Timebends (18 page)

Oddly, Jean and her mother-in-law, near collapse and needing
support, each took on a kind of stunned naysaying tic at the graveside, a ceaseless back-and-forth motion of denial. And Helen, on the Ohio porch, had the same attitude of denial, if without the tic. It would take months for Jean to lose it, and longer for the old lady, who would continue to stand at the porch railing at sundown, her head motioning no-no-no as she looked toward the cemetery, some blocks away.

From Moe's sudden and incredible death, and from the suicide of Helen's husband, emerged
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
which wrestled with the unanswerable—the question of the justice of fate, how it was that one man failed and another, no more or less capable, achieved some glory in life. Perhaps I was refracting my own feelings of a mysterious power gathering within me, contrasting it with its absence in others. But already in 1939, before the war began and fresh out of college, I had written a large tragedy about Montezuma's destruction at the hands of Cortez, with a related inner theme. As the successful David Beeves, the hero of
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
was destroyed by an illusion of his powerlessness, Montezuma convinced himself that the strange white creatures who had come out of the ocean were fated to be his masters and at the same time to apotheosize him to godhood now that he had, as he believed, led his Aztecs to the conquest of all the known world and had nothing left to do with his life. Very differently put, the same question is raised in both plays—the dreamlike irreality of success and power. Both plays, it should be said, were at the same time referring to the paralysis of will in the democracies as Hitler moved week by week to the domination of all Europe.

The Man Who Had All the Luck,
through its endless versions, was to move me inch by inch toward my first open awareness of father-son and brother-brother conflict. David Beeves was initially an orphan who had made his way up the ladder rather miraculously in his small town. His friend Amos was a young local baseball pitcher whose father, Pat, had fanatically trained him practically from childhood; even in the long winters he had his boy pitching against a target in their basement. In short, Amos's life was to be totally fenced off from insane chance. But after a game to which, at long last, Pat has inveigled a Detroit Tigers scout, Amos is turned down for the big leagues. The scout believes he is psychologically paralyzed whenever men are on base behind him—down in the basement he had nothing to worry about but the target in front of his eyes. The very thing that was supposed to guard him against
failure is what brings him down. The effect on David is powerful, dangerously isolating him as a shining success among his peers in the town.

One day, quite suddenly, I saw that Amos and David were brothers and Pat their father. There was a different anguish in the story now, an indescribable new certainty that I could speak from deep within myself, had seen something no one else had ever seen.

I had written four or five full-length plays by 1940, had won two successive Avery Hopwood Awards at Michigan, and had attracted the interest of a few producers and some actors in New York. My first play,
No Villain,
using members of my family as models, was the story of a strike in a garment factory that set a son against his proprietor father. Another was about a prison psychiatrist's doomed struggle to keep the sane from moving over into madness. In that story, there had also been a conflict between brothers, but I had not thought of it as such.

As I said, I had spent many weekends visiting Jackson State Penitentiary, where my former classmate Sid Moscowitz, who had graduated a year before me, had gotten himself appointed on the basis of one elementary psych course as the lone psychologist of the country's largest prison, with the responsibility of keeping some eight thousand inmates from going crazy. In those Depression years it did not take much insight to notice that most crimes were preeminently economic, people stealing in order to eat. I met several prisoners who had murdered sheriffs for attempting to confiscate their livestock for a foreclosing bank, and dozens of small businessmen with seven-year sentences for kiting not very large checks.

But it was the incomprehensible cases—those with only the remotest connection to economic causation—that kept me coming back to Jackson. These were men like one I'll call Droge, an Indianapolis Speedway champion driver who had no real need to turn criminal and yet for a dozen years had secretly been running a ring of car thieves. I met Droge in the machine shop at Jackson, where he was teaching auto repair to the inmates. In his mid-forties, he was a handsome, trim, and intelligent thief, wittily morose, usually with his embittered self as his irony's target. In talking to him, as to other inmates, I had the advantage of access to his records and could check on his truthfulness. His story was true.

An especially valuable foreign or American car would be spotted by Droge's gang and driven a short distance to a waiting truck with a lowered ramp. Then, as the truck sped along the highway to some
other city, mechanics inside would change engine numbers, provide new plates, spray the car a different color, and unload it at a cooperating dealer's premises by evening. They could work a car a day and often a second one through the night for delivery in the morning. Droge had several groups operating across the Midwest; one gang member was an unemployed printer in Lorraine, Kansas, who could turn out perfect registration certificates with false numbers. Over a decade Droge had become a rich thief even as his car racing fame grew.

His downfall came as a result of absolute chance. After lifting a Rolls-Royce in Flint, Michigan, he garaged it behind a rooming house where he had arranged beforehand to stay the night, figuring to depart before dawn when the alarm for the missing car had begun to cool and he could quickly run it up onto his waiting van. Unfortunately, he had managed to pick probably the only rooming house in Flint owned by a cop, who on returning home saw the beautiful Rolls in his garage. Worse yet, Droge had had an instinctive flash and had quietly come downstairs; he was in the car starting to back it out of the driveway when he saw the cop with drawn revolver in his mirror and gunned the engine in the hope of running him down. He got a fifteen-year sentence, cars being sacred in Michigan, but the worst of it was that he knew who to blame for his concrete environment.

One day I found him in the vast open yard of the prison, an area several blocks square, where men strolled about, tossed baseballs, or just sat facing the spring sun. Droge was looking up at the top of the surrounding wall, a straight concrete slab about five stories high, over the top of which four prisoners had made their incredible escape a week earlier. Now workmen were moving about against the sky up there, installing a system of electric eyes so that anyone crossing the beam of light would set off an alarm. The recent escapees had worked in the prison's electrical department and had managed over a period of weeks to collect twelve-foot lengths of one-inch electrical conduit pipe, threaded at both ends, which they buried in the yard length by length each day, plus a long rope that they had cut off the curtain of the prison theatre auditorium. Early one morning they had uncovered the pipes, screwed them together after bending one end, and raised the resulting pole, hooking it onto the top of the wall. Then they had shinnied up and let themselves down on the other side with the rope. Within a week they were all shot dead in St. Louis.

