Parentheses

We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.

I left America, retreated into a more private world than any I’d been living in, and I found that even the need to justify this retreat diminished with time, then disappeared.

My desire (need) to persuade others of the validity of my views—or even to attempt to explain to myself the meaning of my actions, my choices, of my more obscure and/or apocalyptic statements (without revolution, America is doomed)—this desire passed also. When I first arrived in Europe, I remember, I hungered for news of America—I couldn’t begin a day until I’d bought and read the International Herald Tribune. This stopped also: in Spéracèdes weeks would go by when I wouldn’t see a newspaper. From time to time, an article in a paper I did see, a letter from a friend, a specific memory, an encounter with an American abroad, news of the war, of the cities—these could arouse me, arouse my desire to return, to do something—but only temporarily. The longer I stayed away from America, the easier—up to a point—it became to stay away. Major events—the assassinations of King and Kennedy; the Spock Trial; ghetto riots; student rebellions; the Democratic and Republican conventions in the summer of 1968; the New York City teachers strike—these only reinforced my desire to stay away.

One exception: during the week of October 16, 1967—just after we’d arrived in Europe—when news of the demonstrations at the Pentagon and the Oakland Induction Center reached London, I craved to go back. The size and scale of the actions stunned me—in Washington, demonstrators had actually penetrated the Pentagon, and in Oakland, the plans we’d made seemed to be working: demonstrators working in teams, the induction center shut down temporarily, the Oakland police (this was most astonishing) having to call to other cities for reinforcements. I got all the reports I could, I talked nonstop about what was happening with another Stanford teacher, a doctor from the medical school who was working at the National Health Institute in London, and who had been involved in organizing the Oakland Induction Center action—we talked of flying back to America. In Oakland, we told ourselves, something new was happening—something that might even be the beginning of actual revolutionary activity in which white and black radicals would be allies.

In the end, after releasing energy, frustration in a fight to storm the American Embassy in London, after securing bruises which I could carry proudly for several weeks (cherishing them as I’d cherished football injuries when I was younger)—I was glad I hadn’t followed the impulse to go back. Nothing would have been served, the actions—again—were largely symbolic. The war continued, continued to escalate.

Something else, of course—something that seemed, at the time, too selfish, self-centered, to tolerate in myself. My vanity was hurt; I’d misjudged the course events would take, and now that events which I’d played a role in planning were at the center of the world’s attention, I wanted some of the credit. It was difficult, for a few days, to resign myself to my fate: I would not be there to reap the kinds of public dividends that the letter to Kennedy had once promised, and which might now have been mine.

This was not the worst blow my vanity suffered that week. During the battle to break into the Embassy, Betsey and I had been in the front lines, pushing and shoving against the London police. Betsey, in fact, after having argued with me during the walk across London against my infatuation with techniques, as in Oakland, which were not nonviolent—had been the only one of thousands to break through the police lines. She did so three times, and then—caught in no-man’s-land between the police and the Embassy—she’d called to thousands of us to follow her. At which point, each time, she was gingerly lifted up by a policeman and placed back in the crowd. At one point, sweating and groaning, I’d looked up to find myself staring into a beautiful red beard, trimmed beefeater fashion, like that of the guard at the Tower of London. The owner of the beard, a young London policeman, his arms linked with those of his co-workers to right and left, was groaning and sweating also. “With a beard like that,” I muttered, “you should be on our side.” As we continued to shove against one another, three to four thousand people behind me, five hundred to a thousand police behind him, mounted horses now beginning to help, without even seeming to notice me, with only the slightest glance my way, he replied at once, “I’ve got taste.”

During the next eighteen months I was involved in only one other incident which was in any way political. In the fall of 1968—a year after we’d left America, and just after Betsey and I had returned from the camping trip which had taken us across 9,000 miles of Europe, from the arctic circle in Norway to the inner regions of Yugoslavia—I received a notice from my draft board stating that the FBI and the Attorney General had informed them that I had “surrendered” my draft card, and that they would, therefore “be forced to take action” against me—unless, of course, I now promised to carry the card with me and to obey all parts of the selective service law. Two weeks after the first notice, I was directed “to report” to my local board. What had seemed, only four months before—when I wrote the reflections with which this book begins—a “remote” possibility, was no longer remote.

