Literature
I came back from Europe looking for tools to help me survive as an adult. The only option I saw was teaching. I would be a professor. But what would I profess?
Mother always wanted me to be writer, but the dream of writing the great American novel seemed elusive after my abortive attempts to put words on paper in Europe. I could teach Literature. However, Reed took High Culture seriously, and there wasn’t much literature that was worthy of academic study. Aside from the classics of 19th Century fiction, James Joyce was the only contemporary novelist worth paying attention to and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were our only contemporary poets worth considering.
James Jones had published From Here to Eternity and Herman Wouk The Caine Mutiny came out in 1951. According to my professors they were pop culture. John Steinbeck’s East of Eden published in 1952 demonstrated that Steinbeck was over the hill. Grapes of Wrath had been a significant cultural artifact, if not a great book, but nothing of Steinbeck’s since had measured up. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea appeared in 1952 and was grudgingly recognized as worth a read. As was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, was only an advocacy memoir. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 published the same year was pop culture. So were William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in 1954 and Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar in 1955. Trash. That year’s Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was only whispered about.
We read Joyce’s short stories and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, longing, as Joyce put it at the end of Portrait, to “… encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” (What “race” was that?) I struggled through Joyce’s Ulysses in my spare time and devoured Eliot’s The Wasteland. I was so enamored with this poem that I learned large sections by heart and can repeat them to this day.
The Wasteland was High Culture at its highest. You needed a guide to classical literature and the multi-volume version the Oxford English dictionary to begin to understand the poem. I read it again in 2007, struck by its deep pessimism. Written in 1922, it spoke as eloquently to the survivors of World War II as it had to the survivors of the first grand “war to end all wars” for whom it was written. Both wars had destroyed an imagined ideal past and ushered in ages of uncertainty. Eliot begins by turning the traditional season of hope, Spring, on its head.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm …
The fear that Eliot was able to evoke in his simplest narrative lines, as the Son of man seeks solace in a cave, told us how the world would appear after nuclear destruction.
What are the roots that clutch,
what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Modern civilization was a wasteland. Ginzberg’s Howl was a variation on a theme. The Wasteland ends with the poet’s quest for meaning, a meaning that also enamored the Beats. He’s at the Ganges River, where he hears the words of the Upanishad as the Thunder God speaks, “datta, dayadhvam, damyata,” which is roughly translated: “Give, Be Compassionate, Be Self-Controlled.” And then the word Shanti is repeated three times, which is the ending to the Upanishad and is usually translated, ‘The Peace which passeth understanding.”
Neither Joyce nor Eliot, however, inspired me. The truth is, they intimidated me. As for teaching literature, there seemed to be more books of criticism than worthy books of fiction to criticize. By the end of the semester I didn’t want to teach literature. I wanted to seek the truth that Unitarians talked about by studying philosophy. I changed majors in my junior year.
Philosophy
Following the truth “wherever it may lead you,” as the Unitarian code insisted, did not sound corny to me as a Reed College junior in 1957. I was, however, instantly discouraged from trying to answer the big questions and settled on looking for rational reasons for ethical behavior. I thought decisions based on instinct or faith were dead ends. You couldn’t determine the truth of anything with fact free arguments. Absent reason, disputes descended into conflict.
After working through the pre-Socratic philosophers, then Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hobbes we finally arrived at the 18th Century and the ideas that guided my great-grandfather, the Enlightenment of Hume, Locke, Kant and Hegel. I liked Kant who tried to prove that reason could determine moral behavior. When I studied him under the guidance of a young logic’s professor, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason turned out to be a very complicated tautology, its conclusions contained in its premises. Hegel was more interesting, introducing the notion of the dialectic and change based on a tension of opposites, but he held no interest for my logic teacher.
I asked my metaphysics professor what philosopher came after Kant and Hegel and he told me it was John Dewey. But when I read Dewey, he seemed like a promoter of American exceptionalism. I thought Dewey’s pragmatism was a joke compared to Hegel’s dialectic. My logic professor told me Lugwig Wittgenstein came after Hegel, but after struggling through the first few chapters of a massive work dedicated to the sentence “the broom is in the corner,” I wanted to move on.
Neither professor mentioned Karl Marx, the thinker who followed Hegel. I discovered Marx quite by accident in the Reed library. Like my great-grandfather, Marx had taken part in the abortive German Republic of 1848 and fled to a life in exile. Marx had been a newspaper editor in Germany and my great-grandfather became a newspaper editor in Chicago. Any similarities ended there. My great-grandfather embraced American democracy and capitalism. Karl Marx chose working class revolution and communism.
Marx was not taught at Reed. “Try economics,” the philosophy professors said. But neither Reed’s economics department nor any social science taught Marx. That was pretty much true across the United States in the Fifties, despite the fact that Marx was one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th Century and for better or for worse, his followers in the Twentieth Century still were shaping the destiny of half the people in the world. How could we not study this guy? Our fear of Marx intrigued me. What were people so afraid of?
