguous explanations for my actions, my life; that there may not be some terrible—ultimate—relations between what I am as a writer and what I am in the rest of my life; that the sources for both my writing and my actions in the external world may not themselves have sources which are deep, mysterious, and unknown.

Which is one oblique way of introducing the fact that, a year after I’d left GM, I was involved in an experience more personal than political—an experience that, unlike GM, had no discernible (final) beginning or end point—one which affected those things I call (called) my political emotions at least as profoundly as assembly lines did.

Shortly after I’d finished my automobile plant novel and sent it out, Robert, eighteen years old at the time, began a journey through the madness of city, private, and state mental hospitals—a journey which would take several years until, largely through his own courage, his own humor, he emerged whole, himself at the other end—back again for better or worse in the “real” world.

His first hospitalization that winter, coming after my own shaky days that fall—plunged me deeper into the fears for my own mind and future which had first plagued me in Indiana. Robert and I had been very close, and though we had known—had talked for some time about the possibility of hospitalization, we both fiercely resisted the thought, fought against the actuality.

The first time I visited him in a city hospital—he was locked behind iron doors, tied in a straitjacket—though I felt shattered, defeated, uncertain about everything, the visit had a stabilizing effect on me. Much as—in my love, my guilt—I might have wanted to change places with him, to have taken his place so that he could be set free (wishes I would voice often in the next few years), I did what I knew I had to do to make sure that this would not happen. I clung to whatever I felt promised my own self-preservation.

I did this mostly by transforming his hospitalization and its effect on me, things I knew were beyond my control, into things abstract—into part of the political field theory I’d begun developing at GM. What was terrible-evil—at both GM and mental hospitals, what, that is, destroyed others and could do the same to me, were related, and if I could spell out this relationship, I could, in my mind, gain control over it. Robert’s hospitalization, then, became the clearest, the final proof—in my emotions and my theories—of the injustice of things, of the need for revolution.

The edge of these emotions and theories was rage; for every sinking, confused feeling in me I compensated with anger—at the fact that he was imprisoned while others—less good, less virtuous, less sane, less worthy-were free; at the inadequacy of the hospitals he was forced—by himself, by our family, by the world—to be part of; at my inability to get him out.

The general stupidity and indifference of the world were evidenced for me in the particular stupidity and indifference of mental hospitals. How, I would demand, could a human being “get well” when the conditions of his environment told him—not in words, but in the prison-like architecture, the mammoth dormitories for sleeping, the primitive forms of therapy, the shortage of trained personnel—that the world didn’t really care much about him. Once, brought back to a state hospital after what had been diagnosed as an “acute psychotic episode,” he was placed in a maximum security ward. A week later we telephoned his doctor to find out how he was doing, only to discover that his doctor had not yet been informed that he was back in the hospital.

One had only to look around and see what society’s priorities were: when I looked at the world in those days I saw the ease with which money could be obtained for new highways, for space programs, for new model cars, for marching bands, for advertising—and I needed to see and know no more.

How, I asked at the time, could anyone become “sane” in an institution in which he was surrounded all day by the “insane?” (Robert: “You have to be crazy to want to stay here—” Or, telling me not to worry about him: “I’m sane, don’t you see, Jay—? That’s what it means to be here—I’m in sane.”) In my analysis of the situation, I had, I was certain, noticed things that few others had seen. My theory developed: Because of its meager budget and staff, the institution had to place primary emphasis on what were custodial values—i.e., since its burden, day by day, was to try to keep things quiet and orderly, patients who were manic and/or aggressive, for example, were more trouble than patients who were passive and/or depressed, and they were treated accordingly: with security wards, straitjackets, less and less of the already limited, inadequate therapy—and even, at a supposedly decent private hospital, with punishment, confinement to quarters, loss of passes out of the hospital.

In short, the needs of the institution, not of the “patients,” seemed to me generally to determine the forms of treatment. And the needs of the institution, I concluded, were determined by the society which created it, funded it, and declared that people placed in it, designated as “mental patients,” be, in effect, invalidated as human beings—all rights, decisions, property, etc. taken away from them—so that they could become, in this institutionally mad logic—somehow “human again,” “part of society,” “responsible for themselves.”