Betsey and I had gone on the long trip that summer—away from Spéracèdes—for several reasons. In her third month, five weeks after we’d received the news that she was pregnant, she’d suffered a miscarriage, and we’d been more let down, more shaken by this than we’d expected to be. Also, I’d come to the point in this narrative where I’d begun chronicling my New York and California antiwar and civil rights activities, and having to do so had filled me with distaste for the entire project. I had absolutely no desire to write about meetings and marches, wars and ghettos—and, realizing that I didn’t want to write, in a supposedly political book, about the years when I had, finally, become political, I had to doubt the book itself, my reasons for doing it, whether or not I should continue. My second novel had been published a few months before, and, for me, this meant that I should have been working on the third. Instead—again—politics (in the form of a book) was in the way.

The trip helped. When I returned to Spéracèdes in the fall, I was able to dig in at once on the final chapters of this book, and though everything I’d written on my thirtieth birthday, and everything I’d said in the final chapter of the original draft of this book should have made me react, when I heard from my draft board, in whatever “realistic” way would have most easily solved the immediate problem—I reacted, inevitably, in an opposite way. I refused to reply to my draft board, I refused to promise them anything, and I swore that I would not. My moral juices were as active as they’d ever been: I wrote long letters to friends and antiwar organizations telling them of my predicament, and explaining why I would not, of course, ask for my draft card back—even though I was thirty years old, even though I still had a 2A deferment (leave of absence from teaching), even though this meant that being declared delinquent I would be called for induction in the next month’s pool, and, when I didn’t report, would be faced with the usual penalties: five years in jail and/or $10,000 fine.

I would, I said, probably get to stay on in Spéracèdes indefinitely. For, I argued, if the government could, by threatening jail, get me to say: “Okay, I’ll ask you to send me back my draft card”—then what had all my protests ever meant? Although the draft card was only a piece of paper sent out by people who had no “legitimate” authority to conscript men and send them to kill and be killed, that piece of paper was important: for it represented the government’s actual ability to have killed all the people it had already killed in Vietnam. Although I admitted to those who suggested that I simply ask for the card back, that nothing would be served by my exile, that I myself had—since at least a year before—been of the opinion that draft card turn-ins were morally noble acts, but politically useless ones, I now stood firm.

Then too, though I was, by turns, enraged, obsessed, made giddy by what was happening—did the American government, or its bureaucracy, actually want to put me in jail?—the fact that I might have to go to jail or face not returning to America for many years didn’t, during a Spéracèdes autumn, seem very real.

The day I’d received my first note from my draft board, I’d written to Resist, the major organization for aiding resisters, asking for advice on how to keep out of jail. By the time I received—exactly one month later—a notice from my local board declaring me “delinquent,” I had not yet received a reply from Resist, or from any of the other antiwar organizations I’d written to. But I was far from America, I was over thirty years old, I was married, my writing was going well, I would be able to survive—what, I wondered, would have happened to an eighteen-year-old in my position who needed to rely on the efficiency and machinery of the American peace movement?

After not hearing from Resist, I’d also written to a friend of mine, Marty Cramer. He was a lawyer and I’d asked for his advice; I now received it. “My advice to you,” he wrote, “is to swallow your PRIDE and to write the Draft Board that you were away when the letters came and could not answer them. Tell them to return your draft card, period.” He pointed out some consequences of my action I hadn’t thought of (e.g., the problems I might have getting my passport renewed if I stayed abroad to avoid prosecution, the problems I might have putting up with the laws of whatever other country I chose to live in), and said a few other things which part of me had already been whispering.

