Timebends (46 page)

I could hear the wagons drawing up in a circle around the camp, and the clanking of rationalizations being piled up on the barricades.
I did believe the delegates, absolutely, but I also felt the deep pull of loyalty to the past and the antifascist, pro-Soviet sentiments of years gone by. We were not truth-seekers but defenders of a beleaguered, crumbling orthodoxy, within which, however, a certain holy truth still lay cradled in whatever sublime confusion. In later years I blamed myself for a misplaced loyalty far more than I did Lillian, because I was aware that I was split in half by what I strongly suspected or already knew, while she seemed obdurate and wholly convinced; so if she was more mistaken than I, she was probably more honest, for she had always found it easier to deny any embarrassingly contradictory point of truth that might disturb her loyalty to her beliefs. What she feared more than untruth was fear itself; the main thing was always to defy. Her loyalty to the Soviet idea was on some level much the same to her as loyalty to a friend. Integrity meant staying with the ship, even if it was veering in an unscheduled direction that would bring disaster to all the passengers. Indeed, her loyalty was her most touching side, as in her enduring friendships with Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Parker in their horrible declining years.

Replying to her question, I said that they had sounded truthful. She said something to the effect that it might all blow over—unless, of course, it turned out that Tito was an American agent. But she was merely repeating a speculation one heard all over the place in those days.

In Moscow two decades later, when I visited Russia with my wife, Inge, I sat face to face with Ilya Ehrenburg and other Soviet writer-survivors who at the very time of Lillian's dinner were living in terror of jail or worse and were being spiritually crucified by the Stalin regime—“We slept with one ear cocked for the sound of the elevator coming up at three in the morning, holding our breaths until it went past our floor,” he told Inge. To think back at such a moment to evenings like this one with Lillian was a trip into the surreal; from that vantage we seemed history's fools, fleas in the mane of a galloping horse whose route we thought to influence by what we decided to believe or not believe.

As I put on my coat to leave Lillian's house I did not dare tell her or acknowledge fully to myself how depressed by doubt and uncertainty I was. But when we shook hands to say goodbye I saw that she had apparently recovered and was once again looking strong, straight, and prideful, as though something had already been solved for her. I think I knew then, consciously for the first time, that I had some fear of ever really crossing her. She lacked the guilt
that was my lifelong companion, looked outward with her blame far more than into herself. But if we could never be comfortable friends it was probably due more to our competing in the theatre. I believed she deeply resented my success. There may also have been an archaic uneasiness on my part with people of high style and panache, a legacy of my father's shy embarrassment with the extroverted Newmans and their like. And finally, like many men, I had an abiding fear of women who were quick to turn anything unexpected into a moral issue. “Shocking!” came so easily to Lillian's lips that even she could be made to laugh at her repetitious outrage at the spread of aberrant behavior as the fifties twisted the simplicities of the past two decades into indescribably alien new shapes.

All in all, to put it charitably, there was enough self-delusion, if not dishonesty, in those years of the great historical crunch for everyone on every side to take his portion.

No one of my generation can be understood without reference to his relation to Marxism as “the God that failed,” but I have come to think the phrase is wrong. It was an idol and no God. An idol tells people exactly what to believe, God presents them with choices they have to make for themselves. The difference is far from insignificant; before the idol men remain dependent children, before God they are burdened and at the same time liberated to participate in the decisions of endless creation. The dilemma has many surfaces and is no closer to being disposed of now than it was in the early thirties, nor will it be while Western society continues to leave so many of its people spiritually alienated, so empty of the joys of life and culture that they long for a superior will to direct their lives.

I was reminded all over again of idol and God in Turkey, where I went in 1985 with Harold Pinter on a mission for International PEN and the Helsinki Watch Committee. It was a long time since the thirties, but I had a few conversations with Turkish writers that threw me back five decades, to Brooklyn and Ann Arbor and New York. They were conversations that could have happened in many other places, from Beijing to Havana to New York, from Moscow to Phnom Penh to Prague, at that moment in history.

Some of these writers had been severely tortured in ghastly Turkish prisons for being members of a peace organization opposed to Turkey's dependency on both the United States and the
Soviet Union. They were more or less conventionally leftist, as most of the educated are in the Third World, and scornful of American pretensions to democratic principles when all they knew of us was our support of right-wing dictatorships everywhere, including the Turkish military government that had put them behind bars.

Some twenty of them had arranged a dinner for us in a restaurant one evening, and over food and a lot of drink a certain hostility began to appear, hard to understand when we had come here to draw world attention to their situation. One man stood up with raised glass and a mocking look and announced, “To the day when we are rich enough to go to America and investigate civil rights conditions!” Talking with him later, I found it hard to judge if he was an agent of the reactionary government trying to ridicule our mission or simply a Communist attacking me as an American, the archenemy.

Another writer, sitting beside me holding his vodka-loaded head in his hands, said, “If they rearrest me I will escape the country. I could not face torture like that again.” He wore a plaid sports jacket and slacks and a rep tie, and his hair was cut short in fifties college style. “Are you a Marxist?” he suddenly asked.

“What is a Marxist?” I replied.

He looked at me incredulously. “What is a Marxist! A Marxist is a Marxist!” But there was more pain than anger in him.

“You mean a Chinese Marxist is the same as a Soviet Marxist with the two largest mobilized armies in the world facing each other on the border?—something like two million men up there, and each side has a picture of Karl Marx nailed to a stick. And what about a Chinese Marxist fighting Vietnamese Marxists on
their
border? Or Vietnamese and Cambodian Marxists in a battle to the death? Or a Cambodian Pol Pot Marxist against a Cambodian pro-Vietnam Marxist? I won't mention the Israeli Marxist and the Syrian.”