In the self-justifying deterministic logic of the hospital, my version of things was not, of course, true: patients, the argument went, always acted so as “to get what they wanted.” It followed, therefore, that if patients wound up confined to their rooms, in security wards, without therapists, without doctors—that they must have “wanted” to.*

“The shits,” Mailer wrote in Advertisements for Myself, “are killing us.” The sentence spun around in my head, rested there. The shits, I vowed, would not get me (too). And the shits seemed to me to be everywhere—free, walking the earth, sitting in offices, inflicting suffering, enjoying life while (because) others despaired.

The sight of hundreds of visitors—other brothers, mothers, fathers, friends, relatives—waiting in long lines several times a week, laden with shopping bags and packages, eyes darting with fear, anxiety, anticipation—to spend an hour or two with their beloved inmate, always seemed more terrible to me—obscene was the word I used—than what actually existed behind the locked doors. And the sight ot the same people, atter visiting hours, waiting in long lines for city buses to take them home, though less overtly terrible, seemed more depressing.

How, I would ask, could anybody place faith in these hospitals, how could anybody place faith in any of the world’s institutions, when—in one of the largest hospitals in the most progressive state of the most advanced nation in the civilized world—the Director was still clinging to authoritarian notions in which the hospital was analogous to a church, and, I reasoned at the time, the doctors to priests, the patients to sinners. In what everybody else took for a harmless notice placed on the doors of the hospital—a plea for “appropriate” dress by visitors (no shorts, no low necklines), I was able to see stupidity, insanity, the epitome of all the lies and misconceptions and errors that were responsible for the tragic state of the world. “Although a hospital is not a house of worship,” the notice began, “it does partake somewhat of the same solemnity and dignity….” I quenched the fire of my rage by tearing the notice from the door, taking it home with me, brooding over it.

Although I felt I had no choice but to act as if I too had faith in the hospital, the system assigned to “cure” people, my desire again, as at GM, was to destroy: There was more hope in organizing patients (with the support of their aides—almost all black, all underpaid—their doctors, their relatives, their friends) to strike, to picket, to revolt, to blow up the hospitals—than there was in letting things continue as they were.

At one point, on the advice of a friend, a child psychologist at Harlem Hospital, I wrote letters to several private clinics (clinics he said were especially trained to offer my brother the chance he needed), giving my brother’s history, inquiring about openings, telling something of our family, of our financial situation. I received replies which thanked me for my “moving letter” but noted that such clinics could “not think” of accepting a patient (there were no “scholarships” one psychiatrist wrote) unless the family of the patient could “guarantee” the doctors for several years, sums which would run, annually between fifteen and twenty-five thousand dollars.

If I’d needed any further evidence for my belief that the inadequacy of mental hospitals was a direct product, a true reflection of our indices of priority, our economic-social-political system, I now had it. True enough, I’d admit at the time, there were people who got well in state hospitals who were not helped in such private clinics, but if one had to “go out of one’s mind” for a while, it might be more pleasant to do so in pleasant surroundings: on a beautiful estate, with a private nurse, with good professional care, with daily and individual therapy, etc. At the least, it would be nice if one could enjoy the cures available to others, to the rich, if one could “make a little trial of the opposite.”

My life at the Saddle River Country Day School during these months became secondary. I resented the school—the fact that I was part of it—but not with the passion I’d reserved for GM or The Meadows. If the Marxist inside me still insisted on simple dichotomies—the privileged lives the students led did not somehow entitle them to have problems—it didn’t stop me from getting to know the students, from liking them. I enjoyed teaching. The students were my daily world and I talked about them with the other teachers endlessly, thought about them always. I seemed to be able to get the students interested in themselves, in their own worlds—and once this was done, they quickly and easily became interested in books, in writing, in new worlds. I brought their once and twice-weekly compositions across the George Washington Bridge with me on weekends to show friends, and I was, for the better part of my waking hours, respected, admired, even loved; at the time, this was no small thing.