My brief research shows that the law requiring persons to carry a draft card is merely an extension of the law which requires you to register for the Draft at age 18. The penalty for not carrying is the same for not registering—up to 5 years and $10,000. Since you have already registered, and have carried the card for years-it seems foolish to make a moral issue out of this—especially since you now state that you don’t particularly believe in handing in draft cards anymore…the only time that you should fight is when they actually decide to draft you…at this stage it seems ridiculous to thumb your nose at them and ask them to punish you for some silly little infraction…. Ask for the card back and say no more…. If you say it’s a matter of conscience—I wont believe you because you have already admitted that draft card protests have no more meaning to you. Please write your draft board now.

An hour after his letter arrived I’d written to my draft board, telling them that they could return my card to me, and I’d delivered the letter to Georgette. I shook my head, then proceeded to visit each of my friends, telling them of what I’d done. The point, I said (still having to find some justification—moral, political, and metaphysical—for every action I took in this world), was not to give the shits who were killing us any more power than they already had. The point was not to be absolutely moral when dealing with amoral bureaucracies. The point was not to let one’s life be destroyed in symbolic skirmishes. The point was to read carefully what I’d written on my thirtieth birthday…and there were, as always, many more points. I felt high, spun around, relieved—and then, strangely, almost drunkenly pleased with myself. Had I actually considered—for over a month—living in semipermanent exile? (Until I received a new draft card two months later—1A classification—the possibility that I hadn’t written in time to counteract the delinquency notice would remain.) Once I’d asked for the card back, I had to wonder what had made me become so morally obstinate—and once I wondered about this, I found myself smiling, dizzy with the knowledge that I had not, after all, changed so much in all the years since GM—since my first political campaign, and that first novel which had preceded (had prophesied) that campaign.

Our life continued in Spéracèdes—except that we now began to make plans for returning to America. There were no particular reasons for coming back—just the feeling that we wanted to (and that we wanted to return when we weren’t forced to). If for nothing else, to see if—after Spéracèdes—we would be able to live in America —si on pourrait supporter la vie là-bas. I’d already accepted a teaching position in New York—at a new experimental college on Long Island (State University of New York, College at Old Westbury), where there would be, for the first two years, less than 250 students, where all administrators would also teach, where students would share fully in planning and decision making, where housing (on campus—in former servants’ quarters) would be provided for us. It sounded ideal—if at some point we had to go back (because we wanted to), and if going back I would have to work somewhere (we would have to eat, we would have to live somewhere), I didn’t think we would ever do much better than this: no hassle about finding a place to live, a college which—it seemed from the literature they were sending me—might have a greater sense of community, of “relevance” (every student would be required to spend at least one year away from the school working or studying—in ghettos, foreign countries, etc.) than most others. “Responsibility for one’s own living and learning,” the college catalog stated, “in college as in life, will be the operating principle.”

Life in Spéracèdes was as it had been. The daily round of our life was the same, and—in good times and bad—we continued to share it with our friends. In the winter of 1968–69, the bad times outnumbered the good (Nancy Cusack died, some close friends went through bad times, other families talked of leaving Spéracèdes). But the essential quality of our lives remained good, whole. Betsey and I spent more time than we ever had with our friends—and with each other. We still woke early, I walked into town for the day’s bread, we ate breakfast together, I got the mail, I went up to my room to work (to read, write, stare at the sea), Betsey painted, we had long leisurely lunches, took walks, brief trips to nearby villages, spent evenings with friends, or at home, reading, talking.

Our refrigerator had now been borrowed by Clément for his store, and, plugged in twenty-four-hours a day, it became the village’s frozen food department. Bene finished building his house and we had a huge feast to celebrate—in fact, Sundays had become ritual days for feasts; every week we seemed to find one excuse or another—and when we didn’t have excuses, we had the feasts anyway: all of us together (with children, our group would number between thirty and forty), singing, talking, drinking, eating cous-cous or paella or lamb (which we’d roast—whole or half—over an open pit), playing boules, gathering in the bistro for coffee and more drinks.

