Timebends (102 page)

Lewis Galantière, a translator, and Jules Isaacs, a lawyer who gave PEN much of his time simply out of a bemused enjoyment of writers' insanities, had managed to get the State Department to lower its ban (which did not yet include ex-Nazis) on “political undesirables” entering the country, and a genuine cross section of Latin American writers was present (except for the Cubans, who pretended that their invitation had arrived too late for them to attend, an awkward fabrication that nevertheless allowed them to condemn Neruda later as a sellout to imperialism—an attack upon his honor that, as his memoirs attest, he never forgave them).

I suggested that we open a special Latin American mini-congress to be held on the spot, and they quickly and excitedly gathered in one of the public rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel. The great explosion of Latin American novel writing had not yet detonated
over the American and European consciousness, but one could sense among them a kind of ravening appetite for the oncoming future that each of them, albeit from different countries of varying social conditions, seemed to anticipate they would all share. From Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa in the middle to Argentine Victoria Ocampo on the right and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico on the left, the panorama opened out upon a literary viewpoint that to me, since I had always believed in it for myself, seemed coherent and vital and promising. In a word, literature had to speak to the present condition of man's life and thus would implicitly have to stand against injustice as the destroyer of life. The congress's theme, “The Writer as Independent Spirit,” naturally raised the question of the “pure” versus the “committed” writer, or, as Fuentes put it, Mallarmé or Dickens. But this was a meaningless distinction in Latin America (I thought it was in the United States, too), because a Neruda or a Borges, a Carpentier or an Asturias, an Octavio Paz or a Cortázar, all contributed to the same defense through their commitment to the life of the spirit and its free evolution. Two days before, in my speech opening the congress, I had inadvertently stumbled upon a different version of the same thought: that the basis of our mutual toleration lay “in the knowledge that men in one country are in a different situation than men in another country,” and therefore one had to ask deeper and broader questions of writers and literature than any political formulas could ever supply. As an example, I repeated an idea I had broached in London for an annual international day to remind ourselves of the hundreds of writers in prisons all over the world.

For by this time I was certain that PEN had to be the conscience of the world writing community. In fact, I had to suppress the pride I felt now that it was the American writers who had seized the idea and with our far greater solvency and incurable idealism might be the ones capable of putting it on the map. If PEN had ever been an inconsequential literary club, it wasn't one anymore.

The very presence here in the same meeting of such a variety of opinions was already creating new illuminations. Neruda, the great tree of Latin American poetry, who had been my introduction to Latin American writing back in the thirties, had arrived with a certain defensiveness, knowing that we had had to arrange a special permission for his entry into the country. But he was quickly swamped with invitations to read, and did so twice at the Ninety-second Street Y, and made a commercial recording besides. In Dauber and Pine's bookshop on lower Fifth Avenue he spent
hours buying up all they had by and about Whitman, and also Shakespeare's sonnets. When he opened a book to read, his eyebrows rose and he looked like a jungle bird, an immense, round-headed parrot. His warmth toward New York and America, despite his opposition to our Latin American policies, was palpable.

Roaming the Village with him and Inge, I was baffled now more than ever how a man of such all-embracing spirit could continue to countenance Stalinism. I could only think that once again the depth of alienation from bourgeois society had locked a man into a misconceived, nearly religious loyalty to the dream Russia of the believing thirties, a country whose sheer human reality he felt it dishonorable to acknowledge. But of course it was also that American foreign policy was so systematically defending right-wing dictatorships as to leave all but the most timid local reformers with no models and no support but the Soviet ones.

By the time of the congress I had received many a telegram like the one from London saying that a Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer whose name I barely knew, was in danger of execution. Apparently he had taken it on himself to carry communications between breakaway Biafrans and people within the Nigerian government who were trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the dreadful civil war. Would I quickly send some sort of message to General Gowon, who headed the soon-to-be-victorious army of the Nigerian government, asking mercy for Soyinka?

