Timebends (94 page)

It was hard to know where the majority really stood. A friend in nearby Torrington, who was in charge of labor relations for a large metalworking company, appeared at the plant one morning wearing a black armband as part of the nationwide campaign for a pause in our bombing of Vietnam, the so-called Moratorium. Workers on the shop floor solemnly asked him who had died, and he explained. When he returned the next morning, every machine on the floor had an American flag defiantly draped over it. Still, I continued to believe that there must be a way to enlighten such workers, whose sons were the ones doing the fighting.

A boy from down the road who as a child used to come and sit watching in silence while my family and guests talked, swam, or played ball, and whom I later helped to get into the Neighborhood Playhouse acting school, one day poured gasoline over himself in his backyard and set himself afire and died. Of course there was more to it than protest against the war: he had once confided that his father's values were exactly like Willy Loman's. But Biff loves his father enough to fight him and his lethal beliefs. The boy's acting teachers had told me that he had a big talent.

Another boy I had known since his babyhood, the nineteen-year-old son of a local merchant, would appear stoned at my door late at night and offer “to write a poem on any subject” on the spot. He
was draft age, not in school, with no excuse for staying out of the war he hated. Within the year he was dead of an overdose. He had become a great salesman, having invented a business retailing local rocks to collectors, and his car trunk was always weighted down with valuable samples he found hidden in the woods of his rosy-cheeked country boyhood.

But everyone, it seemed to me, knew perfectly well that such things were happening. What could a play or fiction add? The country's unconscious really had been overleaped, its guilt canceled as we learned to harden ourselves by a most elaborate routine of denial. It was all so conscious that even the usual accompaniment of every war, the celebration of the veteran, was reversed, and he was expected to slink back into civilian invisibility. It was strange and sinister to me, and inevitably I had to recall the people working the hillside below Mauthausen, who did not look up as we drove past them toward that killing camp.

Still another young man, the son of an old friend, returned from Vietnam, got on his motorcycle, and headed toward a town six hundred miles away to locate and kill a guy from his outfit who had screamed and drawn Vietcong fire on them. But the guy was not home, and my friend's son came back. He began investing on the stock market and soon made a bundle but continued hinting darkly that certain vets, buddies of his, were prepared to “clean up” society.

The surreal danced on. One day I spoke against the war on the New Haven green—where I had the luck to meet William Sloane Coffin, Jr., the Yale chaplain, who would become a close friend—and a few days later to several hundred plebes at West Point. I had been invited by a colonel in the English department, and at first I responded that he must have intended a different Miller, since I was opposed to the war. “We know who you are, and that's why you've been invited,” he said. It was impossible to refuse him then.

West Point—how I had ached as a teenager to be admitted there!—was an hour-and-a-half drive from Roxbury. The large lecture hall was packed, and standing along the back wall, a dozen faculty looked on, decorated officers watching me expressionlessly as I talked about the Vietnam War, and particularly about the certainty of our defeat. I figured I might as well be eaten whole as in small pieces.

Our bombing of Cambodia had just begun. Inge, Rebecca, and
I had returned from a trip there only two weeks before; Inge had wanted to photograph Angkor Wat and its fabulously carved temples and sculptures. There was a sublime
rootedness
in the god statues, as though they had grown in place centuries before. And in portaled little kiosks here and there stood the lingams, upright stone phalluses, shiny from women sitting on them to bring on pregnancy—or so I'd theorized. A dozen or so fey young monks in saffron robes and shaven heads wafted from quiet niche to niche begging alms and looking very flesh-bound to my jaded eyes.

But my news to the cadets was unaesthetic. I said that I doubted we had six people in our government who could read and understand Cambodian; that Mr. Nixon's bombing the place would hardly endear us to an agricultural people who, as I had seen, loved to stand around in front of their stilted houses staring at their water buffalo or bathing and fondling their children, their lives bounded by the immemorial flooding and draining of their rice fields. I assumed that the profundity of my ignorance of the Cambodian people must be shared by our leaders, who had decided to bomb the hell out of them because they had made a deal allowing the North Vietnamese to use a corridor down one side of the country to supply guerrillas in the south, something Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk could not have prevented anyway.