And, as noted, the first draft of this book finished—and several other projects completed (a collection of stories, a screenplay)—my own desire to write seemed gone, and I didn’t mind. We considered changing our plans from time to time—we told ourselves that our life in Spéracèdes was good, that we were happy together there, that—if we left and then returned—things would not be the same, that we would not find a comparable life anywhere in America, that there was still time to turn down the job and just stay on—but in the end we always came to the conclusion that we wanted to go back, that we would stick to our plans. We would see friends and family, we would put away some money again—if things became intolerable for us—we could always pick up and leave, return to Spéracèdes. (Clément and Fernande told us that they would not rent our house in September until we told them—100 percent—that we were not coming back.)

At the end of March, after parties, tears, good-byes, we set sail from Cannes (Betsey’s paintings rolled up and hidden in our trunks to hide them from French customs—who didn’t even bother to look; all paintings which leave France must be passed on by the Beaux-Arts)—and ten days later, we arrived in America, where the U. S. customs agent opened every one of our packages, every piece of luggage, made us wash dried mud from our boots, tapped on the sides of our trunks in search of false compartments, went through the titles of our books. We drove across the city and when I stopped for gas, a young black guy in a baseball cap, eyes at half-mast, held the pump hose and asked me about the foreign license plate on my car—my first conversation in America. I told him we’d just returned from over a year and a half in France.

He shook his head. “Oh man,” he asked. “Why’d you come back?” His eyes opened. “Man,” he said, “it’s worse here than Vietnam…. Soon as I get through school, I’m gettin’ out.”

That morning, after not having slept all night, Betsey and I had come on deck just before six—at the moment that our ship passed under the Verrazano Bridge. The ship turned, headed toward Manhattan Island. The skyline seemed changed—squarer, less varied. The city looked vast, huge—and something I hadn’t expected—strong. It didn’t, however, look good; it did not, as I’d expected it would, feel good to be home. As the ship made its way up the Hudson—as we passed downtown, the Lower West Side—I spoke for the first time: “Bring this down—?” I said. “Not a chance.” Stop it—maybe…paralyze it from time to time—but destroy it, overthrow it (whatever that might mean)—never. Okay, I said to myself—even before we’d left the pier (listening to the dock workers, looking at the muddy, filthy water, watching the gulls, watching a longshoreman slip a huge payoff to a customs inspector, having to go through every item I’d brought back with me)—okay, this is what you came back for—if only for five minutes: you made the right decision, you had to return, you’ll write the new novel.

There were, predictably, too many impressions at first. Things were big, dirty, noisy, overwhelming. Cars were enormous. People’s faces were gray, and sad. The bright-colored clothes, draped on tired bodies, unsmiling faces (sometimes the complexions seemed almost universally jaundiced), made Americans look like dolls with glaring doll’s clothing. Especially so with old people-women with painted hair and lips; men in absurdly bright colors.

Life seemed hard, people seemed unhappy, food was dreadful—I spent much of my first week reading the lists of chemicals on all the packaged food I ate—everybody seemed to work hard, even when they were not working, all of life—work, friendships, family—seemed fragmented, compartmentalized, the opposite of what it had been in Spéracèdes. In my memory, the German and Swiss people we’d met on our trip—my sense of their lives—made them now seem like relaxed Mediterraneans. Conversations tired me more than I believed possible—everything one said, even in passing, among friends, seemed to have some object. Conversation was not merely conversation; it seemed to need, always, to have some issue, some profit, some gain. Everything—even in the newest, most modern parts of the city and Long Island seemed to be temporary, in a state of disrepair. And yet, as I sensed such things during my first few days back, despite the fact that everything seemed to be in some stage of deterioration, the country seemed unbelievably strong. For so much waste to exist in the midst of so much affluence (my only theory during my first week), the basic productive power of the economy (and the empire) had to be enormous.

