Timebends (19 page)

In a distant corner of the deserted editorial room, the student introduced himself with evident pride as the author of a recent four-part series, “Communism on Campus,” which had exposed a couple of student radicals who, he said—not without some pity—might face expulsion soon. The result of his exposé, he was happy to inform me, was a job offer from a Los Angeles paper. He was a tiny, dwarfed young man with stretched, parchmentlike skin, wearing a fedora tipped to one side like a character in
The Front Page.
Now he got down to business, indicated the middle-aged man, who was still turning pages at the round table, and whispered, “He's state police. He comes in once a week and goes through the letters columns and the news and picks up the names of anybody who says stuff that sounds leftist.”

“And what happens then?”

“Well, it all goes into the master file in the governor's office. The
governor in Michigan is the direct commander of the state police, you know.”

The governor now, of course, was G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams. I could not help smiling as I returned to the table and sat at my old papers with the thick-necked cop across the table scanning the columns for dangerous names. I began looking through the papers with the vague hope of finding one of Soapy's letters to the editor. Fate had me by the elbow: the very editorial page open before me had a letter apparently in response to a complaint the previous day by someone signing himself “Conservative” who had expressed “dismay” at learning that “only radicals attend these so-called Peace meetings.”

“Dear Conservative,” went the reply of the peace movement chairman, “if you Conservatives would bother coming to our meetings it goes without saying they would not only be attended by radicals.” Signed, G. Mennen Williams. I picked up the yellowed paper, walked around to the state police officer, laid it beside the fresh one he was reading, and pointed at the ancient letter. He glanced up at me questioningly, then read the nearly twenty-year-old type, looked up at me again, and said, “Who're you?”

I gave him my name, which meant nothing to him, and explained my
Holiday
assignment. “McCarthyism” meant nothing to him either, and he went back to dutifully scanning the papers for dangerous names.

In the McCarthy years, a kind of unacknowledged underground mentality had permeated all kinds of places. A week or two after my
Holiday
piece on Michigan came out, Ted Patrick asked me to write still another about anything I wished. Since I did little magazine writing, I thanked him but almost automatically declined. A few days later came another request, and then another, until I finally did manage to write a short memoir of life in Brooklyn in the thirties, which he duly published. Years later, after Patrick's death, I learned the reason for his strange persistence. The advertising department of the Pontiac division of General Motors had warned Patrick that Pontiac would cancel all its advertising in
Holiday
if they ever published another piece by Arthur Miller. As it turned out, my second piece did not dry up the Pontiac account, but the air in those days bristled with such threats, and I regretted being unable to congratulate Patrick for his defense, particularly courageous at the time, of editorial integrity. More often the threats had their intended effect, as was illustrated by one of the documents I used for my Michigan piece: a mimeographed inhouse
release from the president of the National Association of Manufacturers advising members to cease their attacks on the university faculty for its alleged radicalism—a time-honored NAM custom—because the radicals had by now been “cleaned out” with the help of organizations like theirs.

Nevertheless, with all the radical turmoil on the campus in the thirties, it was a myth that the student body, let alone the faculty, was predominantly leftist. Most students by far, and almost all the faculty, were mainly interested in their careers, just as they always are. I might editorialize in the
Daily
against the university's refusal to allow John Strachey to speak on his famous book
The Coming Struggle for Power,
but I had no illusions that I was in anything other than the tiny minority that was even aware of his book or point of view.

If Michigan was not in fact a leftist institution, it did earn its reputation for democratic attitudes, witness its willingness to accept me, if only after I had written a couple of imploring letters promising to mend my academic ways. In the twenties the faculty had been open to socialists, birth control advocates, and other oddballs who had found themselves unwanted in more traditional schools, and it was one of the few universities in the thirties where Marxism as such was openly discussed in classrooms, with the teacher usually opposed to its tenets but at least willing to debate them.

