Just One Catch (22 page)

Thus, women no longer hankered for a virtuous man, but a specimen with “the face of a god and the loins of a stag.” If fiction offering such love “reflects the psyches of [its] readers, as to a considerable extent [it] must, [its] most disturbing feature is [its] aggressiveness,” Evans wrote. “Love … exists to give the woman a chance to ‘get her own back,'” after a taste of independence during the war years, when many women joined the workforce, followed by the bitterness of losing freedom in the postwar rush toward married conformity. “[Love] is, apparently, the one means thought to be at her disposal for humiliating men and ‘putting them in their place.'” The uneasy fit of old beliefs with new social predicaments had antiquated the once trusted tropes of fiction, and led to absurdities of style and story. “[T]he authors … seem bewildered at times by the impetuosity of their creations,” Evans wrote. “‘How did they get into bed so quickly?'” asks a narrator in one of the books he cited.

“Must We Change Our Sex Standards?” asked the lead article in the June 1948
Reader's Digest.
The article examined the just-released Kinsey Report. “[Americans] have [now] been told that practices long held in abhorrence must … be regarded as acceptable,” the article explained. “Science, so it is said, does not recognize any expression of sex as ‘abnormal' … [and] pretty much anything is all right.” How were the conventions of women's fiction—
any
fiction, for that matter—supposed to tackle
this
monster? Just three years earlier, in his story “I Don't Love You Any More,” Joe had mentioned
Reader's Digest
as an arbiter of the “sugar and tinsel dream of life.” Who could have predicted that in so short a time the magazine would describe “abhorrent” sexual practices (even if it
was
to denounce them)?

The changing subjects in Norman Rockwell's cover paintings for
The Saturday Evening Post
established as firmly as anything that America had swerved from the past, with no going back. The magazine's publisher, George Horace Lorimer, was a staunch, anti-Roosevelt Republican who wanted every aspect of his magazine to reflect his faith in hard work, self-reliance, and optimism about the nation. Rockwell's covers, featuring idealized main streets and happy folk in commonplace, often humorous situations, mirrored the ways the magazine's middle-class subscribers viewed themselves. “[I]f Rockwell drew cliché situations, then America itself was a cliché,” the artist Milton Glaser once said. “Not one of his drawings depicted something that did not exist.”

This made it all the more troubling to conventional sensibilities when Rockwell showed women in the workplace—Rosie the Riveter on the cover of the May 29, 1943, issue—or men in uniform who were obviously hampered mentally, physically, and emotionally. Lorimer had died in 1937. “It was fortunate … [he] did not live to see Rockwell's contributions to the covers of the Second World War period,” wrote John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman in their study
The Magazine in America, 1741–1990.

The immediate postwar years were even more turbulent. Weekly, monthly, magazines reported on the disarray in America's foreign policy and belligerent talk from Russia (we should “transact our necessary business with Russia at arm's length,” declared
The Atlantic Monthly
in February 1948). Again and again, articles appeared on the establishment of the state of Israel and the resultant rise in Arab militancy, on the Berlin blockade and airlift, on fears of nuclear proliferation.

What place did the fiction of “happily ever after” have in a world like this, except as escapist fare? This question dogged the literary journals, but Joe knew it was the wrong one. Some fiction had
always
been escapist—honorably so, in fact. But what of the fiction that—to paraphrase Lionel Trilling—sought to take full account of human complexity? How did it move forward in such volatile terrain?

Attempts at answers came from Saul Bellow (
The Victim,
1947) and Truman Capote (
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
1948), but the former was schematic, whereas the latter seemed merely confectionary. Both men had yet to find their literary footing. Nelson Algren's
The Man with the Golden Arm
(1949) recycled naturalism even more gleefully than Mailer had, and Carson McCullers's novels from earlier in the decade (
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
1940, and
Reflections in a Golden Eye,
1941) focused so thoroughly on southern grotesques, they had little to say about the world beyond their narrow confines. Compelling writers, all; but it was hard not to feel that the American novel was fraying a bit, unable to store—in the boxes it had built for itself—all it was asked to hold.