The school I was to teach at was a disappointment. The fault, again, as at GM, probably lay in me, in my expectations. Had I actually believed that a radically experimental college could be sponsored by the state of New York? Had I really hoped that—amidst the expressways and shopping centers and suburban towns of Long Island—one could have an island of relevance, a genuine community? With only eighty-three students, I discovered, the college was already a full-scale bureaucracy. There were, by count, more full-time administrators (fourteen) than faculty (eleven), and the total support staff-secretaries seemed to be everywhere—numbered over sixty. I received three or four memos a day—reports, studies, notices for committee meetings, evaluations of reports; in the president’s office there were shelves lined with over seventy different handouts, mostly reprints of his own speeches about the new experimental college of the State University of New York.

The total number of full-time faculty and administrators (I couldn’t keep track of the part-time teachers, consultants, and staff) was twenty-five, and there seemed to be almost that many political factions. I was staggered—depressed—most by the sheer amount of mistrust and double-dealing that one year had bred—business on campus seemed to be conducted as much by rumor, gossip, and private denunciation as by anything else. Faculty members despised one another, and said so. Several of the faculty who supported the president against the students, at the same time drafted a letter to Albany, asking for the president’s resignation, a letter they were ready to use should the president have lost a major battle with the students.

The housing which had been promised to us had disappeared (as we were about to arrive, the school discovered that it had promised and given out more campus housing—less than ten spots—than it had), but at the last minute temporary quarters were found for us. Two weeks before we’d sailed I’d had what was probably my best indication of what was to come when I’d received a telegram asking if I could report the following September, instead of in April—this after I’d sent letters, over the course of a year, asking, in each one, exactly when I would be needed on campus and what my duties would be when I got there. When I arrived, administrators began asking me what I would like to do. A seminar they had hoped I would, upon my arrival, “save,” had dissolved sometime during the ten days it took for me to cross the ocean—why then, they suggested, didn’t I “take my time” and use the months of April and May “to get to know people”? For this, I gasped, I would be paid over $1000 a month. As for the promise of partnership for students—though the mandate of the school, made official in the State University’s 1966 Master Plan, stated that the college “would admit students to full partnership in the academic world,” this was taken by the administration to mean that students would be “consulted” on all major decisions; administrators would, still, make the final decisions themselves. They did. Thus, though a joint student-faculty committee to select new faculty had, in the absence of departments, submitted a list of ten new faculty recommendations to the president—the president had vetoed two of the ten choices, and had made an offer to another faculty prospect who had been rejected by the faculty selection committee. Not a bad percentage, of course, but—given the fact that nobody could recall the last time a president of a major college or university had vetoed even a single faculty recommendation, and given the particular mandate of the college at Old Westbury—this became one fact among many that the students would decide they couldn’t live with. And so—seven weeks after I arrived—confrontation, occupation of buildings, a sit-in, student demands—and (as someone pointed out to me I’d predicted in what I’d written on my thirtieth birthday) I found myself on the side of the students, in the buildings, drafting—on the first day—a statement of no confidence in the president and of support for the students which I got the majority of the faculty to sign.

But such things—political, personal, predictable—were not what impressed me most about the school. It was—despite its miniature size—a college like other colleges; it was neither “relevant” nor “experimental” (by the following fall the college, which had been given a virtual carte blanche for innovation and experimentation, had settled down to a vague program, one which virtually excluded “field work” for all but those students specializing in Urban Studies, and one which included three programs: a Disciplines College (courses in modern literature and philosophy), a standard model Urban Studies College, and—for everybody else—a General Program that had already been tried and tested for four years at San José State College.) The college was, however, still different in one crucial way—in its claim to be different. This was a college which had been asked by the Chancellor of the State University of New York “to review all the conventional ingredients…and break whatever barriers may be in the way.” It was a college which tried endlessly to explain away the phrase “full partnership”—but which would not give it up.