David Carver in London knew a British businessman named Davies who was just leaving for Nigeria and could get my message to the general. Gowon, on seeing my name, asked Davies with some incredulity whether I was the writer who had been married to Marilyn Monroe and, assured that this was so, ordered Soyinka released. How Marilyn would have enjoyed that one!

Another writer, Fernando Arrabal, a Spaniard living in Paris in exile from Franco Spain, had returned to Madrid to see one of his plays and made the mistake of signing one of his books with a dirty pun on Franco's name. When, incredibly enough, he was about to be sentenced to several years in jail for this affront to El Caudillo, his friends cabled me that the judge was an aficionado of the theatre and might be influenced by a message from me.
Death of a Salesman,
for one, had played a long time in Madrid. My cable assured his honor that Arrabal was a playwright of the first importance and an old favorite of mine, wherewith the judge allowed
that as a man of such noteworthy talent Arrabal could get out of Spain forthwith on his promise never to return.

And so I began using what credit I had won for such purposes—in Lithuania, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, Latin American countries, the Soviet Union, Korea, and on more than one censoring school board closer to home, in Illinois and Texas and other states. PEN was now the good right arm its founders had dreamed it might one day become.

For three days we went out and climbed the hillside, planting the hundreds of seedlings out of the pail, and finally, with some help, six thousand of them. Inge, pregnant then but hardly showing it—she would be photographing from a high crane in the Brooklyn Navy Yard four hours before the labor pains began—carefully set roots in the slits I was cutting with a flat spade. From the middle of Europe she has brought this reverence for the consecration of such moments in life when the consciousness of time's flow is supreme. And twenty-five years later our ankle-high seedlings are dense sixty-foot trees with stems thicker than telephone poles, and Rebecca is a young woman, a painter and actress, and her brother Robert is working in film in California, and her sister Jane is a weaver and busy sculptor's wife, and I have heard the word “Grandpa!” from a girl of two, a boy of six, and girl of fourteen, Bob's kids.

There was no denying the resistance to that word—my God, I had hardly begun! What are these small persons doing on my lap lovingly repeating that terrible accusation with all its finality? How confidently they imagine I am Grandpa. And this makes me wonder who I imagine I am.

And then the pleasure of growing accustomed to it and even getting to where I can call it into a phone—“Hello? This is Grandpa!”—as though I am not an impersonator trying to show some kind of fatuous procreative accomplishment.

The shocks are there but feel more distant. At a recent town meeting in the high school on the nuclear freeze issue, people standing up to make their comments had stated their names and the number of years they had lived here: “John Smith; I've lived here seven years,” as though this gave their opinions more authority. The longest period of residence was around twelve years, except for one young woman whose family had settled here in 1680. I felt a slight unwillingness to announce that I had lived here forty
years. Heads turned. I was the old man. Okay, but who was I?

I have lived more than half my life in the Connecticut countryside, all the time expecting to get some play or book finished so I can spend more time in the city, where everything is happening. There is something about this forty-year temporary residence that strikes me funny now. If only we could stop murdering one another we could be a wonderfully humorous species. My contentment discontents me when I know that little happens here that I don't make happen, except the sun coming up and going down and the leaves emerging and dropping off and an occasional surprise like the recent appearance of coyotes in the woods. There is more unbroken forest from Canada down to here than there was even in Lincoln's youth, the farms having gradually vanished, and there is even the odd bear, they say, a wanderer down from the north, and now these coyotes. I have seen them. They have a fixed smug grin, as though they just stole something. And they cannot be mistaken for dogs, whom they otherwise resemble, because of their eyes, which look at you with a blue guilt but no conscience, a mixture of calculation and defensive distrust that domestication cured in dogs thousands of years ago.

