My Generation (36 page)

[Introduction to
The Wheat and the Chaff
, Seaver, 1982.]

N
one of the members of my family is a cheerleader for the values so stridently celebrated at this past summer's convention in Houston. But I want to describe how the rescue team they organized on Christmas Day of 1985 helped ensure my survival and, perhaps paradoxically, confirmed a lovely statement by Barbara Bush at the same event.
*

For weeks I had been confined to a room in a mental hospital, suffering from one of the darkest pains known to humankind—clinical depression. They burst into that grim green cell at noon, all twelve of them, my wife and son, three daughters and their extended families. They had brought with them an enormous turkey dinner complete with napkins and silver which they laid out on my bed. Cajolery or bribery had created this miracle, along with the very presence of such a mob—regulations stipulated no visitors in excess of two.

Even more impressive was their feat of muscling past the custodians a television set and VCR. My oldest daughter, a movie director, had pieced together—out of 8 mm film I had shot—a ribbon of scenes from the distant past, much childish mugging and antic tomfoolery set to Mozart. How delicious
it was, in that chill and laughterless place, to hear the sound of pure hilarity and feel appetite stir again, and perceive the first glimmer of light in the dungeon of madness. I had a long way to go, yet months afterwards it was possible for me to situate recollections of this noisy explosion of love at the very start of my recovery.

That Christmas Day my family presented, by most common American standards, an unorthodox profile. One of my daughters was living in sin with her lover, who was present. Another daughter's stepson—he was also on hand—was born out of wedlock and had been reared with great proficiency and tenderness by a single mother who happens to be a lesbian. A favorite godson was likewise illegitimate. Had I been able to take a poll among them I would have found that then, as now, none of the members of my family believed in the power of prayer, or the need for it in or out of school (or hospital). All of them at one time or another have smoked pot, and inhaled it. None considers homosexuality to be either wrong or unnatural, and they all support a woman's right to abortion. They can take pornography or leave it but in any case do not judge it to be evil. Family values? The phrase would make them hoot. Family, as Barbara Bush said, “means putting your arms around each other, and being there.” This was the only consideration which had value on that day of the beginning of my own rebirth.

[Previously unpublished. Styron wrote this reminiscence in 1992 at the invitation of
Time
magazine for a projected series on “The Family.” The series was canceled; Styron's statement is preserved among his papers at Duke University.]

I
n France the Clinton Tragedy—no longer too strong a word, in English or French—has prompted commentators to try out every possible variation on the theme of American puritanism. For years I've been attempting to convince my friends in France that Americans are collectively quite as broadminded as the French. In fact, the tenor of public opinion in respect to our president's sex life has proved the point that Americans are generally as tolerant as the French in matters like lust and its capacity to unhinge otherwise reasonable human beings. What the French don't possess is the equivalent of the American South, where a strain of Protestant fundamentalism is so maniacal that one of its archetypal zealots, Kenneth Starr, has been able to really dismantle the presidency because of a gawky and fumbling sexual dalliance. No wonder that the French, along with much of the rest of the world, view Clinton's Tormentor as the embodiment of America's terrifying puritanical spirit.

Absent too from the French scene is a media with fangs bared to go to work on the presidential throat.
Newsweek'
s early rooting about for dirt in the Lewinsky affair would not have found a French equivalent. Nor would a French paper have printed a preposterous headline about Clinton's wretched little liaison such as that which ran above Peggy Noonan's column in
The Wall Street Journal:
“American Caligula.”
¹
While the French press is as celebrity-sodden and, in certain ways, as prone to sensation-mongering as
our own, and while its members can behave like attack dogs in political affairs, almost all journals have continually honored the privacy of those in high office; their restraint has helped them avoid the sins of their American counterparts, some of whose indecent prying helped lay the groundwork for Clinton's ghastly public denuding at the hands of Kenneth Starr.

In May of 1981, on the day of François Mitterrand's inaugural, I stood amid a small circle of people gathered near the new president in the bush garden of the Élysée Palace. Mitterrand had a fondness for writers, and I, along with Arthur Miller and Carlos Fuentes, had been invited to the occasion. The sunny weather was almost perfect, the historic nature of the moment caused people to speak in excited, mildly alcoholic murmurs, and Mitterrand himself rocked back and forth on his heels, wearing his new grandeur with a look of numb surprise. But mainly I recall a subtle and hovering eroticism. Sex drenched the air like perfume. Seven of the admirers surrounding Mitterrand were lovely young women in their spring dresses; as time wore on and they left his side, one by one, each twittered, “
A bientot
,
François!
” A French journalist whom I knew, standing next to me, whispered amiably, “And you can bet they
will
be back soon.”

