Europe
In a fine drizzle early one morning, the Ryndam slowed, and the French coast emerged, a sprawl of warehouses and docks at Le Havre. We stood along the rail staring down at French stevedores, dressed in dark pants and jackets, caps jauntily on their heads, staring back.
The gangplank lowered from mid deck. First class passengers first, then steerage, we carried our bags through an army of porters, stumbling as our sea legs adjusted to a stable surface after the roll of the North Atlantic. Beyond the sheds and across the tracks, we followed most of the other passengers and boarded the boat train to Paris.
Sitting in a 2nd class compartment, Doug and I looked at each other. We had been swallowed up by Europe. We now were completely out of touch with American culture, which was not yet ubiquitous. There were no transistor radios and Walkman carrying American tunes, no old syndicated American television programs and advertising campaigns. No outposts of American fast food. We occasionally sent out and received letters at American Express offices in major cities. Our only other contact with America was the staid, very European, International edition of The Herald Tribune.
As the train rattled toward Paris, I found myself relaxing, as if I were in familiar psychological territory, on a train full of people who looked as “Beat” as I felt. In time I realized that all of Europe was “Beat” after the war, its horrors only a decade old. Europeans were grounded in the bedrock of humanity, in touch with the most basic forces of survival … food, warmth, love, passion, intellectual curiosity and a keen pessimism about grand designs.
Doug’s sister worked for the American military near Frankfurt, and we bought a small Morris Minor car at a very cheap price in the middle of winter, from an American GI on his way home. We kept the US Army license plates that allowed us to buy our gasoline at army bases that were then spread all over Europe, for a fraction of the going European price.
We began our travels following a used, Guide Blue, reprinted just after the war. It faithfully recorded every church and village that had existed at the turn of the Century. Then it noted, in precise detail, the church or village’s demise. "Destroyed in 1917" or 1918 or 1942 or 1945. The destruction was stunning. Europe had been beaten to a pulp. In Cologne, Germany, the great city on the Rhine River, it's cathedral rose above rubble, its main street like an American Western town with false fronts hiding Quonset huts. Noon break at factories brought out women and girls but no men, eating thick slices of dark bread spread with thick layers of lard.
American soldiers were treated like royalty. They had power. Their soldier’s pay and cheap goods at the PX’s gave them the edge they needed to get girls and special perks. What a contrast to the reality thirty years later when I did a television show for ABC News on The All Volunteer Army: A Shocking State of Readiness. By then GI’s were poor compared to most Germans, and contemptuously tolerated rather than lionized. Young American soldiers lined up in front of whorehouses outside the American base at Baumholder on payday, instead of selecting their dates from the eager German girls I’d seen in 1955 when chocolate bars and nylons still meant something.
We headed out of Germany into the Austrian Alps for skiing. In the villages near the ski slopes local residents posted signs offering room and board at extremely cheap prices. We stayed with Austrian families who assured us that they were not German. We did not point out that Hitler was Austrian. The skiing was spectacular, long runs on beautiful mountains, deep powder, empty hills. At night we went to village beer cellars where the local men would arrive at 9:00 pm sharp, drink huge steins of beer, voices rising, maybe a song or two, and at 10:00 pm they started to drift away. The bar was empty by11:00.
Spain
We shipped our skis home and headed across the Alps into northern Italy, wandering through the mountains to Venice, where two nights had put such a severe strain on our $5 a day limit that we headed back into the mountains toward Florence. It started snowing as we crossed the pass into the Perugian Valley heading south. Snow fell in thick, huge flakes, until we reached the valley floor where it turned to rain as we drove through orchards of bare trees waiting for spring.
The rain stopped. The dark clouds rose and an opening appeared between them. A single shaft of light struck the ground directly over an ancient building on the western hillside. Everything else was gloomy and dark. We drove up a dirt road. The parking lot in front of what was now clearly a church was empty. We parked and walked in. A simple, central hall with its high windows, the walls covered with the subtle and moving 13th Century frescos by Gioto. We had stumbled unknown into Assisi.
Mesmerized by the art, we wandered through the nave. After a while, Gregorian chants started to waft through the church from some remote distance. The sounds grew louder, identifiable from the cellars below. Doug and I found a staircase that led downstairs into darkness, and we cautiously walked down ancient stone stairs to a hallway lighted by burning tapers. Walking in front of us were twenty or thirty young boys, fourteen, fifteen years old, clothed in monks’ garb, singing Gregorian Chants. Their faces revealed a certainty about the meaning and purpose of life that left me shaken. I watched them with envy. The storm, the shaft of light, the faded frescos from the 13th Century, the mesmerizing music of absolute certainty, I had a near religious conversion that afternoon in Italy.