For color I told how Rebecca, then nine, had come to us after breakfast one morning to report that the hotel swimming pool was half drained and full of soapsuds and that the hotel was being evacuated; and how the management had denied this, saying they were only cleaning the pool, and I had phoned our embassy in Phnom Penh and been reassured that nothing was happening and we should continue our holiday. At that very moment, of course, we were installing Lon Nol and overthrowing Prince Sihanouk, and Cambodia had entered the war and all the airports were shut down. To get out of Angkor we and a British couple, the Foxtons, who had a daughter Rebecca's age, practically had to buy a bus that would drive the four hours over roads of broken rock to the Thai border, and of course Angkor was all but destroyed in short order, gods or no gods. But the gist of my remarks was that we could hardly hope to have the Cambodians on our side when we didn't know them, had no interest in them, and didn't really give a goddam for them anyway, and that a people had a way of catching on to this sooner or later, just as the Vietnamese had long since done.

A cadet with a size seventeen neck—I later learned he was the son of the Teamster boss in Chicago—was the first to raise his hand
in the question period. He said he was outraged that I should be allowed to make this kind of defeatist propaganda at the Military Academy. I braced for the onslaught. A bald colonel with a bright red Guard's mustache, his chest covered with decorations, now raised his hand from the back of the room. During my speech a certain glaring ferocity in his straight bearing had attracted my worried attention.

“I…”—his first vocalization, in a commanding basso, sent a chill up my back here in the heart of the war—“was military attaché in Phnom Penh for twelve years.” A pause for effect. A bit of an actor, a ham, in fact, considering the mustache. Here it comes, I thought, I am dead. “And I want to tell you that everything Mr. Miller has said is the truth.” With which he turned and left the room.

Through the evening until two o'clock next morning, in the home of a young colonel who insisted I have dinner with him and his wife, surrounded by half a dozen of his fellow officers, I now heard the other side of the catastrophe, that of these tormented young soldiers. The army, they were saying, each in his different way, had had nothing to do with starting this war. They had known from the beginning that it was unwinnable on the battlefield, that it was a political and not a military problem. They were now having to get into civilian clothes to go down to New York City; people were blaming them, insulting and sometimes even attacking them in the streets. They had all fought in Vietnam, all had many decorations, and with a tense lostness in their eyes they were asking me to tell the country what they could not: to stop the war. They had an austerity—yes, and a kind of purity—reminiscent of young priests. And all of them were due to return to action, some within weeks, to lead yet more men into deaths they knew were useless and could never be redeemed.

But in time Ronald Reagan would invent a redemption, would cook it up like a new movie script out of the longings of the audience. What had once been common tragic knowledge at West Point was carefully, assiduously rewritten by experts in denial who gave us in myth the victory that had eluded us in reality. The pain was apparently too great to bear if untempered by the merest meaning, and so the doors were thrown open to an orgy of sentimental self-appreciation, and we were “standing tall again” on the same quicksand of unreality as ever. The monumentalized dead were mourned, but avoidance was the survivors' lot. It was as though the people had witnessed something in Vietnam so repulsive, so inexplicable for Americans to have done, that they could not acknowledge the casting away of fifty-eight thousand of their
countrymen and finally found solace in a show business presidency with its incandescent reassurances of greatness reborn.

The sixties was a time of stalemate for me, perhaps because I had lost the last belief in any social prophecy, whether the common expectation that America was now being revolutionized by the youth and black movements or the pretensions of the orthodox to a democratic crusade in Vietnam. I could find no refreshing current of history such as I had imagined touching in the thirties and forties, only a moral stagnation that mocked creation itself. In a two-hour play, what could I hope to reveal that would compare with Lyndon Johnson facing a regiment of troops on some Pacific island and happily calling out, in reference to the Vietnamese, “Nail those coonskins to the wall, boys!” We had not descended to such vileness even against the Nazis, but it seemed to fill the entire canvas, leaving nothing to be said about it that it was not already saying itself. And yet it was an evasion to enjoy declaring the death of all values. In American side streets they still wanted better lives for their kids, wished marriages could last, clung to a certain biological decency. I could not forget that. But they had no place in art except as boringly sentimentalized wish figures.

