Timebends (85 page)

Gjon Mili was tall, with a drooping mustache under a long bulb
of a Middle Eastern nose, and hair that was cut by Sammy, another unmarriageable Albanian who ran Mili's errands and from the looks of the haircut was easily distracted. Apart from photo supplies Gjon never bought anything and could nibble on the same cheese or stale bread all week. A mountain goat.
Life
gave him a one-room office in their building after his studio burned down, a major catastrophe, what with his thousands of photographs and gifts and old hats and letters from Picasso and everybody else who had mattered in the past fifty years. He loved folk dancing and went to lower Broadway every week and jumped around with a lot of other Albanians, most of them half his height. To him, everything was marvelous. He was a little like Saroyan, essentially an unattachable man with a great appetite for friendship and loneliness and no idea of the value of a dollar; although he pretended to be a shrewd trader he really didn't care about it. In his last years, two decades hence, he talked a lot about his mother, whose approval he still needed: in his late seventies he was still becoming a success in America so she, in her nineties, could boast way up there in those sequestered Albanian mountains.

Cartier-Bresson was from yet another planet, a Norman of high family who had read a lot. was always shaved, and dressed a bit on the English side in fine muted tweed jackets. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the war, finally escaping on the third attempt, and had hardly stopped traveling since. China, the Soviet Union, Africa, India—the world's elegant muteness had been caught by his Leica. Like Inge and Gjon, he lived painting, but unlike her, politics too.

These three simply could not or would not connect with the coming generation's inability to understand that photography was somehow, in some secret way, an extension of prophecy. They had no way of explaining that a photograph had to move the heart toward the sea of spirit and, however remotely, provoke bad, selfish, bigoted, narrow people to want to destroy it. The enemy was indifference always, and all the disguises of vulgarity in this, one of the most vulgar of the arts. I felt good near Inge's long view of everything, which still allowed her an involved uninvolvement with the latest thing.

What repeatedly surprised me was the austerity of her pride. “I am a snob,” she once said, meaning that she would never stand in the middle of a crowd, only on the edge where she could see the whole. Balenciaga had made a broad gray hat and roomy gray coat and given them to her along with a rack of other clothes in return
for her photographs and for the way she spoke Spanish like a Spaniard and disagreed with him when she felt like it. She had an earned suspicion of sentimentality about large-hearted humanity, raised as she had been in Nazi Germany with its fraudulent populism. For refusing to join the Nazi student organization, she was forced to assemble plane parts at Tempelhof airport in Berlin at a time when it was being bombed daily, working alongside Ukrainian women no one was likely to miss when they went up.

A year after we met, we were crossing the Rhine on a tiny ferry when she was suddenly approached by a bowing gentleman, well dressed in a fedora and tweed coat. I was at the rail watching the shoreline and, turning, saw him bend slightly forward with a fixed, wheedling smile. Back in the car driving off the ferry, Inge explained that he had been asking whether she could help him find a publisher for a book he was writing.

“He was the one who had me sent to Tempelhof.”

“He tried to kill you.”

“Yes, you could say that.” She whitened.

We drove on up a mountain and stood before a castle overlooking the Rhine. Majestic. It had all been run by the Ku Klux Klan, on the same level of argument. But Heine had stood here once. Maybe the past really had been severed and the avant-garde was right. Even so, I had to search out a continuity. One had to explain all this so that people could understand it and not do it again, but the avant-garde was talking mainly to its converts, it seemed to me, and that simply could not be right. On the other hand, no conventional realism could illuminate this murder-by-civilization.

This quite ordinary-looking fellow politely wondering if she could help him find a publisher, both of them standing in the wind on the tiny ferry deck—it only held four cars and a few passengers, an idyllic little ferry under the brow of the chesty castle from whose crenellated tower a beer-bellied baron had long ago commanded cannonades upon ships below that failed to stop and pay his toll. It was a normal way of making a living in those days, they say. If you owned a castle, that was what you did, and you were a member of the nobility and had a crest and pride.