Doug dragged me away and we drove on to Rome where I fell helplessly in love with a provocative scullery maid.
North along the Mediterranean, finally turning south, heading into Spain. It was the late Spring of 1955 when we crossed the French border and entered Europe's last fascist dictatorship. Spain was a close ally of the United States, a partner in containing communism, but I knew from reading history that Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the supreme ruler, had sent his troops into battle in 1936 under the slogan, “Down with intelligence! Long live death!”
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At the border the casual courtesy of French border guards gave way to the suspicious scrutiny of Franco's police. They examined our passports carefully for a long time, "What are your intentions in Spain? How much money do you have with you? Are you meeting any Spanish citizens? Where will you be staying?” We were thankful for our US Army license plates.
The countryside beyond the border was bleak, stark and almost uninhabited. Farms seemed deserted. Draft animals listlessly waited in muddy pens. An old man and a woman went on slow, separate errands in a desolate barnyard. Soldiers in black uniforms patrolled the roads on black bicycles with black machine pistols strapped to their crossbars. They were humorless and resentful. We drove to Barcelona without stopping.
We had been traveling around Europe for four months, and our funds were low. We had been downgrading our sleeping accommodations, and in Barcelona we hit bottom at a seedy hotel in a working-class district, where the woman behind the front desk couldn’t stop laughing as she handed us our key for a single, cheap room in her whorehouse.
Further south, in Seville, the balmy climate and warm, friendly people, the sherry bars with endless supplies of free tapas, seduced me. I took a long hike up into the hills, stumbling onto a community of gypsies living in caves, out of another century. I went almost unnoticed, because by then I was dressed in the same Beat clothes that most Europeans wore in those days, dark corduroys and black turtlenecks, rich earth colors that didn’t show the dirt, a black beret.
Ernest Hemingway’s 1932 Death in the Afternoon, an enthusiastic treatise on bull fighting, required us to attend a string of corridas. I was fascinated and not appalled as contemporary political correctness demands, but I’ve never been tempted to return. We spent a drunken night on the steps of the Cathedral in Toledo after a day of inspiration from the twisted torsos of El Greco.
Then we went to Madrid.
Madrid
Just outside Madrid, we stopped to clean the car’s backseat of remnants of a bushel of oranges bought on the road out of Seville. The oranges had started to give off the unmistakable, chemical stench of rotting citrus. We worked carefully under the watchful eyes of the Civil Guard.
The closer we came to Madrid, the more heavily patrolled the roads. An illegal copy of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls weighed heavily in my suitcase. I was nineteen. I had been reading Hemingway and the romantic World War II mysteries of Eric Ambler. The viciousness of fascism and heroism of communist revolutionaries were uppermost in my mind as we entered fascism’s last world capitol.
We walked from our cheap traveler's hotel toward to center of town. In the late afternoon the streets were virtually empty. We stopped for coffee and bread at a cafe where people huddled in dark overcoats and hats, unfriendly. Madrid had a used-up look. There were no spontaneous bursts of passion; the haunting tunes of flamenco and the sherry bars of Seville and Valencia, nor the religious intensity of Toledo. The gray stonewalls of the official buildings were dark with grime, the streets empty of traffic, a black and white film from the Nazi era.
We had dinner that first night at Cafe Economic #5, two twenty-year-old boys speaking quietly in English attracted attention. Diagonally across the room, sitting in the corner, an elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit stared at us. He was rail thin with white hair carefully combed back. When he saw me looking at him, he got up from his table and walked across the room toward us. We stopped eating and stood up. He handed us a worn business card with elaborate courtesy. His name was embossed in gold, identifying him as a poet. "I assume that you are Americans," he said in perfect, somewhat academic English.
The gentleman accepted our invitation to sit down. His pin stripped suit was frayed but immaculate. He held himself with pride. The entire restaurant seemed to be looking at us out of the corners of their eyes as they pretended to go on with their dinner. He asked us how we liked Spain. What did we think of Madrid? Were we “political?” Finally, he offered to show us “the real Spain.”
The next day, the poet took on a slow-paced walking tour of pre-Fascist cultural monuments, closed libraries and clubs where he still had the keys. We stared at light spots on the walls where tapestries were missing, book shelves empty of books, chairs at tables empty of people. The books were seized as subversive, the poet said. The club members arrested as subversives, the paintings and tapestries sold to pay taxes. We went to the steps of a museum where he was afraid to enter.
