The White Album (27 page)

1970

I
am talking
here about being a child of my time
.
When I think about the Sixties now I think about an afternoon not of the Sixties at all, an afternoon early in my sophomore year at Berkeley, a bright autumn Saturday in 1953
.
1 was lying on a leather couch in a fraternity house (there had been a lunch for the alumni, my date had gone on to the game, I do not now recall why I had stayed behind), lying there alone reading a book by Lionel Trilling and listening to a middle-aged man pick out on a piano in need of tuning the melodic line to “Blue Room
.
”
All that afternoon he sat at the piano and all that afternoon he played “Blue Room” and he never got it right
.
I can hear and see it still, the wrong note in “We will thrive on / Keep alive on,” the sunlight falling through the big windows, the man picking up his drink and beginning again and telling me, without ever saying a word, something I had not known before about bad marriages and wasted time and looking backward
.
That such an afternoon would now seem implausible in every detail— the idea of having had a “date” for a football lunch now seems to me so exotic as to be almost czarist—suggests the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies
.

The distance we have come from the world in which I went to college was on my mind quite a bit during those seasons when not only Berkeley but dozens of other campuses were periodically shut down, incipient battlegrounds, their borders sealed
.
To think of Berkeley as it was in the Fifties was not to think of barricades and reconstituted classes
.
“Reconstitution” would have sounded to us then like Newspeak, and barricades are never personal
.
We were all very personal then, sometimes relen
tl
essly so, and, at that point where we either act or do not act, most of us are still
.
I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood
.
If man was bound to err, then any social
organization was bound to be in
error
.
It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise
.

At Berkeley in the Fifties no one was surprised by anything at all, a
donn
é
e
which tended to render discourse less than spirited, and debate nonexistent
.
The world was by definition imperfect, and so of course was the university
.
There was some talk even then about IBM cards, but on balance the notion that free education for tens of thousands of people might involve automation did not seem unreasonable
.
We took it for granted that the Board of Regents would sometimes act wrongly We simply avoided those students rumored to be FBI informers
.
We were that generation called “silent,” but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period
’s
official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression
.
We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate
.

To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation
.
I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults
.
That most of us have found adulthood just as morally ambiguous as we expected it to be falls perhaps into the category of prophecies self-fulfilled: I am simply not sure
.
I am telling you only how it was
.
The mood of Berkeley in those years was one of mild but chronic “depression,” against which I remember certain small things that seemed to me somehow explications, dazzling in their clarity, of the world I was about to enter: I remember a woman picking daffodils in the rain one day when I was walking in the hills
.
I remember a teacher who drank too much one night and revealed his fright and bitterness
.
I remember my real joy at discovering for the first time how language worked, at discovering, for example, that the central line
of Heart of Darkness
was a postscript
.
All such images were personal, and the personal was all that most of us expected to find
.
We would make a separate peace
.
We would do graduate work I in Middle English, we would go abroad
.
We would make some
money and live on a ranch
.
We would survive outside history, in a kind of
id
é
e fixe
referred to always, during the years I spent at Berkeley, as “some little town with a decent beach
.
”

As it worked out I did not find or even look for the little town with the decent beach
.
I sat
in the large bare apartment in
which I lived my junior and senior years (I had lived awhile in a sorority, the Tri Delt house, and had left it, typically, not over any “issue” but because I, the implacable “I,” did not like living with sixty people) and I read Camus and Henry James and I watched a flowering plum come in and out of blossom and at night, most nights, I walked outside and looked up to where the cyclotron and the bevatron glowed on the dark hillside, unspeakable mysteries which engaged me, in the style of my time, only personally
.
Later I got out of Berkeley and went to New York and later I got out of New York and came to Los Angeles
.
What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace
.
Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time
.
A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after
.
Another attempted suicide in Mexico and then, in a recovery which seemed in many ways a more advanced derangement, came home and joined the Bank of Americas three-year executive-training program
.
Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time
.
If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending
.