The symbolic Marxist for me at the time was a brilliant student named Joe Feldman; I still consider him one of the most intelligent people I have ever known. I first met Joe around midnight one freezing February evening when he came loping into the
Daily
editorial room in his sneakers, which, like his bushy brown head of hair, were covered with snow. He was wearing a good tweed jacket over a pajama top and had a fistful of paper in his hand. Tall and loose-jointed, he stepped onto a desk top to greet all the editors and reporters, who looked up from their typewriters and sat back to await his performance, Joe being a phenomenal speaker on almost any subject. Though he rarely attended a class, he never got less than perfect grades because he could devour texts at incredible speed, preparing in a day or two for any exam. “Compared to the witlessness of this university's educational system, Ed Wynn is Molière and Jack Benny is Falstaff …” He had a charming snigger and whole bushels of facts.

I no longer recall what brought him to us that night, but it was usually some editorial he objected to and insisted on being given
space to rebut. In reality, he was trying to humiliate the managing editor, with whom he was competing for the beautiful Leah Bloom, who usually trailed him, exhausted, into the building along with Mrs. McCall, his landlady, maternally carrying his overcoat and standing below him as he harangued the staff, pleading with him to put it on before he caught his death as Leah pressed his galoshes or a muffler on him. As often as not it was the
Daily's
attempts at objectivity that drove him wild, especially in regard to Spain. Sniggering down at the little managing editor, who sneered up at him between heavy sarcastic sighs directed at Leah, Joe shouted, “What is this about Nazi planes ‘allegedly' flying for Franco? Are you trying to become the
New York Times,
for Christ's sake? Do we not have photographs showing the wreckage of shot-down fighter planes with Nazi German identification on the engines?” But the editor thought that anybody could take a picture of anything, and how did he know the picture hadn't been snapped in Hamburg? “You mean they crash planes on purpose in Hamburg?
Erwachen Sie!
Rouse yourself from this protofascistic funk you're in, stop playing with yourself, and turn this into a newspaper. So what if you don't get tapped by the
Times?
Aren't you too young to be so corrupt?” And so forth, until the editor was unable to hold back any longer and they were fighting down in the icy street, with the landlady and Leah trying to keep Joe from getting a chill.

Leah ended up marrying neither of them, and I lost track of Joe after my graduation in 1938, until one day in 1940 I ran into him on a midtown New York street, shaved and neatly dressed and with his hair combed. By this time Spain had succumbed to Franco and two of our classmates had died there fighting for the Loyalists. I was about to go out to Ohio to get married, and Joe had decided to become a stage designer, having simply walked in on Cleon Throckmorton, one of the most respected designers of the time, and convinced him to take him on as his chief assistant even though Joe's interest in set design was only a few weeks old. During this brief time he had read everything on the subject available in English and was probably beginning to instruct Throckmorton and correct his mistakes.

I congratulated him on his swift rise, but he stared at the passing traffic on Fifth Avenue and said he was on the verge of quitting. I was surprised. “I'm joining the Air Corps.” The Air Corps! How could he join the Air Corps for an imperialist war? “I think we're going to get into it,” he said, all the merry gloss gone from his eyes. “I think we'll have to.” And would he be fighting the Soviets—still
Germany's allies at the time—in that case? He nearly ceased breathing, and a peculiar deathlike density packed his eyes. “I don't think they're going to stay with the Germans, but if they do—yes, we'll have to fight them too.” We shook hands without smiling, aware that he was, in a way, betting his life on a vision of reality.

He died over Burma. One early evening in the sixties I found myself on Ninety-sixth and Madison on my way to a friend's house for dinner, and suddenly noticing the Feldman Pharmacy sign over the corner store, I recalled that his father had been a pharmacist in the area. It was now thirty years since Joe had stepped onto the desk in the
Daily
office, and more than twenty since he had been shot down. His father would probably be retired or dead by now. At the counter a small white-haired woman looked at me through the banks of lipsticks and combs. I said I had been a friend of Joe's, and was she by any chance his mother? Her tired, bored face quickly flushed with energy, and she instantly reached down into a drawer and pulled out an envelope with an eight-by-ten photograph that I expected would show Joe's merry face, his satiric eyes, and the pain. But it showed a large gravestone, perhaps six feet high, in a clearing surrounded by jungle flora, engraved with some dozen names including Joe's. She reached over and pointed at it. “This is in Burma,” she said. We talked for a few minutes. He had been their only child. She thanked me for stopping in and was curious to know why I had done it. I said I wasn't sure but that I could never forget him. Her eyes began to fill with tears, and she turned away.