As a teacher, I was able to satisfy my own needs (to be important—the center of attention, the source of change, knowledge), while at the same time satisfying my sense of what a good teacher should be by making my presence, my opinions irrelevant, secondary. The grades I had to put on written work never seemed to affect students adversely—those who had received the lowest grades were as eager (afterwards) to read and show their work as were those who received the highest. On the first day of school, not knowing what to do, I’d assigned “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” as the topic for the first composition in my eighth-grade class. As soon as I heard the students groan, I added, as an afterthought; “And you don’t have to tell the truth—” It was the first of my attempts to reverse the conventional—barely original, but it seemed to be enough to set the students free, to set me free, to set the tone for the year.

At the school itself, not wanting, I suppose, to endanger the respect and popularity I’d achieved, I kept my political emotions and theories to myself. In the course of the year I can recall only two things I did which could in any way have been considered political, 1) I refused to make my students take part in civil defense drills in which they would protect themselves from nuclear warheads by crouching under their desks; and 2) I taught The Catcher In the Rye despite warnings from the headmaster and his request that I choose another novel. In addition—the events rest in my memory precisely because they were so absurdly minor, so earnestly proletarian—I actually said to a student, with others present, when he came in one day bemoaning the $50,000 his father had lost in a stock market slide the previous day: “Have you ever considered that your father earns money for which he doesn’t work?”—and I rooted for an opposing football team (an orphanage) against my own.

I did no writing all winter, but that spring I started and completed two projects. The first was an attempt at a children’s book. The teacher with whom I was friendliest at the school was Mrs. Gladys Matthews, and she was in her early eighties at the time. Born and raised in Texas, she was a member of the DAR, the Colonial Dames of America, a descendant of Pocahontas, and had been a staunch supporter of Norman Thomas in the thirties. When she read articles and stories in magazines, she would systematically tear out all the full pages of advertising, muttering as explanation: “I didn’t pay for this—” Mrs. Matthews had taught Mexican children in Texas border schools, and one of them had given her the memoirs of an ancestor of his—a guide named Poli (José Policarpo Rodriguez)—famous in Texas during the nineteenth century for having blazed many of its important trails and for having been keeper of the camels when Jefferson Davis had brought them to America just before the Civil War.

“Here you are,” she said to me one night, handing me several boxes of yellow-edged pages. “I tried to write a book once and found out I wasn’t a writer. So I stopped. I’ve been waiting thirty years to find somebody to finish the job.”

The fact that Poli had lived through both the Mexican and Civil wars without taking part in either intrigued the pacifist-propagandist in me, and I worked on the book every night for several months. The result, however (my fifth complete book), was dismal, and working on it depressed me, only made me aware of the original fiction I was not writing.

The second piece of writing I did that spring was also derivative. By then my political book (A Letter to Kennedy) had been rejected by enough publishers to convince me that it would not be published. Several publishers had helped sharpen my sense of injustice (helplessness) by noting that for such a letter to have “relevance,” it would have to have been written by “a well-known political figure.” Hadn’t, I screamed silently, that been the point of the book—that I was not well known, that I had not, until GM, been political? I took up such points, at length, in the new article, quoting from my rejection slips, telling the story of the letter, of the book about the letter, of the article about the book about the letter.

I dreaded the idea of a second year as tutor to the rich. I wanted, again, to get far away from New York, from my family. In late spring I applied to the Indiana University School of Letters for the summer session. If I survived it, I decided, I would stay on for the fall and finish my Master’s Degree.

The eight weeks in Bloomington were a joy: I played tennis every day, basketball, made good friends with other graduate students, had time for reading, writing, and—what seemed suddenly all important—more than enough of the company, the conversation—about literature, politics, Indiana—I had obviously been hungering for. Having been away from graduate school for two years, having broken the usual pattern—straight from four years of undergraduate studies to graduate school to college-teaching position—I found that I could more easily accept what had previously seemed unacceptable. I was wary, though, fearful—especially about what discussions, papers, theorizing on other novels—when I, at twenty-four, had had none published—would do to me, to my writing.

The world of the university, upon my return to it, did not impress me as being any more moral in its internal politics, its bureaucracy, its contracts, its own caste system, than GM; still, I discovered, I preferred the business of education to the business of business.