1970

1

in
A
way
it seems the most idiosyncratic of beach communities, twenty-seven miles of coastline with no hotel, no passable restaurant, nothing to attract the traveler’s dollar
.
It is not a resort
.
No one “vacations” or “holidays,” as those words are conventionally understood, at Malibu
.
Its principal residential street, the Pacific Coast Highway, is quite literally a highway, California i, which runs from the Mexican border to the Oregon line and brings Greyhound buses and refrigerated produce trucks and six-teen-wheel gasoline tankers hurtling past the front windows of houses frequently bought and sold for over a million dollars
.
The water off Malibu is neither as clear nor as tropically colored as the water off La Jolla
.
The beaches at Malibu are neither as white nor as wide as the beach at Carmel
.
The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R
.
V
.
parks
.
For these and other reasons Malibu tends to astonish and disappoint those who have never before seen it, and yet its very name remains, in the imagination of people all over the world, a kind of shorthand for the easy life
.
I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it
.

2

Dick Haddock, a family man, a man twenty-six years in the same line of work, a man who has on the telephone and in his office the crisp and easy manner of technological middle management, is in many respects the prototypical Southern California solid citizen
.
He lives in a San Fernando Valley subdivision near a freshwater marina and a good shopping plaza
.
His son is a high-school swimmer
.
His daughter is “into tennis
.
”
He drives thirty miles to and from work, puts in a forty-hour week, regularly takes courses to maintain his professional skills, keeps in shape and looks it
.
When he discusses his career he talks, in a kind of
politely impersonal second person, about how “you would want like any other individual to advance yourself” about “improving your rating” and “being more of an asset to your department,” about “really knowing your business
.
”
Dick Haddock’s business for all these twenty-six years has been that of a professional lifeguard for the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches, and his office is a $190,000 lookout on Zuma Beach in northern Malibu
.

It was Thanksgiving morning, 1975
.
A Santa Ana wind was just dying after blowing in off the Mojave for three weeks and setting 69,000 acres of Los Angeles County on fire
.
Squadrons of planes had been dropping chemicals on the fires to no effect
.
Querulous interviews with burned-out householders had become a fixed element of the six o’clock news
.
Smoke from the fires had that week stretched a hundred miles out over the Pacific and darkened the days and lit the nights and by Thanksgiving morning there was the sense all over Southern California of living in some grave solar dislocation
.
It was one of those weeks when Los Angeles seemed most perilously and breathtakingly itself, a cartoon of natural disaster, and it was a peculiar week in which to spend the day with Dick Haddock and the rest of the Zuma headquarters crew
.

Actually I had wanted to meet the lifeguards ever since I moved to Malibu
.
I would drive past Zuma some cold winter mornings and see a few of them making their mandatory daily half-mile swims in open ocean
.
I would drive past Zuma some late foggy nights and see others moving around behind the lookout’s lighted windows, the only other souls awake in all of northern Malibu
.
It seemed to me a curious, almost beatified career choice, electing to save those in peril upon the sea forty hours a week, and as the soot drifted down around the Zuma lookout on that Thanksgiving morning the laconic routines and paramilitary rankings of these civil servants in red j trunks took on a devotionary and dreamlike inevitability
.
There was the “captain,” John McFarlane, a man who had already taken his daily half-mile run and his daily half-mile swim and was putting on his glasses to catch up on paperwork
.
Had the
water been below 56 degrees he would have been allowed to swim in a wet suit, but the water was not below 56 degrees and so he had swum as usual in his red trunks
.
The water was 58 degrees
.
John McFarlane is 48
.
There was the “lieutenant,” Dick Haddock, telling me about how each of the Department’s 125 permanent lifeguards (there are also 600 part-time or “recurrent” lifeguards) learns crowd control at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Academy, learns emergency driving techniques at the California Highway Patrol Academy, learns medical procedures at the U
.
S
.
C
.
Medical Center, and, besides running the daily half-mile and swimming the daily half-mile, does a monthly 500-meter paddle and a monthly pier jump
.
A “pier jump” is just what it sounds like, and its purpose is to gain practice around pilings in heavy surf
.

There was as well the man out on patrol
.