Timebends (71 page)

History bends; the ease with which I could, in the sixties, understand the fear and frustration of the dissident in the Sovietized world was the result, in some great part, of my experience before the Un-American Activities Committee in the fifties.

I remember Chairman Walter's brown-and-white shoes with perforated wing tips, and his blue blazer, a costume for a wedding in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and his pleasant nod to me as he made his entrance amid the stern faces of his Committee. He took no pains to conceal his surprise and interest in the large number of reporters present (including, of course, I. F. Stone, perhaps the hardest-working and best reporter in Washington), and especially in the unprecedented appearance of more than twenty foreign journalists, all seated at a long table not far from me. This had not happened before. It was not yet common for American plays to be published and widely performed in Europe, as mine had been, and I thanked my right hand for the work it had done over the years. Of course I knew that they were thinking that what had almost murdered European culture was sitting in this room under the almost palpable power of the American flag, and I wanted to reassure them that it was not going to happen here, at least not today.

I remember only a couple of disappointing colloquies with the Committee members. Arens produced a comment I had made soon after the end of the war in answer to a questionnaire circulated by
New Masses
magazine about the arrest of Ezra Pound, asking various writers their opinions on what should be done with him. I had said that he had clearly committed treason by broadcasting and writing for Mussolini in an attempt to demoralize American troops fighting in Germany and Italy, and that he should be
treated like anybody else who had committed the same crime.

Arens brought this up as a curious contradiction of my claim to believe in freedom of speech, a subject that also arose in an exchange with a Cincinnati congressman named Gordon Scherer. Once, on the subject of Pound, Scherer sternly asked whether “a Communist who is a poet should have the right to advocate the overthrow of this government by force and violence? In his literature, in poetry?”

I replied that “a man should have the right to write a poem about anything,” wondering at his provincial foolishness in choosing poetry as an incendiary form; he was probably unaware that nobody read poets in America except other poets or students under compulsion and that he'd have made a much more forceful point by using film or the novel as an example.

When I confirmed that I did think a poet could legally write such a subversive poem, Mr. Scherer actually threw up his hands and turned to the other members as though to say, “What more do we have to ask?”

I was shocked when Arens, a far more sophisticated fellow, pressed me to explain how I could deny Pound his right to speak. It was terribly strange to equate a poet writing a subversive poem in peacetime America with a man broadcasting month after month to American troops in order to undermine their morale in time of war. But whatever the theoretical considerations, mine went far deeper.

I must have been one of the few Americans who had actually heard an Ezra Pound broadcast from Axis Italy, and I could still recall the cold that had flowed into my heart while I was listening to him. Back during the war I had bought a new radio, a handsome Scott offered me at cost—still a considerable sum—by Irving Aranoff, a friend who was then the furniture buyer at A&S, the big Brooklyn department store. It had a powerful shortwave band, and one evening in our Willow Street house I turned it on and heard a clearly Midwestern voice. I assumed I had picked up an American station until the voice started talking about the necessity of killing the Jewish people. This was so arrantly vile and at the same time so calmly spoken that I thought at first it was some lame bad-taste satire by a desperate comic. But gradually the man's jolliness of spirit, his sheer ebullience, convinced and appalled me. Left to herself, he blithely explained, Europe, composed as she was of closely interrelated peoples, would easily solve all her problems; it was purely the work of the Jews that this war had happened, for
they were sworn to take vengeance on the gentiles while carrying out their plot to take over the entire world. The only solution, which he thanked God Hitler had had the intelligence to grasp, was to utterly destroy this hidden nation once and forever.

When Arens looked at me with his tight little pug face and asked if I didn't think it strange that in Pound's case I was so ready to abrogate my pristine principles of freedom of speech, I saw the face I had been fighting all my life and the blood came into my head. I regretted it and fought to down my anger, but he saw it happening and realized he had overstepped, since I was obviously one of those Jews who did not go into the gas without a complaint. Pound had been calling for racial murder and, judging from the broadcast I had heard, would have happily killed me as a Jew if he could have. The questioning petered out before Arens's hypocritical question could be exposed for what it was, but in a way I was glad for this little episode; it cleared the air. I had been against men like Pound who stood for wrong, and I was proud of it.