By the fall of 1969 the start of its second pilot year, the president—a former Associate Director of the Peace Corps, an adviser to President Kennedy on civil rights, a lawyer with a special interest in civil liberties—had resigned to become president of Bryn Mawr. His own understanding of educational innovation, experiment, and civil liberties was evidenced for me several weeks after I arrived, when the student literary magazine was seized from the mailing room and not permitted to go out to students, because, as the president explained in a letter to the editor, it would probably be judged to be “obscene.” While “as a lawyer,” he said, he might defend the magazine’s “right to publish” what it chose, he was still an “officer of the University”; his reason for seizing the magazine then, was because it was his judgment that its contents—specifically, a cartoon by R. Crumb, reprinted from Head-Comix—might “offend the moral views of the majority of the people of New York State who support this college.” (When he first saw the magazine, the president had sent a messenger to the office of admissions to find out if R. Crumb was going to be an Old Westbury student the following fall.)

All of this, then, was not surprising, and, after a month or two I seemed to get used to it. What continued to amaze me, what still amazes me after a half year back was something else: the funds that kept being poured into the college for buildings, supplies, consultants, salaries, secretaries, programs, printing, cars. Where, I kept asking, was all that money coming from?

I felt, I said during the first few weeks, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—i.e., that I was, quite literally, plugged into the nation’s power supply: I received housing, an office, a telephone; my postage was paid for, my writing supplies were provided (there was a carton of supplies on my desk when I arrived—appointment calendar, marble stand with pen, paper, pads, stapler, stapler remover, tape, boxes of throw-a-way manifold carbon paper sets—in which a sheet of carbon paper was used only one time (“Your time is worth more to your employer typing than salvaging carbon paper.”)—this after years of making four and five carbon copies of novels and stories on my portable typewriter, trying to figure out whether to use each carbon nine, ten, or eleven times); and—most amazing of all—there were new state cars with official state seals on their sides, available for my use. (For its eighty-three students and two dozen faculty and administrators, there were five state cars; when the school grew to 222 students—and to a staff of over 100—in the fall of 1969, five additional cars were delivered.) How, I kept wondering, could this be? How could the system support so many planners, so much nonproductive labor and material?

Where, I kept asking, was all the money coming from? The school’s operating budget was slightly over one million dollars for the first year, slightly under two million for the second year (the cars came out of a separate budget in Albany, and not out of the school’s budget). In a speech given shortly before his resignation, the college president revealed that the “promise of ‘full partnership’” was “taken from an early memorandum on the college by [the Vice Chancellor], which was written in the aftermath of the explosion at Berkeley, at a time when the University was anxious to get ahead of the student revolution.” The advance construction budget for building a school whose origin, whose reason for existence, lay in such notions—for building a school that would have a maximum of five thousand students when completed, was—I still can’t believe it (and the figure will doubtless be higher by the time construction is finished)—one hundred million dollars.

As at GM, I began generalizing (if such waste and wealth were running wild at one college…), and devising antic, silent schemes. When the school had its year-end review session I would have only one question: why was a state car available for a professor but not for a welfare recipient?

The school, I said (to myself at first—later to others) was an obscenity and should be closed. We had to take away from the state its ability—its right—to claim that it had an experimental college. Take the money, give it to the Black Panthers, and let them fund us as a free university. Take the money—and just give it away. Why, I asked, was the editor of Time-Life Books, and not one of the school electricians or gardeners, the head of the College Council? And why were students walking across gardens and lawns which they didn’t tend? How could the school consider itself real—set off on the six-hundred-acre estate and arboretum of William Robertson Coe (owner of several other estates, including Buffalo Bill’s 200,000-acre ranch in Cody, Wyoming)—when it had no village store? no bistro?

Betsey and I tried, in our own lives, to maintain as much of what had been good in Spéracèdes as possible—and six months later, we still try: we have no television, no telephone, we buy no newspapers. Though we’ve given up on getting fresh vegetables (those that are called fresh seem to spoil overnight if left out of the refrigerator), or eggs that have taste (the mass-produced eggs in France, Jacques had said, were made by “concentration-camp chickens”)—we still eat long leisurely lunches, which we prepare together, we still take walks after lunch. But life in Spéracèdes, as I’d written over a year before, had “unfitted me for a return to American civilization”—especially to life on Long Island, where everything seems to move on superhighways, where all essential relations (shopping, getting the mail, working) seem impersonal, where everything is arranged and communicated by telephone. And most of all, where the possibility of friendship—built and sustained on a daily basis in a world where the essential parts of day-to-day life are actually and physically shared—is almost nonexistent.