"This is the face of Fascism. You go home and you tell the American people about the real Spain. How can they support this fascist dictator who denies his people every common decency?" The tour ended late that night in a dark, working-class bar near our hotel, where our poet seemed accidentally to run into an old friend, George Matei who was visiting Madrid from Paris.
It later became clear that bumping into George was no accident.
Smuggling Documents
George was short and muscular, with the broad, open face of an optimist, a mass of tousled brown hair and a scar on one cheekbone that seemed incongruous. His eyes, in this confusion of impressions were grey blue and watchful, making contact with mine, then looking away when he seemed satisfied by something.
George was on his way back to Paris, and we offered to give him a ride. It was a routine trip until we neared the French border. George suddenly wanted to be let off, said he had to meet some friends and would see us for dinner at a small café in France. And he darted away, leaving his two heavy suitcases in our trunk.
It was creepy. I had read a scene like this in a mystery novel, George Hector carrying documents for a mysterious stranger in Eric Ambler’s The Dain Curse, and I wondered how I would stand up to Spanish interrogation. Anti-fascist movies like Rossellini’s Open City were popular after the war, and torture always seemed like a real possibility if you found yourself in the wrong circumstances. Which is where I seemed to find myself. But neither of us wanted to dump George’s bags, and we sailed through the border without any trouble.
Good to his word, George met us for dinner on the French side and had a good laugh with us about the documents he was smuggling back to Paris for his Spanish Communist comrades.
It was June by now, and we sold our car to an arriving tourist for a good profit. Doug went off to spend the summer with his family in Germany. I bought a Peugeot touring bike in Paris and took the train to Strasbourg, biked down the Rhine River to Cologne, still a burned out shell of a city with fake facades and Quonset hut interiors.
It was difficult to internalize the incredible destruction of modern warfare or the devastation of people’s lives. Women and girls stood outside factory walls at lunch. There were few men. Thy ate thick slices of brown bread covered with a heavy spread of lard.
The long climb over the mountains to Belgium seemed like a struggle after the lazy drop down the Rhine. I went through Belgium, crossed into the Netherlands, stayed in Amsterdam for a few nights. When I hit a northern wind on the endless plains of Northern Germany I caught a train and fell in love with a fellow passenger, Birgitta Hawkinson. We stayed in Copenhagen, took the boat train to England together and then biked from London down to Lands End and back, staying in dry, sweet smelling haylofts of farmers along the road in exchange for a few light chores.
I wanted to marry her and take her back to America, but she had an au pair position with a Parisian family waiting, and we went back to Paris together in August. She was four years older and lifetime ahead of a still naïve American boy.
I stayed on in Paris and met George' Mattei’s comrades, survivors of the resistance, carrying on the struggle for a socialist world. Who knows what was real and what was false? A beautiful girl I admired, George said, had led the resistance in Marseille. Another slender beauty had seduced German officers and slit their throats. George's friends were a heady mix of intellectuals, students, workers, and petty criminals.
Desperate for money to stay beyond my September deadline, one of George's friends offered to buy my passport for enough money to live for another year. Should I have chucked it all, stayed in Paris, become a man without a country, ended up in the French Foreign Legion? It didn’t seem like a good idea at the time.
Birgitta met me for the last time at Gare de St Lazare where I caught the boat train to Le Havre. It was kindness on her part and a sentimental goodbye on the platform, a scene forever in my mind in black and white, the engine wheels waiting, steam pouring across the platform, wet smells of leather luggage, the dark clothes of a still beaten Europe, and one broken heart.
I met Doug in our cabin on the Maasdam and headed back to the United States for a second year of college.
Back to Reed
I was carrying banned books by Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn), D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers), and Allen Ginzberg (his recently published and banned poem Howl). United States customs agents had been seizing copies of Howl as obscene since March 25 of 1955, and smuggling copies through was a thrill. I was prepared for confiscation and a good story, but I slipped past the customs officials.
After only a few steps on American soil I felt the easy laissez faire of Europe slip away, thousands of miles across the Atlantic. I was back in the United States. We took the bus to the airport and waited for our plane ride home. The pace, the energy, the nervous insecurity were nerve wracking after Europe still barely on its knees and humble. My fellow citizens on the bus, in the airport, on the plane ride home, seemed to be trying hard to live up to an ideal, which they could not seem to achieve. Startlingly, they seemed as adrift as the kids I met in Westport Connecticut at age eleven.
Unlike Europe, America was preoccupied with the Communist menace and the Cold War. Witch hunts continued to spread across the country driving liberal, radical progressives out of the movie industry, radio and television, magazines and newspapers, universities, libraries, every opinion shaping instrument in the country. War talk became more strident.