Still, leaving the room with Joe, I felt the flatness of anticlimax. If the Committee's basic interest in me was merely publicity rather than a serious defense of the republic, I nevertheless felt I had projected much more self-certainty than I really possessed, and at the same time a remoteness from the long-ago years of the thirties and forties when I had still connected the Soviets with socialism, and socialism with man's redemption. But such passions had no place in hearings conducted like some political tennis match whose narrow rules demanded that the ball bounce inside certain boxes; the Committee in order to win had to show I was dominated by the Party, and I had to show the opposite to prove that I had never skirted what now was treason.

Was it really enough to appear thoroughly selfish, their ultimate test of Americanism? Tolstoy as a Christian had once declared that he would rather be a Communist believer than a man of no beliefs. As Arens produced one after another of those petitions, protests, declarations—I seemed to have signed one a day—it crossed my mind how hopeful I must have been in those distant times! Had I signed nothing and cared less, I would not be here. But that was not the whole of it either. That pile of protests six inches thick, I realized, was as much a denial of reality as a commitment to the future. In truth, I had supported these various causes to express my fear of a looming victory of fascism and my alienation from the waste of potential in America while knowing nothing about life under any socialist regime. All I was
sure of now, in 1956, was the desire to acknowledge myself in the present, and perhaps by ceasing to repress what was ambitious and sensual and, yes, selfish, to assume responsibility for my moment and my space in the world.

In coming years my mind would pick out themes of this symphony and leave me with one or two that I could whistle, but they turned out to be variations created by shocked memory. “Why do you write so tragically about America?” was what I had for years recalled as the chairman's final remark to me; but in looking up the record, I find that it was Congressman Doyle asking, “Why do you not direct some of the magnificent ability you have to fighting against… Communist conspiracies?… Why do you not direct your magnificent talents to that? …”

But there was no mistaking what they wanted of me; it was reassurance and not the downbeat stuff I had been turning out. Nor did it dawn on anyone present that a congressman might not have the license to put such a question to a writer in America, and all their faces were placid as he asked it. And so for years to come his voice would echo far beyond himself or even his Soviet counterparts; it was the voice of state power everywhere, the voice of the club, the tribe, the spirit of unfreedom wherever organized society has existed. Walter and the Committee were simply a little less sophisticated, perhaps a little less intelligent than some other theologians of the idolatry of the state, and showed their hands when they need not have. Walter could not resist the temptation to cast his vote for optimism—at the end of the hearing he took a moment to thank me and to hope that in future I would write more happily about America.

And what came to mind in response was my luck: to have been born in a country whose founders had foreseen that Power was fundamentally an idiot who at all cost had to be restrained by a net of rules so basic and so clear that even he could be instructed in them before, in one of his rages, he tore down the house.

But before the end I had to be asked if a certain writer had been in the room when I arrived at a meeting of Communist writers a decade before, and as Arens probably anticipated by now, I of course had to ask not to be asked that question as I would not violate what on the spur of the moment I said was my sense of myself. I lacked the wit to inquire what investigative purpose the question could serve when he had already used the man's name in asking it, and when in addition it had been a perfectly legal meeting of a legal group. But of course it was all a
game of power entirely; they had the power and were bound to make me concede that I did not by trying to force me to break an implicit understanding among human beings that you don't use their names to bring trouble on them, or cooperate in deforming the democratic doctrine of the sanctity of peaceful association. I was warned that I was in contempt of a congressional committee—since I had chosen not to claim the protections of the Fifth Amendment in the belief that I had done nothing against which I needed them. After repeating my request not to be asked that question, which had no conceivable legislative or investigative purpose, I was warned once more of my jeopardy in refusing to answer it, and that was that: having claimed no constitutional protections, I could now be sent to jail.