In fact, the only time during my first six months back in America when I felt that I’d been lifted from the severe depression which had immediately become my life was during the student sit-in at the end of the school year. After a few days of living in buildings with students and faculty, I realized that I felt good—and I knew why, made as many analogies as I could. For the week that we occupied buildings—even though the world we lived in was artificial, temporary—we were returned to essential functions: getting food, preparing meals, eating, sleeping, talking. For the first—the only—time, when I would meet somebody, instead of talking about a subject, we would talk about one another—I’d just seen X walking out of the dormitory; Betsey was making a batch of cookies to bring for lunch; Y was looking tired; How did you sleep last night? What was the weather going to be like? So-and-so seemed to be in good form today.

That we shared political enemies, political theories, and political objectives—all right; more important that—if briefly, artificially—I was in a situation among people I was coming to know and like and admire, I was in a situation where, when nobody was talking, I didn’t mind the silence.

“At least,” I would say to people during my first few months back, “it’s good to know that the war in Vietnam is over.” My cynicism trying vainly to mask my frustration, to excuse, in some arch way, the fact that—back in America—I felt (feel) no desire to become involved again in protest against the war, in politics. Not reading papers or watching TV or listening to the news on the radio, it was impossible, walking the streets of the nation, to know there was a war going on in which at least a half million American soldiers were fighting. Despite my perverse refusal to listen to news or to discuss politics, attitudes and opinions trickled in: the entire country, it now seemed, agreed that the war in Vietnam should be ended—how then, could it be that the actual numbers of men in Vietnam, the actual amount of bombing and destruction, the weekly numbers of dead and wounded were greater than they had been two years before, when only a minority of Americans were against the war?

The peace movement, people would tell me, had accomplished a lot in changing the attitudes of Americans toward the war. What was I to do with such a statement? If most Americans were against the war—if the American people had voted in two presidential elections for disengagement from the war—and if the war was larger than it had ever been, the murder and death and destruction greater than they’d ever been, what conclusions did this lead to—about the relation of democratic processes to processes of government, about all the wealth and waste which, home again, assaulted my imagination?

(An item noted just before I left Spéracèdes: one airline company giving a subcontract to another company to develop—not produce—new in-flight ideas for mixes of movies and music and tapes; cost—over ten million dollars—though I didn’t know what to do with such a fact, like the existence of new state cars for faculty members, it seemed to tell me everything I needed to know. Cf., also, my experience working with open housing committees in New York, where I would go in to see about renting an apartment after a nonwhite person had gone in. If, in 1964 and 1965 (before that phenomenon misnamed backlash), in the most liberal city in the most liberal state in America, a city and state which had the strongest antidiscrimination laws in the nation, doctors and lawyers and businessmen who could afford $600-a-month apartments still needed such a committee, were still being refused housing because of race—then this too was all I needed to know in order to imagine what things were like elsewhere, for people without such education, money, position.)

Nothing mattered except what happened: the only yardstick for measuring political protest, I said before we left Spéracèdes, was to ask if it affected the Stock Market or the Gross National Product. The rest, as Jacques would put it, “c’est de la littérature.” But I drew no conclusions from my observations, impressions: I felt, I suppose, what I’d felt before—working in a single community, protesting a particular issue, closing down a particular school, teaching a particular human being—this was work which had nothing to do with those large things which trapped, wounded, and murdered people, and which preserved the continuity of such processes—but, as always, one did the best one could where one could.