Then on November 22nd, 1955, the Soviet Union tested its first thermonuclear device. Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, increasing numbers in suburban houses, most with decent jobs, desperate to hold on to what they had. We were in a new war with an implacable enemy.
Back at Reed, the campus buzzed with discontent. While I was away McCarthy’s un-American Activities Committee had come to Portland and subpoenaed several Reed professors. Three refused to cooperate, and Reed’s Board of Trustees immediately suspended them. When Stanley Moore, a Marxist Professor of Philosophy, declined to tell the trustees whether or not he was a member of the Communist Party, they fired him. The other two professors told Reed trustees they were not communists and were re-instated. Moore later said he had been a communist in the forties, but had quit the party well before the HUAC hearings in Portland. His refusing to answer the trustees’ questions had been a matter of principle.
Moore had received enthusiastic support from students and faculty. The Faculty Council issued a statement that called Moore "among the outstanding members of the faculty in terms of scholarly preparation, objectivity in the presentation of material and general effectiveness in the classroom. "
Moore’s firing pleased Portland’s businessmen and bankers who hobnobbed with the trustees. Some had ominously warned that Reed would be closed if the trustees didn’t act. The leading Portland newspaper said the trustees’ action reflected the temper of the times: “should Communists be allowed to teach? "No!" the Reed Trustees roared in reply, "No Communists should teach in the schools of this country, and particularly not at Reed College." Reed’s firings taught me that no American institution could be trusted to do the right thing.
Television seemed to have invaded American homes in my absence. Eisenhower was holding televised presidential news conferences for the first time. There were tough new Westerns featuring men settling new frontiers with their guns and the help of compliant women. There were lame joke situation comedies. Nothing for those of us at Reed. We felt utterly detached from the whole circus. With one telling exception.
I had only been back in college a few weeks when, on September 30th, 1955, at age 24, actor James Dean died when his Porsche 550 Spyder collided head on with another car on a two-lane highway. A month after his death, Rebel Without A Cause premiered in New York City and then opened across the country. Dean played Jim Stark, promoted as “the bad boy from a good family” in the ad campaign. Actually, Stark is one of the few good boys in the movie and he came from a dysfunctional family.
While the plot twists seem wildly improbable today, they were based on real events heavily covered by the era’s news media. The portrayal of 1950s’ alienation was dead on. Stark’s father, a henpecked husband who wears a frilly apron for most of the movie, is weak and indecisive. Stark’s mother, a shrewish caricature of discontent, offers no love nor guidance. Stark sees no cultural model worth emulating. He doesn’t know where he belongs, feels alienated from the society around him.
What does it matter anyway? In a powerful scene that reflects the era’s fear of nuclear annihilation, an astronomer explains how man is of little consequence and demonstrates how the earth will eventually end in a flaming cataclysm!
The movie opens with Stark, drunk, lying in a puddle of water, caressing a stuffed animal, rain dripping on his face. He’s picked up by extremely respectful policemen who take him to the station and call his parents. The police psychiatrist is one of the only other good guys in the film. He befriends Stark who agrees to report back to the cops, presumably to help them end a plague of juvenile delinquency. Snitching was considered a good thing in the Fifties.
Juvenile delinquents are tormenting Stark at high school. Costumed in upper middle class clothing, they seem to be “the bad kids” from “the good families” the ad talked about. They relish tormenting others, giggle while inflicting pain and almost beat a kid to death. Natalie Wood, who plays the gang leader’s girlfriend, is as sadistic and nasty as the rest of them … until she switches her allegiance to Stark.
The penultimate scene is a game a chicken. Cars were the center of teenage life in the Fifties. You either had one yourself or you knew someone who did. They were our entertainment, our refuge from the adult world, where we proved our courage by reckless driving and learned about sex. I did some pretty stupid things in cars, rolling two of them before I was twenty, but I never played chicken. In chicken, two cars drive toward each other at top speed. The first driver to swerve is chicken. In the movie version, they drive toward a cliff over the Pacific Ocean.
Just before the drivers take off, the gang leader tells Stark, “You know, I kind of like you.” Stark asks, “Then why are we doing this?” The gang leader replies, “We gotta to do something.”
Two other juvenile delinquent films came out at about the same time, “Blackboard Jungle” and “The Wild One.” Variety hoped that the facts portrayed in these films were “hideously exaggerated” and prayed that they would “never meet such youths except upon the motion picture screen.” Bosley Crowther of the New York Times thought, “There are some excruciating flashes of accuracy and truth in this film.”
None of the contemporary critics saw any of these movies as a reflection of 1950s’ alienation.