I would have been one of those on board the ship being shot at, not one of the shooters. The Jewish view of things is sometimes irritating.

We drove down the mountain. The Rhine can be frightening if you let yourself think about it. But so can everything. “Do not think about any one thing for too long,” said old gray Professor Pillsbury
in 1935, having not too long before been caught inside his own brain trying to get out and into the world. So we drove down the mountain and talked about something other than the man on the ferry. I was slowly getting to understand why she called herself a snob.

Johnny Langenegger, my driver and recording engineer, steered the new green 1940 Chevy van carefully along the barely perceptible trail through the pines, branches scraping at the top of the government vehicle. Suddenly we were at the edge of a vertical drop of granite that went ten stories down to a mile-wide floor. We could see little moving dots of men working the quarry. The air smelled of resin, like rotting oranges.

Johnny's head was close-cropped. He was trying to enlist in the marines for the big war that he was sure was coming soon, certainly by 1941 at the latest, and he didn't want to be in the army. We sat in the truck trying to figure what to do about getting down to the quarrymen, whom I would ask to talk into the microphone that was attached to the immense record-cutting machine in the back of the van. I was collecting dialect speech for B. A. Botkin of the folklore division of the Library of Congress, and we had been traveling around North Carolina for the past ten days talking to all kinds of people. It was wonderful how speech patterns could change so suddenly out in these backwoods places from one mile to the next, and they said the quarrymen spoke in a way all their own. In desperation I had gotten the job through my friend Joe Liss, who worked in the radio division of the library. Hardly two years out of college, with the WPA Theatre Project dissolved by Congress, I had not yet been able to connect in commercial radio on any regular basis, and my two Hopwood Awards were no longer resonating in my or anyone else's mind.

“Why don't we try going back to the paved road and see if it leads to an office or something. There must be a way to get down there,” I said to Johnny. As he turned toward me, I saw his eyes go wide open and his mouth fall apart. I turned to my window and looked into the octagonal barrel of a shotgun. It was wavering. At the other end of it was a red-faced old man in denim shirt and overalls sitting in a truck—it was weird and dreamy that it had got there without our hearing it—and next to him a stringy woman was pulling at his right arm and saying something and looking angry and terrified at the same time.

The old red-faced man was speaking with lips drawn back over his enormous horsey false teeth. The woman kept pulling at him and calling his name, something like Martin or maybe Carter.

“You get out of here, you Jew bastards, or I'll blow your goddam heads off!” He released the safety, and my head pitched forward against the windshield as Johnny gunned the Chevy in reverse and went down the dirt track backwards doing at least twenty miles an hour.

The man had read the gold federal seal saying “United States Government” on the van's door, and that meant Roosevelt, who in some places down here was Rosenfeld, and we were all Jews out to get the races mixed, niggers in bed with white and so forth, because that was what the kikes were after, to destroy the Christian and so on. By this time he might also have heard that I had been in the town square interviewing black people who had nowhere to go after being fired from the shipyard they had recently finished building in the swampland mud.

The wavering barrel of that shotgun remained an afterimage in my brain, as if I had stared into a blindingly bright light. I saw it again, that black steel hole, as we drove down the mountain toward the Rhine. It was no good simply saying the past was canceled. But why did it seem to have no particular connection with the present and who I was now? Cancellation was the beginning of the sixties for me, the great disconcerting wipeout of all that had gone before.

Inge and I were walking down Madison to the Waldorf-Astoria. She would be off to some mountain in Argentina soon to photograph the making of a Yul Brynner film. She had photographed refugees with Brynner in North Africa for the United Nations a couple of years before.

We walked fast. Winter was blowing into New York, making the shops look cozy behind the store windows. A moment comes when you realize that you are friends and may separate or come together and part again quite happily, with no dependency. A good moment.