I was struck also by the ways in which the lives of the graduate students impressed me, initially, as being similar to the lives of mental patients. Again, I worked out a theory: graduate students, like mental patients, were protected, insulated from the outside world; they were given fixed rewards and punishments for obeying and disobeying rules; they were taken care of with respect to the necessities of life; they had their own therapists (teachers, advisers, counselors). Undergraduates at the university had always referred to the graduate center as “the zoo”—and I now found the word appropriate; the numbers of graduate students who seemed to me to be misfits, who would not, I felt, have been able to survive in any other environment was astonishing. More than this, it was their physical bearing which had first elicited my reactions, comparisons: stiff neck and shoulders, drugged look about the eyes, tight mouthlines, inability to laugh naturally…

Still, I was happier on the campus, among them, than I’d been at GM, at home, or at Saddle River. The pressures within university walls seemed infinitely less severe than those outside it; I had forgotten about the incredible amounts of sheer time a student had to himself and I found, at the end of eight weeks, that I wanted to stay. Even the fact that many of the people I was surrounded by were timid, tight, vulnerable, or strange, came, by this time, to represent something positive for me—i.e., I interpreted their (projected) inability to get on in the outside world as an instinctive rejection of it.

At the end of the summer I sent a letter to the headmaster of the Saddle River Country Day School from Los Angeles (I’d driven there with some graduate students), telling him of my decision to return to graduate school. I flew to New York after two weeks in California, settled things there, and drove back to Bloomington, where I took an apartment a few blocks from the campus with two graduate students in botany.

Shortly after classes began I repeated, briefly, the games of the previous year: I’d walk the town streets at night and wait until the last second before racing across the paths of oncoming cars. Thanks to the summer tennis and basketball my timing was good—despite blaring horns, screeches, skidding runs, I was never hurt badly. The games lasted for a week or two and never returned.

I received an assistantship in the English Department that fall and I thrived on the teaching. That my freshmen students seemed, in general, inferior to most of my ninth- and tenth-grade students at Saddle River only gave me more reason to assume antic dispositions, to work hard.

Once I asked my classes for a definition of “empiricism.” They had just read Bertrand Russell’s essay, “Empiricism and Democracy,” and I said that I wanted to know how much background I’d need to give them when we discussed the essay during the next class meeting. They should not put their names on their papers, they should not answer if they hadn’t had time to read the essay. The word, which appeared not only in the title, but in virtually every paragraph of the essay, was taken by all but two of fifty students to be “a form of government like communism or colonialism.”

During my second or third week of teaching we read an essay by Wright Morris, “Abuse of the Past: Norman Rockwell.” In the essay, Morris repeatedly uses Rockwell’s drawings to illustrate what he describes as the American ability to make of all things “a joke,” of the

American inability to face reality—try to imagine a Rockwell drawing of a concentration camp, a bad train crash. I was almost through the class period before I realized that the reason things were not going well was that we were operating on different spectrums; my students, I discovered by a few quick questions, had assumed that Morris was praising Rockwell for his truthfulness. If you couldn’t say something good about somebody, they seemed to believe, you shouldn’t say anything. I was, I realized, back in the provinces—and I discovered that I didn’t mind.

At the end of the second semester my students wrote, without exception, that the value of their year at Indiana, the purpose of their college education, was “to get to know different kinds of people better.” That they could not write sentences in English, that any single composition seemed to contain (like the notice on the New York State Hospital door) all the logical, ideological, and philosophical errors of Western Civilization, that they were fundamentalist-conservatives politically (the first essay I looked at the second semester was entitled: “How Franklin Roosevelt Caused the Second World War in Order to Aid International Communism”), that most of them found the classroom an obvious intrusion on the other activities associated with college live (in their lives, the work-pleasure split was natural and untroubled)—I found that I did not become enraged with them for such things. Their prejudice, like their ignorance, seemed profound—in the simplest, most literal way, I said, they didn’t know any better.

About a month after classes began—on October 24, 1962, two days after Kennedy announced the Cuban blockade—the campus had its first political demonstration of the year, and I welcomed it, found that I was excited by the possibility that I might be part of it, that I might apply—in some visible way—the experience, knowledge, theories, and emotions that I’d gained since the last time I’d been on the campus.