Watching the workmen on top of the wall, his eyes narrowed in thought, Droge shook his head and sighed.

“What's the matter?” I asked.

“Waste of time. All a guy'd need would be a three-cell flashlight—if he was stupid enough to try getting out of here, I mean.”

“A flashlight?”

“Sure. Shine it into the receiving cell, walk past it, then shut off your light. You never interrupt the beam and you're home free, till they catch you and blow out your brains.”

“God!” I exclaimed. “Maybe you ought to tell them.”

“What's the difference? It gives them a little work. Anyway, they'll find out sooner or later.”

Droge was definitely not mad, but men in different stages of delusionary dreams were wandering everywhere in the prison, a place I came to regard as more an asylum for the insane than a place to punish criminals. In fact, the sanest of all were the con men, the forgers, safecrackers, and high-level car thieves like Droge who had simply matched skills and wits against the system and had momentarily lost in a game that was purely technical, with no more hard feelings than a pole vaulter has against the force of gravity.

The Great Disobedience,
the play I eventually wrote about the prison, was the first I had ever researched; I wanted to get out of myself and use the world as my subject. And here was the system's malign pressure on human brains waiting to be exposed. After winning the two Hopwood Awards, I did not win a prize in my senior year, this play having been thought “turgid” by the judges, as indeed my feelings about Jackson were. It was reputed to be the most progressive prison in the nation, but I could never sleep easily after returning to Ann Arbor until I had managed to put out of mind that city of caged men, the musky zoo smell of those hot, humid cellblocks with tier on tier of humans, over eight thousand of them, and the echoing of their hollow bass rumbling that never ceased, the wild, insane laughter and threatening uproars that periodically arose. No guard dared walk within arm's length of the cells for fear of being strangled by hands darting out between the bars. The worst of it was that had I been given charge of that prison I knew I would have been helpless to change it, short of opening the gates and letting everyone go. Yet one couldn't do that either. I thought that at least a quarter of them were totally mad.

My play's failure did nothing to weaken my conviction that art ought to be of use in changing society. This was, of course, a common idea in the thirties, in part because it was so simple to understand. Stalin had called art a “weapon” of revolution and writers
“engineers of the soul,” and indeed something like that concept goes far back in human history. The medieval and Renaissance works that glorified Christianity through the formulas of biblical imagery, as well as Shakespeare's repeated affirmations of monarchy's divine rights, were different aspects of this same demand upon art to confirm the sublime validity of a regime. And closer to our own time, the two greatest writers I knew of, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, were neither of them “free” in the British or American sense of detachment from all social and religious responsibilities; for both, in their different ways, the confirmation of Christ's message, not entertainment or escape, was the ultimate end of art. Chekhov's adored plays were usually approached then as specimens of a generically gloomy Russian personality, but just as the Greek tragedies—which I was coming to love in the way a man at the bottom of a pit loves a ladder—sought to transform the vendetta and the blood feud into the institutions of law and justice, so Chekhov was voicing a social need to break out of the Russian tradition of indolence into a brisk new age of purposeful work and scientific analysis of problems. In short, these were not mere authorial “angles” to sell arbitrarily fashionable causes but natural eruptions of mankind's will to evolve.

In the thirties Ann Arbor was regarded as a radical enclave in the heart of the Middle West, registering the largest number of student signers of the so-called Oxford Pledge, a promise never to bear arms in war, which had originated at the British university. Of course it was really the bygone world war we were swearing not to participate in: by the time the next one came along, the same committed pacifists, with few exceptions, would present themselves for battle against Germany and Japan.

Change is of the essence, but some things change more ironically than others. The head of the campus peace movement was a senior named G. Mennen Williams, an heir to the shaving cream fortune, nicknamed “Soapy” then and thereafter. His wry, acerbic letters to the editor put antimovement conservatives in their place at least once a week. Soapy could often be found, in 1935 and 1936, haranguing the doubtful from the library steps.

At the worst of the McCarthy time, in 1953, less than twenty years later, the editor of
Holiday
magazine, Ted Patrick, asked me to go back to Ann Arbor to report the changes since the thirties. In many ways the campus was unrecognizable. A member of the
Student Council told me that as a resident of a cooperative rooming house she was running into more and more people who thought she must be a Communist for not living in a privately owned house or an official university dormitory; Erich Walter, my old English professor who had become dean, told me that the FBI was asking teachers and students to inform on each other and suggested that I confirm this by talking to the current “orientation professor”; members of the Socialist Club, an anti-Communist group, said that people no longer came to the club's weekly meetings by car because a state policeman was outside taking down license numbers. But the climax of my little investigation came during a visit to my beloved offices of the
Daily.

In the thirties the building was home to every disputatious radical splinter group, along with the liberals and conservatives shouting back at them, since all political groups inevitably wanted to dominate
Daily
editorial policy on the issues of the day. Competition for reporters' jobs was fierce. But now the building seemed deserted at two in the afternoon, and I soon learned that the paper, incredibly, was forced to advertise for applicants to the staff. To refresh my memory of the old days, I asked for some
Dailies
of the thirties from the morgue, sat down at the large round oak table at the end of the editorial room on the second floor, and began riffling through the musty pages. Soon a burly middle-aged man appeared and seated himself at the table to peruse some recent issues of the paper and take notes. A student reporter materialized at my elbow, whispering to me to come with him if I wanted to know what was happening in the place.