And so the coyotes are out there earnestly trying to arrange their lives to make more coyotes possible, not knowing that it is my forest, of course. And I am in this room from which I can sometimes look out at dusk and see them warily moving through the barren winter trees, and I am, I suppose, doing what they are doing, making myself possible and those who come after me. At such moments I do not know whose land this is that I own, or whose bed I sleep in. In the darkness out there they see my light and pause, muzzles lifted, wondering who I am and what I am doing here in this cabin under my light. I am a mystery to them until they tire of it and move on, but the truth, the first truth, probably, is that we are all connected, watching one another. Even the trees.

Arthur Miller described
Timebends
as a pre-emptive strike against biographers who wished to pick over his bones while he was still alive. Though he approached the task with some trepidation, as befits a general protecting himself from incursion, he grew, he explained, to enjoy chatting to himself and recovering what might be lost not only to him but to those for whom the past was no more than a rumour. Americans, he suggested, liked to regard themselves as so many Adams, born to name the world anew. What, he asked himself, was the reality of the Depression or fascism to those for whom they were no more than words, and none too familiar words at that? The writing of his book thus gained a social and political point, which transcended mere motives of self-defence.

For him, one of the oddities of the Depression was that it never vitiated American optimism, faith in progress, technology, reinvention. What it did was to legitimate radicalism, which even invaded the White House so that it took the rest of the century to drive it out, and in the years after the publication of
Timebends
he would grow ever more desperate at the rolling back of New Deal principles as social and environmental protections were wilfully stripped away. He watched as the political system fell into the hands of those who saw the future in terms of a nineteenth-century liberalism claimed now by the Right who developed an imperial posture even as they denied being motivated by anything more than freedom and a defensive necessity. 9/11 was no less a shock to him than to anyone else – his own daughter, Rebecca, was on the streets of Manhattan when the aircraft struck – but he resented the power
it conceded to those who sought to defend the country by suspending the very values they insisted were under assault. He watched, dismayed, as Church and state moved ever closer, and laissez-faire politics triumphed. It seemed to him like a new Gilded Age and the collapse of corporations in a maze of corruption scarcely surprised him.

The importance of the Depression was that it offered a lesson in human necessities as it did in causality. For him, the past inhered in the present and its agent was memory, but its recovery was no mere experience in nostalgia, a regret at lost innocence. In his plays he chose to revisit the past both for the lessons it held and because it was a reminder that history is a human construct and hence the responsibility of those who were something more than its product. His restless journeying back and forth in
Timebends
and his plays is thus no Proustian exercise in chance assonances. It is an assertion of connection and connectiveness. As individuals and as a society, he insists that we are what we have wrought and that this is our glory and our shame. From
All My Sons
to
Finishing the Picture
he would dramatise his conviction that we are responsible for our actions, and his autobiography, in its account of triumphs and disasters, wrong paths taken and commitments maintained, was no less relentless in the rigour of its moral vision.

What was missing from
Timebends,
he acknowledged, looking back from 1995 when the seventy-year-old who had written it had turned eighty and was able to assess what he had wrought, was, firstly, his love of sport, intertwined for a while, as he grew up in Brooklyn, with a burgeoning sexuality that was a mystery and which, it seemed to him, had never been fused with love, which was something quite other.

Missing, too, was the Bible and the religion that intrigued but never claimed him. He even contributed to a television programme on atheism in the last year of his life, when others might at least have tried to negotiate a pragmatic truce with the God in whom he could never finally bring himself to believe. What he had in place of his religion, beyond his art, was a faith in man, constantly tested to near breaking point, hence his refusal to capitulate to what struck him as a merely fashionable despair.

Then there was popular music, about which he had said little in
Timebends,
beyond mentioning his brief attempt to become a crooner. Its absence from his account was perhaps as well since after the period of Sinatra, Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald he found rock music repetitious, thumping and vapid, while he despaired of singers
who could move with ease from synthetic ballads to advertising jingles. At last, after eighty years, he had, it seemed, finally turned himself into a grumpy old man baffled by youth, except that his ear remained remarkably attuned to a shifting language as he registered every change in a culture for which change was and always had been a defining necessity.