The fashion—I hesitate to call it a ruling idea—was to let it all hang out, to acknowledge oneself utterly. But I no longer believed that “truthfulness” was merely a matter of social undress and defiance of norms. There were naked liars too.

The Truth Drug,
a film scenario, was one of a score of abortive attempts to grasp my feelings about the sixties. Hogy, a young researcher at Columbia who is also a jazz flutist and a fencer and falls in love with a new girl every few weeks, stumbles on a chemical that transforms a wolverine, one of the most aggressive of animals, into a loving beast that fairly weeps with tenderness. The mixture apparently stimulates a part of the brain involved not so much in sex as in empathic identification, for the wolverine is not trying to mount everything in sight, only to offer affection.

On his way to visit a girlfriend one night, Hogy is mugged by an addict couple, and after drinking a bottle of the mixture they promptly dissolve into sympathy for him, for one another, and for the children they have neglected. The chemical finally finds its way into the hands of Hock and Stutz, manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, and is marketed under the trade name Love. It sweeps the country, since it is inevitably rumored to be an aphrodisiac.

Love transforms hateful people into friendlier folk, but there are
quick complications. Professional football collapses as players instead of tackling the ball carrier run beside him trying to persuade him to stop. The subway system grinds to a halt as passengers lovingly decline to push their way into crowded cars, leaving thousands stranded on platforms. Most dangerous of all, the armed forces begin swallowing Love, and submarines are discovered surfacing so that the men can lie on deck sunbathing, exposing their positions to the Russians, while air force crews flee into jungles to escape having to bomb anybody. The crusty chief of the Hock and Stutz ad agency tries a glassful and, instead of rudely breaking into American TV programs with the company's commercials, falls in love with his Rolls-Royce and goes to bed with two hubcaps. Without its aggression the society begins to totter, and in desperation Washington bombs the Russians with kilotons of Love in the hope that it will immobilize them as badly as it has us. Soon both societies have all but ceased to operate, and everyone is passively lying around raising an occasional tomato—everyone, that is, but the true believers of all faiths, who have of course forbidden their followers to drink what they are sure is a sex-enhancing drug. Orthodox Jews join with pious Catholics, Protestants, and Moslems all over the world in a new International devoted to the rooting out and destruction of Love, a manifestation of the Devil in his age-old campaign to make man love himself with no need of God.

But I broke off the script before the end. The compelling desire to address people, let alone entertain and enlighten them, was somehow no longer with me. And maybe, too, the violent rejection of
After the Fall
had helped to burn it away.

In the late fall of 1973 a reprint of an article in
New Times
magazine arrived in the mail, sent by its author, journalist Joan Barthel. It contained parts of a Connecticut state police interrogation of an eighteen-year-old boy, Peter Reilly, in which he confessed to brutally murdering his mother, Barbara Gibbons. It had been a fiendish knife attack; her throat had been cut, her vagina forced with a bottle. The boy had been tried and convicted, but some of the local people in this rather remote northern Connecticut community had raised bail, many of them by putting up savings account books or even mortgaging their homes, such was their belief in his innocence. Along with a lot of others I was now being asked to help with money that might get him a new trial.

Peter was not black or Hispanic, Jewish or radical; he was pure
victim. Knowing nothing whatever about the murder's circumstances, I was initially drawn into the case by reading the interrogator's horrifyingly cool and perfectly cynical misuse of Freudian psychology. To me it screamed of fraud. After twenty-four hours without counsel and ten hours of questioning, Peter, who had never known a father, was reduced to asking if his warmly paternal interrogator was sure he had murdered his mother, because he still felt only a loving sadness at the thought of her death. Wherewith the cop blithely confided that the Oedipus complex was quite universal in men, and considering his mother's practice throughout his childhood of having sex with innumerable strangers right there in the lower level of the double-decker bed while Peter slept in the upper one, the laws of psychology practically demanded that he conceive a monstrous fury against her, which had at last erupted. Naturally, Sergeant Kelly assured him, this hostility was all unconscious—but a hip boy like Peter must certainly know about the unconscious, and so the best thing to do was to “get it off your chest.” Exhausted beyond exhaustion, Peter finally signed a confession, which he retracted after a night's rest. But it was too late.