I found a collection of essays based on Marx’s Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Marx wrote, “The present condition of society displays its difference from the earlier state of civil society in that — in contrast to the past — it does not integrate the individual within its community.” Here was a description of the alienation my generation felt. Post war capitalism destroyed traditional communities and left us all struggling virtually alone, as even extended families fell apart.
“Labor produces wonderful works for the rich, but it produces poverty for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the laborer. It produces beauty, but deformity for the laborer. It replaces labor with machines, but at the same time it throws the laborer into the most barbarous labor and at the same time makes the laborer into a machine. It produces intelligence and culture, but it produces senselessness and cretinism for the laborer.”
The key to human fulfillment was un-alienated work. For Marx, control of our own labor was essential. But in capitalism, “labor is not voluntary, but constrained, forced labor. Therefore, it does not meet a need, but rather it is a means to meet some need alien to it. Its estranged character becomes obvious when one sees that as soon as there is no physical or other coercion, labor is avoided like the plague. This alienated labor, this labor, in which human beings alienate themselves from themselves, is a labor of self-denial and self-torture.”
As I read more deeply in Marx I found a theoretical basis for a wildly popular book about alienation by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd. According to this book, humans organized themselves in three basic ways. Tradition-directed people lived by values passed on from generation to generation; inner-directed people lived by values instilled by a church or family; and outer directed people tried to figure out what others wanted and then fit in.
What made The Lonely Crowd so talked about in the mid Fifties was its assertion that members of America’s rising middle class were other-directed. They wanted to be liked by others. Thus, they more easily adapted to the conformity demanded by large corporations, public institutions and the war on Communism.
A charismatic young professor at Reed named Warren Sussman taught a course in American Studies: the US from 1877 to the present. Sussman relied on some Marxist tools for his analysis and original documents for his source material. He was part of a new wave of American professors who in the mid Fifties began to question historical orthodoxy and view the United States with more critical eyes. I decided to switch to American studies for my senior year.
Graduate School
Over the summer, Reed fired Sussman. We students assumed he was too far left. Reed’s Dean of Faculty insisted it was his poor teaching. We told the Dean how much we had learned from Sussman, how much extracurricular work we’d done and how we looked forward to continuing with Sussman. The Dean insisted that when we grew up, we’d agree that Reed had done the right thing. Sussman went on to a distinguished career, serving as chairman of the Rutgers College history department from 1973 to 1979. This incident was another nail in the trust we put in our core institutions like colleges and universities in the late Fifties. Today, of course, the very idea of trust in high institutions seems quaint.
With my favorite teacher gone, I took the lightest course load possible and ran for student body president. My cocky assumption that I was smarter than most others must have ticked off some students. My sole opponent ran a negative campaign distinguished by posters featuring a big red kiss and the words, Kiss Crotch for President; I lost by a narrow margin.
The notion that change was in the air never occurred to me in 1956 and 1957. I had resigned myself to an academic career devoted to a life of learning and teaching, a kind of self-imposed exile from the American mainstream. It was not in the nature of my generation to prepare ourselves for battle. Like many, I spent the next three years encumbering myself with responsibilities. I was in a tremendous hurry to become an adult, although I’m not sure what kind of independence I thought adulthood would bring.
I lived off campus above a fish market, in one of two apartments on the second floor. Three Reed men shared my apartment and three Reed women lived across the hall. I did the cooking for all of us. They cleaned. The Fish Market became notorious at Reed for faculty/student parties that pushed the limits of Fifty’s decorum, one with a stripper I'd met on the train from Oakland. "Where's the senior member of the faculty," she crooned as she slipped into our narrow living room for the last time dressed only in a small towel which she clutched to her breasts. To the applause of everyone in the room, she dropped her towel in front of the Dean of Students and gave him a warm embrace.
Civil Rights
Going through the Nineteen Fifties, the tiny beams of light sent into the American wilderness by SANE, comedians and folk singers seemed isolated, only offering solace in a raging storm. Nowhere was this truer than in the struggle for the rights of African Americans. They had fought in World War II and had discovered what it was like to live in societies without America’s overt racism. Many came back from the war committed to fighting for racial justice in this country. It was the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
Reed College was lily white. If it hadn’t been for Warren Sussman’s emphasis on the breakdown of Reconstruction in 1877, and the brutal reversal of the rights that African Americans won after the Civil War, racial relations never would have entered my mind. But Susman made clear that far too little had changed in the eighty years since Reconstruction ended. Despite the passage of Brown v the Board of Education in May, 1954, the actual implementation of desegregating schools hadn’t begun to draw attention to itself.
Emmet Till, a 14-year-old northern Negro boy, accused of winking at a white girl, had been beaten and killed by a group of Mississippi white men in August of 1955. Doug and I were crossing the Atlantic when the story broke, but was still national news when we returned. It became news again when the likely perpetrators were found not guilty by an all white jury.