As for the short story: “Not for one hundred years, not since the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, has the short story in America displayed the tendencies it has shown during the past year,” said Martha Foley in her foreword to the 1948 edition of
Best American Short Stories.
“The overwhelming tension, the terror, the specter of undefined guilt which permeated Poe's work are the most obvious attributes of today's short story writing.” The “re-emergence of the old-fashioned ghost story,” the “breathless awaiting of the unknown,” was, Foley wrote, the short story writer's response to the “atom-bomb-inventing, airplane traveling, electronically powered United States of America.” Furthermore, the stories' preoccupation with ill-seen fears could be “linked to the war” and its aftermath. Yet here again (if Foley's generalizations held up), writers were responding to the new with well-worn gestures. Ghosts were creepy. They were not—in this flashpoint moment—particularly informative.

*   *   *

IN A PASSAGE
he ultimately cut from his first novel, Joe mocked the writing of an academic thesis. It was, he wrote, a process whose primary requirement was to make “an original contribution of nothing new to a subject of no importance.” For his M.A. thesis at Columbia, he chose as his subject “The Pulitzer Prize Plays, 1917–1935.” He didn't much care about the topic, nor did he know, exactly, what a thesis should entail. “I'm surprised [it] was approved,” he wrote later. It was a “trivial, unfruitful subject.” Nevertheless, it indicated both his practical ambitions and his growing dissatisfaction with the fiction he had written. Perhaps by studying the prizewinning plays of his lifetime, he could learn to be a successful dramatist. “I'm not sure that my motivations then … were worthy ones,” he said. He was soon to graduate. “I really wanted to make money and have some kind of status.… I write dialogue rapidly, so I thought I [might be] in playwriting or radio.”

At night, in the apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street, he worked on his thesis. Occasionally, he and Shirley invited someone to dinner—Buck Baudin was still a frequent guest—or Shirley's mother dropped in to cook for them and her husband. “[H]er parents found delight in watching me eat—always a second helping, often a third,” he recalled. Dottie was particularly proud of her prime rib crusted with garlic, salt, and paprika.

Joe had trouble convincing his brother and sister to visit. They worked hard, and subway travel, on a weekend or at the end of a day, was an extra ordeal for them. When they did come, Lee's wife, Perle, “gushed in praise at the [apartment's] sensible arrangement and the authentic look of several of the almost-genuine antique pieces” Shirley and Dottie had found to decorate the place, Joe said. Lee told Joe how proud he was of his achievements in school. He tried to ignore the splinters of jealousy he felt over his little brother's opportunities.

Few of Joe's old Coney Island pals had gotten out—or gotten far. Beansy Winkler had joined a photographic firm, converting Air Corps footage into color film for commercial use. Lou Berkman had left his father's junk shop to start a plumbing-supply business. Davey Goldsmith went to work for a hatband company.

George Mandel was the happiest success story Joe knew. He had recovered from his head wound and moved into a Greenwich Village loft to paint and write. He still illustrated comic books and lived, as well, on disability payments from the army. The comic-book industry had expanded during the war years, as superheroes—many of them fighting Nazis—embodied America's hopes and fears. “Superheroes allowed adolescents and adults to slip back to the confidence and inviolability of that last moment of childhood,” wrote Gerard Jones in
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book.
“It had been a long, nerve-wearing run for twenty years, through Prohibition and sexual revolution and economic transformation and urbanization and Depression and the rumors of war, when a naïve nation had to pretend to be adult and sophisticated.”

Most importantly, while serious fiction struggled to make sense of the war's consequences, comic-book heroes could serve unabashedly as “slapstick comedians in a vaudeville of holocaust,” Jones said. If given free rein, a talented and ambitious artist like George Mandel was well positioned to help the comics move from the straightforward heroism required in combat to the superhuman challenges awaiting peacetime America.