As soon as an Ad Hoc Committee of students issued a statement calling for a demonstration protesting the blockade, the University administration responded as I knew it would. The Dean of Students, Robert H. Shaffer, issued a statement in which he declared that “Indiana University has always supported the right of the individual student to express himself freely on any political or social issue. We shall continue to support this policy of free expression….” He added, however, that “common sense would suggest that students who consider participation in any public demonstration would understand with whom they are aligning themselves…. I am certain that the vast majority of the students will ignore the action of such a small number of students endeavoring to attract attention to themselves.” The president of the university, former Secretary of the Army, Elvis J. Stahr, Jr., stated that “the most effective way to deal with minorities with whom we disagree in the present kind of situation is to ignore them completely” (italics mine).

I arrived at the University auditorium on the afternoon of October 24 prepared to join the Ad Hoc group as soon as it issued its statement on the crisis. I never got a chance. The several thousand students who were gathered in the square in front of the auditorium hissed, booed, shoved, punched, kicked. The fifteen demonstrators, unable to give their statement, began moving away from the auditorium, and the students followed them.

The day had already been turned into a joke; the protest was another football rally: students carried placards bearing signs such as “Block that Ship!”—a refrain they chanted again and again. One fraternity paraded with a sign that stated: “We Believe in Mom’s Cherry Pie and Sex.”

Groups of students formed barricades, arms linked, and kicked and punched the protesters at various points along the route of their march. The police, who followed the students across campus, did nothing. When a clergyman (the Reverend Paul Killinger, Unitarian minister in Bloomington) asked one of the policemen why he was doing nothing to protect the fifteen students, the policeman smiled, and replied that he was only there “to protect the liberties of Americans.”

The saddest part of the day concerned the attack on a young faculty member—a visiting professor from Spain. He told me afterwards that when he had seen the announcement of the demonstration in the student paper, he had been thrilled—for the first time since he’d come to America, he was actually going to see how our democracy worked, how we allowed free speech even in time of crisis. When he saw what actually happened, though, he suddenly found himself trying to address the crowd, trying to get them to give the protesters a hearing, to let them make their statement.

The crowd pressed in on him, he was thrown against a car, hurled to the ground, punched, kicked. A graduate student I knew ran to a policeman to tell him that the professor was being beaten, but the policeman told my friend, “He shouldn’t be here.” “It serves him right,” said another.

A week later, still badly cut and bruised, the professor showed me a letter he had received from the student body president, Mike Donovan. Donovan had issued a statement after the demonstration, beginning: “This afternoon the students of Indiana University clearly illustrated one of the things President Kennedy and the American people wish to preserve in this country…freedom of speech and the right to dissent….” In his letter to the professor, Donovan said that he had heard about the “alleged” attack on him, but he wanted to remind the professor that “as an alien,” he was not, of course, “entitled to the same rights as American citizens….” Donovan was considered the campus “liberal”; the campus “conservative,” who received the university’s highest award at graduation that June, went on to become the national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom.

The enemies I’d found in Indianapolis were living in Bloomington also, and I was ready to do more than battle them silently. The day of the demonstrations I was at work on an article and on letters to the student paper, to university officials. The day after the demonstration the student paper made no mention of violence, and though many faculty members and students sent letters about what had happened, the paper, under the direction of the Department of Journalism, refused to print any of them. They refused also to give any reason for their decision, though they did admit to me, on the phone, that they were “acting under orders.”

I sent the article out and it was quickly turned down by several national magazines; when, a few months later, the local county prosecutor, Thomas A. Hoadley, brought an injunction against three of the demonstrators, officers of the Young Socialists Alliance, for violating a 1951 Indiana Anti-Communism Statute (“It shall be the purpose of the state of Indiana and the people of Indiana to exterminate Communism and Communists, and any or all teachings of the same….”), I revised the article, sent it to The Minority of One, and soon had my second acceptance. (Later that year, when events proliferated, I would write a third article, one which was published in The New Republic.)

The sequence of events began to resemble something from Babbitt. To “clear the way” for a Grand Jury investigation of the “possible involvement” of the YSA in the demonstration of October 24, the young prosecutor dismissed charges against two nonstudents involved. “The important thing, in this case,” he told the press, “is to get this organization off the campus.” He announced that he would consider the constitutionality of the YSA (under the 1951 statute), that he would take the case to the Supreme Court “if necessary,” and that the action would “definitely not be taken as a witch hunt.”