I could see I had hurt his feelings; he had never wanted to think of it this way, and he was filling up with despair, bearing as he did the marks of torture on his body for the sake of a monolithic faith whose existence I was disposing of so airily. He got angry. “No, no, there is only one Marxism!” he nearly shouted over the mandolin playing nearby and the lilting voice of a folk singer.

I pressed no further but thought of the “one Christianity” clubbing itself to death in Ireland, or the “one Islam” in Lebanon. And of the seventeenth century, when in the name of Christ they nearly destroyed all Europe in the Thirty Years War. Or the “one
Judaism” in Israel, with the murderous hatreds between Orthodox and secular Jews.

“Maybe we are living through the retribalization of the world,” I said. “One after another the remnants of ancient cultures are waking up from their long sleep, and maybe Marxism is the rationale that gives a modern sound to this upsurge of atavistic tribalism …”

A new voice interrupted; this was Aziz Nesin, author of some ninety books of humor and poetry, a Marxist since his youth and now a Socialist. He had been imprisoned many times and had once, a few years before, served six months for insulting the Shah of Iran in one of his pieces. Every Turk knew his name and his story: how he had left military school and ended up struggling against the American-backed military dictatorships of his former schoolmates. At fifty he was a short, reputedly rich man of imposing dignity.

“Stalin tried to grab an eastern province and the Bosporus right after the last war,” he said, “and right now Russia is still pressuring us for parts of our side of the border, a tremendous area.”

I was somewhat confused now; it was slightly odd that a man of the left, speaking to an American, should be slamming the Soviets. I said that Marxism had apparently not managed to curb Russian expansionism, at least in this part of the world, and he mournfully agreed, if with a troubled uncertainty in his eyes.

The first man, the one in the sports jacket who had been tortured, nodded mournfully too and without seeming to change the subject said, “Yes, American imperialism has missile bases all along the border, dozens!” As he elaborated on the size of the U.S. military presence in Turkey, the Soviet demand for the cession of a Turkish province quickly sank out of sight.

“Then as Marxists,” I said, trying to trace their thinking process, “how do you locate yourselves between the two giants here? Both menace Turkish independence, right?”

They now stared at me with a peculiar blankness. Not exactly a denial nor yet an affirmation that they were truly between the hammer and the equally blameworthy anvil, it seemed more like a metaphysical suspension, a meeting point between the logic of an argument and the inadmissibility of its approaching conclusions. I had run into a phenomenon—the mystery of alienation—that had plagued the postwar years in so many places.

People of principle, confronting evidence that their beliefs are mistaken, dig themselves further into their convictions to stand off the threat of despair. To lose hope is to become corrupt. Here were
two Marxists a few hours' drive from a Soviet border that they thought the Russians wished to bend southward into Turkish territory, but almost the entire weight of their resentment was against the United States. Never mind Soviet reality; Russia was the enemy of their enemy, and that was enough—enough, that is, to keep them from submission to the evils around them.

I knew their despair, for that is all it was or can be if alienation is the prize of moral thought and fact is set aside as mere detail.

The resurgent American right of the early fifties, the assault led by Senator McCarthy on the etiquette of liberal society, was, among other things, a hunt for the alienated, and with remarkable speed conformity became the new style of the hour.

As the fifties dawned I already knew radio scriptwriters who could no longer find producers to hire them. Initially one assumed that if they were not Party members they must be very close to it, and so society as a whole remained, one supposed, intact. But now, as America tested the first hydrogen bomb, condemned by many as immoral, and the expectation grew that the Russians would soon have one of their own, and Mao Zedong chased out Chiang Kaishek, a heaving dough began to displace the solid liberal earth underfoot, and one did not know from day to day when it would all fall in like a souffle. On Brooklyn Heights one day it all seemed to have done just that.

Louis Untermeyer, then in his sixties, was a poet and anthologist, a distinguished-looking old New York type with a large aristocratic nose and a passion for conversation, especially about writers and writing. Forty years before, he had left the family jewelry business to become a poet. He had married four times—twice to the same woman, the poet Jean Starr—had taught and written and published, and with the swift rise of television had suddenly become nationally known as one of the original regulars on
What's My Line?,
a popular early show in which he, along with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, publisher Bennett Cerf, and Arlene Francis, would try to guess the occupation of a studio guest by asking the fewest possible questions in the brief time allowed. All this with wisecracking and banter, at which Louis was a lovable master, what with his instant recall of every joke and pun he had ever heard.

Louis loved poetry and young women, not necessarily in that order; on his eighty-fifth birthday he would say, “I'm still chasing
them. The only difference is that now I can't remember why.” He had old friendships with many of the great American poets—among them William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore—and was a fellow who could easily spend an afternoon just talking and witticizing with kindred souls. One evening I saw unusual deference paid him by the kingly and much older Robert Frost, who sat still for a lengthy lecture from Louis on etymology. That afternoon my young springer spaniel, Red—an unteachable animal I later gave away to my Ford dealer, fleeing his showroom before he could change his mind—had rushed through our Willow Street doorway down the stoop and smashed into the side of a passing car, stunning his brain still further and sending him hysterically running, with me behind him, way up to Borough Hall. In the evening, Frost listened to the story of my chase and then, staring out like one of the heads on Mount Rushmore, drawled, “Sounds like a comical dog.”

Louis very much enjoyed life, most especially now that he was such a success and making real money on the television. His present arid final wife, Bryna—named by populist parents after William Jennings Bryan—was the editor of
Mademoiselle
and had her own arch wit to match his, although nobody had Louis's energy; he could pun in whole streams that she could only dam up by screaming from the middle of the room with hands clapped over her ears. In the ensuing silence he would go to the piano and play some extremely loud Beethoven. Urbane and cultivated, and now with an amazing check coming in every week, they lived in a snug and cluttered Brooklyn Heights apartment.