Often, Joe visited Mandel in the Village, sometimes in the company of Danny the Count. Mandel entertained them with stories of his recovery in the ward of a military hospital. Everybody in his sector had suffered a head wound, he said. Each man wore a turban of bandages. One day, a fellow patient dreamed up a money scheme: He was sure it would make him a millionaire once he got back to the States. He walked around the ward, asking everybody what they thought of his idea. The men told him he was brilliant. When he got to Mandel, he said, “All the guys think I'll make a million dollars. What do you think?” “Yeah, sure,” Mandel told him. “But maybe you better ask somebody who ain't been shot in the head.”

*   *   *

“YOU'RE NOT GOING
to England!” Dottie said.

Shirley had just informed her mother that Joe had received a Fulbright Scholarship. President Truman had signed the program into law a few years before, by which war-surplus money could be used to facilitate student exchanges. What it meant for Joe was a year of study at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University.

“I didn't even wait to see if my master's thesis had been accepted,” Joe recalled. “There was a ship sailing with two or three hundred Fulbright and Rhodes scholars.”

He also seems to have “cut corners” on his foreign-language requirement, confessing in his memoir that a “charitable young lady from California,” presumably a fellow student, “surreptitiously helped me meet the … requirement.” He added, “I'm sorry now I did that.”

As when he had crossed the ocean after the war, he was one of the few people who didn't get seasick. He retained a healthy appetite. Days later, Shirley was grateful to be on solid ground.

St. Catherine's College, whose roots went back to 1868, sat on the bank of the Cherwell River, on the east side of Oxford. It had a glass and concrete facade, with a prominent bell tower and a large dining hall inside, noteworthy for its striking Cumberland-slate floor. If Shirley had visions of spending a year touring the romantic old capitals of Europe, she was soon crestfallen. At one point, she and Joe did catch a ferry from England to France, and passed a few days in Paris, enjoying the restaurants (which seemed to have recovered from the German occupation more quickly than anything else). They also made a halfhearted, but failed, attempt to find a synagogue there in which to observe Yom Kippur; Lena had warned them before they left the States that Europeans would think badly of American Jews if they didn't attend services.

For the most part, Joe hunkered down at Oxford and immersed himself in books. “When I had the Fulbright, I spent one term on Milton and one on Chaucer and one on Shakespeare and I came to the conclusion that Milton is pretty much of a waste,” he told a journalist in 1969. “There's almost nothing he says that's pertinent or of any importance to us today, not only in terms of philosophy or attitude but even aesthetically.” The remark shows he was continuing to read for his writing, not for any scholarly pursuit. Nevertheless, he also read a “massive amount of Shakespeare criticism from Samuel Johnson to Jan Kott.” He read Swift and Voltaire. Aristophanes fascinated him, he said, because of his interest in “war mentality and … wartime society.”

College reports indicate he made “very good progress” while at St. Catherine's. An old friend from NYU, Edward Bloustein, who went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, remembered Joe “was impressed by the place more than his studies and spent a considerable proportion of the year working hard on a short story.” The story does not seem to have survived, or to have stirred a desire in Joe to return to fiction full-time.

Bloustein, who later became president of Rutgers University, spent much of his time at Oxford trying to repair international relations after Joe had swept through a room. “I [always] had a distinct sense of the strength of this guy,” Bloustein told Barbara Gelb. “But he had … a very biting humor that sometimes distress[ed] me. His humor [was] delivered so deadpan, people misinterpret[ed] it and [could] feel insulted. This happened often when I was with him in England. I would take the people aside and explain Joe to them, and then they would find him the attractive man he [was].”

Before Joe sailed overseas, he left a dossier with the Columbia University Placement Bureau, to be mailed out whenever a job opportunity arose. Journalism, teaching—he wasn't sure what he wanted, but on January 31, 1950, he wrote Professor Theodore J. Gates at Pennsylvania State College to apply formally for a teaching position in the Department of English Composition. The Placement Bureau had notified Joe of the opening. “I have had no previous teaching experience,” he admitted, “but my scholastic record is a good one.” He said he planned to return to the United States at the end of June. As his residence, he gave Dottie and Barney's address.