A local grand jury indicted the three officers, but miraculously, the indictment made no mention of the events of October 24—instead it charged the officers with being present at a meeting in which the national secretary of the YSA, Leroy McCrae, had stated that nonviolence might not be the only way for black people to secure political power in places such as Mississippi. The meeting had been held after Hoadley had announced that he would seek to indict the three officers.

Hoadley called the grand jury “courageous,” and told the press that “we want only to stamp out Communism and what it stands for before it gets a foothold here.” Then he added that because the grand jury could not obtain a list of YSA members, he had not been able to cross-check their names against a list of names compiled in his own narcotics investigation “to determine to what extent, if any, marijuana is used to recruit new members in the YSA.” When the indictment was returned, the student senate of I. U. called a special session and went on record—there was one abstention, by a foreign student—as being unanimously “opposed” to the “socialist minority” which was bringing their university into disrepute.

Invited to contribute a guest editorial on the controversy to the local newspaper, The Bloomington Herald-Telephone, Hoadley chose “academic freedom” as his subject. When several faculty members wrote to the paper to point out that fourteen of Hoadley’s seventeen paragraphs were lifted verbatim from a famous A. O. Love-joy speech on academic freedom, Hoadley replied that the Lovejoy speech was more than twenty-eight years old and therefore in the public domain. He added that he had not used quotation marks around Lovejoy’s words because he did not want “to impress the university community with [his] literary ability.”

Hoadley was a rather bungling parody of a Midwest anti-Communist, but what he was a parody of still seemed to me to be the strongest political strain in the central regions of America. The attitudes exemplified by Hoadley, the police, Donovan, the 1951 Statute, the student senate, the grand jury—these were, I continued to believe, the attitudes held by the majority of Hoosiers, and, I inferred (remembering my eight months in Indianapolis), the majority of Americans.

Those who ended by opposing Hoadley (as Stahr and Shaffer did) were, as they had shown earlier, not really so distant from him. As with the man who had provided the atmosphere for the passing of the 1951 Statute, those who objected to Hoadley did so more because of his “methods” than because of his purpose.

I remember discussing the case with one of the university’s best-known professors that spring, a man who considered himself a “liberal.” I told him about my articles, my involvement, and he seemed sympathetic. After a while our discussion passed to another I. U. case, that of a journalism professor who had been brought to Indiana to give the Journalism Department prestige and then had been denied tenure because of several articles he’d written for national magazines in which he’d been critical of the university.

The professor agreed with me that a man’s opinions outside the classroom should have no effect on his position in the university, that it had probably been a mistake to let this professor go, to in effect, fire him. “Still,” he reminded me, “it’s a dirty bird who soils its own nest.”

If such remarks alienated me from many who styled themselves “liberals,” I was no more at home, I found, with the YSA group. Although I did what I could on their behalf, I discovered that their political views impressed me as being enormously deficient in both subtlety and honesty. Most of all, their rhetoric (much of it about The Working Man, the Class Struggle, the Fascist State, etc.) made me twitch. My political reactions remained those of a writer.

I enjoyed being involved in the case; I enjoyed following the day-to-day dramas which attached themselves to events; I enjoyed writing about it, having articles published, getting attention (notoriety) because of my writing (the Herald-Telephone announced the publication of my first article on its front page); I enjoyed receiving long letters from people such as Stahr and Shaffer, from professors at other universities who’d been involved in similar episodes. Though I may have found the people in the YSA simplistic and strident—incompatible temperamentally—as long as I could separate myself from them (and from everybody else) by setting my views down on paper and by having those views published, I was willing to work with them, for them. I was, in short, able to do something on a sustained basis about the world which, two years before, had paralyzed me; this pleased me, seemed to help lift me from the fearful melancholy depression of the previous two years. My year in Bloomington was a good one. For better or worse, I realized, things were in proportion: helping three indicted students was not an activity which had much in common with my previous campaigns, but that was all right too.