It was about six years since I had slipped into the Waldorf after days in the Bay Ridge streets with the wild boys, and about twelve since the Waldorf Conference. Now I was going inside to answer questions, along with the novelist James T. Farrell, before a convention of the American Psychological Association. Inge thought it should be interesting; her father had been a professor and scientist,
and academies were serious business. But for me it was merely another attempt to look into the window of the time, a time that I could still not feel was mine. A time is yours when you and your friends are taking the same things for granted without thinking about it. I seemed unable to take anything for granted anymore, and I kept trying to figure out what others were taking for granted. The country had become foreign to me, and I did not understand why or how I had become this culturally hard-of-hearing fellow.

An audience of hundreds, surprisingly mostly women. This was not yet Vietnam, World War II was long gone. The Depression had not come back. There were still big fins on the cars. It was before Kennedy was shot, but Castro had beaten us at the Bay of Pigs, and men still had short haircuts. Milton Berle and Sid Caesar were on television. Sinatra was still a Democrat, like most of the showbiz folks. Even so the colors were beginning to run on the big cartoon; the liberal consensus was disintegrating, but the process still had no name.

Farrell and I sat side by side. Trying to concentrate on the speeches, I no longer knew why I had come here, but since he, a most honest and intense man, seemed absorbed in what was happening, I felt I should be too. I may have been hoping that someone would say something that would accidentally strike the beat of the time for me.

With the two formal speeches finished, somebody asked me about the place of morality in science. Everybody has a tag, and I was still the moralist, even now that I was not too regular what with one divorce behind me and a new one coming up.

All I could think to say was that morality could not be divorced from science—a reply that seemed to groan with the obvious if only we recalled the example of the Nazi doctors who, under the pretext of studying the physiology of drowning, had people bound hand and foot, thrown into pools, and then fished out for autopsies. Just because you had built a cathedral or synagogue, it did not mean you had a religion, and cutting people up did not mean you had a science. I kept my answer brief, hoping that we could now get on to something more interesting.

But there seemed to be some uneasiness in the audience at my answer. It left me bewildered. And when everyone was getting up to leave, a crowd, mostly women, surrounded me and asked why throwing those trussed people into the water was not science. Were they serious? Apparently. I could only answer that if it was science I preferred the Middle Ages. But mainly I was speechless. This was the first time I had faced Cool, the truthfulness without
truth, the blankly interested posthumanist faces. I was surrounded by twenty or thirty women who were not at all satisfied that drowning people was not science and wanted further explanation. I may have been mistaken, but it crossed my mind that this could not have been so before the war, before it had been thoroughly done in the camps. Again I was at a loss. “Supposing some doctors said that they had to burn up a few million people to scientifically measure if human smoke had some special effect on the atmosphere, since it had never been done before, at least on that scale? Would that be science?”—but my words got lost in the chattering cross talk, and as we left, I wasn't so sure myself that there was any way of establishing what science was anymore. I thought the color had gone out of Inge's cheeks, as it had near the Rhine.

Science was reason's triumph, we had been so pridefully taught, the defeat of the Beast. But what happened when the Beast learned science? This had ceased to be an intellectual problem for me, had crossed over into my heart. I was living in a hotel, with no distractions—unusual for me—and with perhaps too much time alone, I had come to fear something I could not define or name.

Brooks Atkinson came up one afternoon with no special mission or interview in mind and sat talking for an hour or so. I felt I was a disappointment to him; as I read his mind, he may have expected that after my nearly five-year spell of Hollywood and notoriety, I would now be resolutely turning back to the theatre. It was nice of him to think it needed me—he was another of those who cared a lot—but my main feeling these days was something like embarrassment. Why, I wasn't sure, but it was certainly not a mood in which to start a new play.

The end of the past struck me wherever I looked. I knew hardly anyone of my generation anymore. In my mid-forties, I seemed to be the oldest one in the room. It was very strange that few remembered what I remembered.