They were dying in Vietnam then. Not long before, I had returned to Ann Arbor to speak at the first teach-in: the whole university had closed down for three days to discuss the war and how to protest it. I had no prepared speech; with experts like Jean Lacouture among the participants, my presence represented purely symbolic support for the protest. Standing on the stage of Hill Auditorium, a vast place donated in the twenties by a lumber baron, I remembered the afternoon in 1935 when I had sat in the same hall listening to the Japanese evangelist Toyohiko Kagawa, a merchant of the sublime, as I saw it then, and had witnessed some fifty Chinese students standing up and walking out because he had referred to Manchuria, which the Japanese army was then occupying, as Manchukuo, its Japanese name. On the steps of that auditorium I had
one day been accosted by a Chinese student with a little pail of tickets he was trying to sell to raise money to bring over a famous Chinese who would, he said, tell what the Japanese were doing to his country. I had asked, “Why do you need a famous person? Why don't you tell the story yourself?” His hooded eyes barely widened with surprise at my suggestion. “Who, me? I just a little shit.”

Now, in the sixties, I thought I noticed something like a festive air among the students protesting the war, an atmosphere of delighted mutual discovery and a breaking down of personal defenses that I thought slightly unreal, I knew not why. And so when the applause for me died away—there was too much of it, I felt—I found myself saying, “I remember some other protests in this building, and I have to tell you that it's wonderful how these things bring people together, but you mustn't forget that the FBI is among you and someday you may have to account for being here.”

It was the wrong moment to be saying such a thing, here at the budding of a noble movement to end an unjust war, a moment when this generation had just begun to reach out and find its partners in protest. Silence greeted my remark, a confused silence. And so I went on and said that despite the presence of spies and the possibility that people might one day be called on to renounce and condemn the passions they were feeling today, it was the essential risk of living at all to feel what they were feeling now. And more: that even if this movement should end, not in some climactic thunderclap of victory but in pale distraction and remorse for wasted time, it should not be the occasion for disillusion, because we must go on groping from one illusion of virtue to another; the fact was that man could not act at all without moral impulse, however mistaken its identification with any particular movement might eventually turn out to be.

Standing there at fifty, so close to young and determined men like Carl Oglesby and Bob Moses, Jean Lacouture and Tom Hayden, I soon realized, however, that they had passed beyond the reach of such warnings, for this was not the generation of the thirties, not at all. These young people were talking up an organization, totally American and in a certain sense not even political, that would throw down its bodies in the path of tanks. This was not the symbolic ideological rhetoric of another time when Hitlerism, however threatening, was very far away and few people really believed the United States would enter a new European war. The students packing Hill Auditorium knew they were personally up for grabs and that they might be killed if America did not change
course. They were not saving somebody else, and that was the difference between them and their fathers in the thirties, when with all the poverty and dislocation of life it still took a leap of the imagination for a student to be radicalized. The ticket to radicalization in the sixties was the draft card in the wallet.

Like the American campaign for the Oxford Pledge against bearing arms, the phenomenon of the anti-Vietnam War teach-in was initiated at Michigan. For three days and nights classes were suspended and lecturers talked about Southeast Asia, about the history of Vietnam, the language and poetry and religion, and a sad exhilaration spread over everyone, or almost everyone, for I could not believe that students and intellectuals could halt a war. Listening to the speakers, I could not help placing my own father in the audience; as in the theatre, even he should be able to understand and be moved.