Early in the year—after a free Friday night showing of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky—a friend had introduced me to Betsey. She was with him and I was with another girl—but I couldn’t, for the rest of the evening, take my eyes from hers. Fortunately—we would laugh about this later, we almost laughed out loud that night-she kept hers on mine. We went out together for the first time a few weeks later—the night, in fact, that I finished my first article on the campus events—and we saw one another every day after that.

In the spring, though, after her mother had undergone open-heart surgery, and my father had suffered several severe coronaries, we decided that it would be best to break up. I’d already accepted a University Fellowship to Columbia for the following fall, which I thought meant—since Betsey had another year to go for her degree at Indiana—that things were bound to end. Better, we both reasoned, sooner than later. Then too, I remembered my father reaching under the plastic oxygen tent to take my hand in his (I’d been summoned to New York when he suffered his second coronary), to ask me to be good to my mother—a request which I interpreted at the time as his dying wish that I never marry a non-Jewish girl.

Still, despite our guilt (Betsey’s mother would spell out, in Baptist terminology, the consequences of “living in sin” with a Jew) and our resolutions, we seemed incapable of avoiding each other, we each found ourselves taking strange new routes across campus between classes so that we would—daily and accidentally—meet. And when I finished a piece of writing I found myself doing what I’d done all year—immediately going to see her (telephoning her if she was already locked in her dormitory for the night) and reading her what I’d written, discussing it with her.

That winter, in order, I thought, to cheer myself up, I’d once papered an entire wall of my one-room apartment with rejection slips—and was plunged instantaneously into a severe depression which lasted until we’d both torn down the slips. One Saturday afternoon that spring, after Betsey and I had “broken up,” I returned to my apartment feeling particularly low, thinking of papering my wall again. When I unlocked my door, though, I found Betsey inside, sitting on my bed. “I thought you might like to play tennis,” she said, and smiled.

About a week later she called to tell me that she’d taken a job in New York for the summer—as waterfront director at a Girl Scout camp near Port Jefferson, Long Island. She pointed out that she’d applied for the job before we’d made our decision, and I offered to “show her around New York” on her days off.

I received my Master’s Degree that June and returned to New York, where I rented a single room on the top floor of a brownstone on West Eighty-fifth Street. In Columbia’s graduate school, I knew, there was no attendance checking, no grades; my fellowship, then, was for the writing of a new (seventh) book I’d already begun to pressure-cook. During July and August my writing went better than it ever had. Betsey came into the city once a week and I drove out to her camp several times. One morning, after Betsey had spent the night at my parents’ apartment, I met my father in the kitchen. Nobody else was awake. He spoke to me in Yiddish and then translated. “From her,” he said smiling at me, “you can’t get poisoned.” In September, just before she went back to Indiana for her senior year, I asked her to marry me.

That spring and summer, for the first time, I worked at a new form—the short story—and I discovered that here, too, as in my politics, I was no longer absolute. Most of my work consisted in rejecting ideas, in cutting—i.e., what I left out of a story became as important-more important—than what I included. I no longer seemed to believe that every word or idea or fiction that came from me need save the world, or be saved for it.

In June an editor at a New York publishing house was optimistic about the chances for my automobile plant novel and invited me in to talk about it, asked me if I would be willing to undertake some revisions. What was needed most, we both agreed, was cutting—and when I was done with revisions, a month or two later, we both agreed that the result was immensely superior to the original. Unfortunately, what had been a five-hundred page novel was now a 140-page manuscript.

_______________

* Cf. the following account given by Erving Goffman, in Asylums: “… Persons who are lodged on ‘bad’ wards find that very little equipment of any kind is given them—clothes may be taken away from them each night, recreational materials may be withheld, and only heavy wooden chairs and benches provided for furniture. Acts of hostility against the institution have to rely on limited, ill-designed devices, such as banging a chair against the floor or striking a sheet of newspaper sharply so as to make an annoying explosive sound. And the more inadequate this equipment is to convey rejection of the hospital, the more the act appears as a psychotic symptom, and the more likely it is that management feels justified in assigning the patient to a bad ward. When a patient finds himself in seclusion, naked and without visible means of expression, he may have to rely on tearing up his mattress, if he can, or writing with faeces on the wall—actions management takes to be in keeping with the kind of person who warrants seclusion.”