Till’s brutal murder and the lack of accountability was the spark that started what Louis Lomax called the "Negro revolt.” It was a spark set in already in already smoldering coals. By the time Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in defiance of a Montgomery, Alabama law a few months later, a sea change in attitude had taken place in America. Her resistance was national news.
A few weeks later, Martin Luther King started the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It lasted until December 20th, 1956, when a federal court overturned the Alabama bus laws. Whites angry about the boycott, bombed four African American churches and the homes of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and E.D. Nixon. None of us could any longer ignore civil rights.
What finally got Eisenhower’s attention was Governor Orval Faubus’s use of Alabama’s National Guard to block the entry of nine Negro students to Little Rock High School. The students were attending under federal court order, which Faubus was simply ignoring. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to return to their armories. Then he sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce the Federal court order. The next year, Congress passed, and Eisenhower signed, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which created the Civil Rights Commission and authorized the Justice Department to investigate cases of African Americans denied voting rights.
The Old Left
Classes at Columbia were lectures, sometimes interesting but frequently routine. My masters’ seminar was earnest, everyone dressed in a jacket, slacks and tie except for me and a graduate of Bard college. We were the scruffy rebels, taking part in peace movement demonstration, urging our horrified colleagues to join us. My real education in New York City came from Barnie Carnal, my wife's uncle, her father’s brother, both former members of the Communist Party. Barnie had been a labor organizer in the Thirties and the West Virginia coordinator for the 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign. It was a romantic past that seemed in 1958 to be as unattainable as a trip to the moon.
Barnie gave me books and pamphlets by Marx, Engels and Feuerbach, the epic novels of Mikhail Sholokhov and plays by Bertold Brecht. I was thrilled to see Lotte Lena as Jenny in the Three Penny Opera, playing at the Theater du Lys on Christopher Street in the Village. Barnie had been a labor organizer in the Thirties and the West Virginia coordinator for the 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign. It was a romantic past that seemed in 1959 to be as unattainable as a trip to the moon seemed at the time.
In the years that I knew him, Barnie was blacklisted. He was working at home as a fund raiser for Yeshiva University. The work seemed like one of those made-up jobs found for lefties who were otherwise unemployable, but it had turned out to be a real benefit for Yeshiva. Barnie had created hundreds of boxes of three by five file cards. Long before the age of computers and data processing, he had gradually gathered information about the personal habits of everyone who gave money to Yeshiva University. By cross referencing this large data base, he could tell you which clubs, which golf partners, which dinner companions a potential donor had with people who had already given, so current donors could be contacted to put pressure on their golf partners or club members who hadn’t yet contributed.
Barnie was short, wiry, intense, at the age of seventy plus still jiggling his leg as he worked at his desk, his energy demanding more space than the New York apartment seemed to offer. He delighted in the cleverness of his work for Yeshiva and seemed tolerant of the tedium. In his spare time, Barnie studied Greek, translating the great Greek works of philosophy with the intention of writing a book about freedom. He made a big deal of drinking one four ounce shot of whisky each night, drawing attention to his self-discipline with the righteousness a former drinker who never went to an Alcoholics Anonymous treatment program.
What’s missing from this sketch is Barnie’s sense of humor, his constant search for the joke, his irony at life’s absurdities, his hesitancy to take offense. Barnie’s son, Robbie, came home from school one afternoon, and told his dad he’d heard a joke at school, and he wasn’t sure if it was anti-Semitic or not. He wanted to know what his dad thought.
“Jesus came back to earth in New York City. He walks into Houlihan’s Bar and he says he’s Jesus Christ, and he asks people to change their sinful ways. Nobody listens to him, and the bar tender, getting rid of real pain in ass, escorts Jesus to the door. Jesus gets the same treatment from Giuseppe the shoemaker, Kravic the sausage maker and Jarvis the door man. Then he goes into Moshe, the butcher, and he asks, “Do you know who I am?” Moshe looks at him carefully then walks out from behind the counter. “Move back against that wall,” Moshe says. “Put your arms up.” And holding up a hammer and a couple of large nails Moshe proceeds to drive them in the Jesus' hands, as he murmurs the punch line, ‘You guys never learn.’”
Barnie was bemused and asked us what we thought. There was very little Barnie took offense at except the avarice of the ruling class.
Barnie introduced me to the New York Left scene, people who you felt had made a good run for it, but they had been defeated. There was no attempt to lead us into party membership or even into left wing activity, except for the rare peace or labor demonstration. They were nice people, like Barnie Josephson who had opened the first inter-racial nightclub in New York City and had featured Billie Holiday who had sung Strange Fruit every night at the end of her set. Barnie Josephson now ran an eatery on University Place. The New York State government took his liquor license away when he refused to testify against his brother in one of the communist trials.
The American lefties that I met in New York were hunkered down, licking their wounds, moving on from militant causes if they were young enough to still have a chance in the remote niches of the mainstream. They told me they missed the comradery, the intellectual stimulation of party activity, but most of all they missed the hope. I had found the kind of people I wanted to be.