Politics, however, in any overt form (except for the minor business at the college), did not now concern me. Having had, for a while, a place to live which we loved, where we lived—and how—seemed suddenly central, all important. Outwardly, back in America, things could not have been better. My life, in September of 1969, had the elements which might have been the matter for the happy ending—the epilogue—of a nineteenth-century novel: Betsey was pregnant again, and, in her seventh month, doing beautifully; I was succeeding beyond any previous hopes with my writing, and (something I’d never let myself hope would be possible) earning enough from it for us to live on; Betsey was painting and we were still spending most days—all day—together; my brother and mother and father were all well and I was relaxed in their company, I enjoyed being with them (for the first time, my father and I could sit in a room together, not speaking, and I could—as I’d done with friends in Spéracèdes—simply enjoy his presence).

Still, this wasn’t enough—still we found (find) ourselves longing for Spéracèdes, find ourselves unable to accept—as real or necessary—life on Long Island, in America. A luxury, of course—symptomatic of the wealth and waste of the land—to even be able to debate the relative merits of Spéracèdes and the United States, to have the choice of one or the other, to even be able to write a narrative such as this, one in which I can reflect on such decisions, on ten years of my life. (Cf., students at Old Westbury considering what kind of college they would like to have. Consider—I had not, until I was back here—what the reaction of a North Vietnamese might be to an ad in The New York Review of Books for the Vietnam Curriculum, to the fact that, while we wage war against them, we are also able—we are free, in the most literal sense—to debate the rightness and wrongness of what we are doing, to absorb the war into our schools for study and debate. Or, to put it another way, as one young Englishman put it to me, during my second week in Europe: “Funny, ain’t it—that all you Yanks get to come here for your vacations, but I never get to spend my summers in your country—”)

The problem, then, luxurious as it is: having lived in Spéracèdes and having tasted, over the course of sixteen months, the kind of daily life there that I did, I find that I cannot (do not want to) live here. And it will not, I suspect—sense—be substantially different anywhere in America—in California or the Northwest or on a farm in upstate New York or a commune in New Mexico; one goes (I would go) to these places to escape America, and my life would be defined by this escape, by opposition. I would still be living in America, and by now, this obviously has a particular meaning for me. As with the college at Old Westbury, I would say, so with other things: since Old Westbury is in America—part of America—why should (how could) it be better than, different from, America?

Yet—the part I have no reasons for, cannot analyze—I know I can’t live any place but in America. A question—it seems at first—of roots, of history, of my subject (for fiction). But more than this: at the least, I know that, for me, living even semipermanently anywhere outside of America—even in Spéracèdes—seems, in prospect, unreal. Something like the situation—the predicament—of a black man in America; or, minimally, in my own life, analogous to the form that predicament took in the life of one black man. “The most crucial time in my own development,” James Baldwin writes in his “Autobiographical Notes” for Notes of a Native Son, “came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use—I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe.”

The problem—for Baldwin, too—has something luxurious about it; the terms of reference, the feelings are distinctly a writer’s. They do not, at least at first, seem to deal with the everyday problems of masses of people who live in America’s cities, trapped (at least at first) by things physical: color, ignorance, poverty.

Back in America, everything good—my writing, my life with my wife, the times spent with friends—seems a refuge from everything bad, from everything else. So, while living and working here, Betsey and I talk endlessly to one another about our situation, about what we’ll do next—though lately it seems, we do this less. Having found, temporarily, a place that was home for us, a place in which we had a better life, day by day, than we thought possible, we now find that we do not want to settle for less; and we know that we are, at the moment, lucky enough not to have to settle for less. Give things time, we say—a year, a year and a half—and if life here is still intolerable, if our friends are still there, we’ll return to Spéracèdes. Long-range plans and decisions stay unresolved, our life remains transient (we systematically shed possessions)—and that’s all right, too. The readiness, as always, is all.

I began this book, I thought, in order to trace my own political activities—their origins, and where they might lead; yet I end without having really done either—I end without any conclusions, political or otherwise, with—at the most—merely the attempt (doubtless an attempt which is politically counterrevolutionary) to discover, in terms more personal than political, who I am and where I’ve been. I.e., in the fall of 1969 it seems enough to be finishing the narrative of some of the things which, in my own life, I thought had their beginnings at General Motors in the summer of 1960—not in order to persuade or convince or prove, but simply because it is what I have been writing.