Marilyn had come to give moral support during the last days of the hearing, spending her time with Olie Rauh hidden from the press in their home. It had never been easy for me to share trouble—weakness—with a woman, just as my father had always kept bad news to himself, and even when my eyes were the height of the handkerchief drooping out of his back pocket, this stoicism had seemed like strength. Something like fear was filling her up at my closing myself off. I was protecting a wound, defensively turning inward, but she glimpsed herself an unwanted wife cooped up for days in a strange house. I tried to see a good challenge in her need, if a somewhat scary one. It was the first time I had had to apologize. Like a child, like me, she wanted to dissolve the boundaries of her mind and body in another person, in the world, and I had seemed to throw her back on herself.

But we'd soon be off to England, to a new kind of film for her with perhaps the most respected actor in the world, and a new chance for
View
with an extraordinary young director. I must get to work at once on the full-length version, a fascinating test of the play's structure. I had originally designed it as bare as a telegram, its story in the foreground, its appeal essentially to the mind's awe at its amazing concatenations. But I thought differently now, that it could move people too with pity for the protagonist and even identification with him, a man who does so many unworthy things. Perhaps, in the nearly two years since writing it, I had learned to suspend judgment somewhat and to cease holding myself apart from the ranks of driven men—and not as a matter of principle but for real.

Exhausted sleep in a strange bed after twelve hours over the Atlantic in a piston plane and a confrontation at the airport with what Laurence Olivier, near to giggling with excitement, described as the largest press conference in English history. There had to have been at least four hundred journalists from all over the British Isles as far away as the remotest mists of Scotland, as well as a contingent from the Continent including two dour Basques in berets, the whole mob surrounded by a cordon of police. At one point the camera flashes formed a solid wall of white light that seemed to last for almost half a minute, a veritable aureole, and the madness of it made even the photographers burst out laughing. Naturally not a word of what was asked or answered remains in memory, but it hardly mattered then or later, everyone so astonished that Marilyn was among them, a goddess risen from their cold sea. When she smiled they did, and frowned when she frowned, and if she so much as giggled they roared with delighted laughter, and listened in churchly silence when she took a moment and actually
spoke!
with her voice so soft and soothing that grown men went limp as lichens at the living sound of it.

It was a bracing new tone for her to experience, of respectful adoration undermined by no insinuation of the puritanical sneer; whatever sexual problems these journalists may have had, they were not trying to pretend that they would not gladly have rushed into the dungeon for life in return for her favors, or plucked a rose for her from the face of a vertical stone cliff overhanging the fires of Hell. There was little else in any newspaper next day, and on certain other days too during her months in England; the country could have been towed into the Indian Ocean without anyone noticing, if she simply went shopping or made even a remotely quotable remark that would justify yet another front-page photo of her. Queen and Parliament may have run the country, but she commanded its heart. When she visited Marks and Spencer a few weeks after arriving, the entire store was vacated of customers and closed for fear of an uncontrollable stampede of people trying to get a look at her. She shattered a thousand years of British imperturbability.

In rolling green Surrey a rambling and not too unreasonably damp country house was rented from Lord North, the publisher of the
Financial Times,
in his forties and very tall and very thin and narrow-headed and very unable to take his eyes off her as he sat
in the music room, having taken the morning off to introduce us to the house, pointing a finger and saying, “And there is that boring dining room. Which you reach through that boring corridor and through the boring salon,” lengthening out the interview as long as it would stretch. There was a servant couple, Hungarian refugees who had not long before fled Budapest, and they waited breathlessly in one spot when called, like a pair of bewildered pigeons. I found a desk to work at in the music room, just behind the French doors opening onto the hundred feet of carpet that was called a lawn, which ended at a brick wall marking the boundary of Windsor Great Park, the vast estate surrounding the royal castle where the Queen occasionally stayed.