Mitterrand had a wife and he had a mistress, who bore him a daughter—this is old news by now—and he also had a slew of girlfriends. Everybody knew about it and nobody gave a damn, least of all the members of the press, who had been aware for years of Mitterrand's robust appetites. They never mentioned his diligent womanizing. In a touching memoir about Mitterrand's last months of life—published this past spring in English under the title “Dying without God”—the journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert spoke with the ex-president about numerous matters—politics, literature, history—but the subject of women came often to the fore. Giesbert knew Mitterrand in the days before his presidency and he recalls mornings when he would run into this avid lover, resembling “not so much a night owl as a wolf that had been out on the prowl until dawn.” Giesbert adds that women “were not merely his passion but the only beings on the face of the earth capable of making him abandon his cynicism.”

Mitterrand liked and admired Bill Clinton (as opposed to Reagan, whom he called a “dullard” and a “complete nonentity”) and was especially fascinated by what he described as his “animality,” which doubtless meant something steamier. It's easy to perceive a kinship between the two chiefs of state. Clinton's own tumultuous sexual past—the Arkansas bimbo eruption,
“the hundreds of women” he spoke about to Monica Lewinsky—might find a correspondence in the wonderfully candid remark uttered by the dying Mitterrand: “To be able to yield to carnal temptation is in itself reason enough to govern.”

Mitterrand was a deeply flawed character—many Frenchmen still hate him—but his presidency was creative and illustrious. Clinton's self-admitted wrongdoing, his lies and his nearly incomprehensible recklessness, helped produce Starr's inquisition—an ordeal that has left his career and his ambitions in wreckage. But if Clinton is the victim of a sexual “addiction,” whatever that means, so clearly was Mitterrand; the difference is that in France a compact between the press and the public allowed the president to deal with his obsession, and even perhaps to revel in it, so long as he governed well.

In America a complicity between the public and the media has generated an ignoble voyeurism so pervasive that we have never permitted a man like Bill Clinton to proclaim with fury that his sex life, past and present, is nobody's business but his own. Long before Kenneth Starr set up his cruel and indefinable pillory there had begun to evolve a climate where privacy—
la vie privée
—to be cherished above all rights—was all but gone, leaving the way clear for the Starr Report itself, and its invincible repulsiveness.

[
New Yorker
, October 12, 1998. The text published here is the full version, preserved in a handwritten draft in the Styron collection at the Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Carolina.]

I
t was perhaps unfortunate that Richard J. Daley, the hoodlum suzerain of the city, became emblematic of all that the young people in their anguish cried out against, even though he plainly deserved it. No one should ever have been surprised that he set loose his battalions against the kids; it was the triumphant end product of his style, and what else might one expect from this squalid person, whose spirit suffused the great city as oppressively as that of some Central American field marshal? And it was no doubt inevitable, moreover, a component of the North American oligarchic manner—one could not imagine a Trujillo so mismanaging his public relations—that after the catastrophe had taken place he should remain so obscenely lodged in the public eye, howling “Kike!” at Abe Ribicoff, packing the galleries with his rabble, and muttering hoarse irrelevancies about conspiracy and assassination, about the
Republican
convention (“They had a fence in Miami, too, Walter, nobody ever talks about
that
!”) to a discomfited Cronkite, who wobbled in that Oriental presence between deference and faint-hearted suggestions that Miami and Chicago just might not be the same sort of thing.

That is what many of us did along about Thursday night in Chicago—retreat to the center, the blissful black interior of some hotel room, and turn on the television set. For after four days and nights in the storm outside, after the sleepless, eventually hallucinated connection with so many of the
appalling and implausible events of that week, it was a relief to get off the streets and away from the parks and the Amphitheater and the boorish, stinking hotel lobbies and to see it as most Americans had seen it—even if one's last sight was that of the unspeakable Daley, attempting to explain away a shame that most people who witnessed it will feel to their bones for a very long time.

Yet, again, maybe in the immediate aftermath of the convention it was too bad that Daley should have hogged a disproportionate share of the infamy that has fallen upon the Democratic Party; for if it is getting him off the hook too easily to call him a scapegoat, nonetheless the execration he has received (even the New York
Daily News
, though partly, of course, out of civic rivalry, carried jeering stories about him) may obscure the fact that Daley is only the nastiest symbol of stupidity and desuetude in a political party that may die, or perhaps is already dead, because it harbors too many of his breed and mentality. Hubert Humphrey, the departed John Bailey, John Connally, Richard Hughes, Ed Muskie—all are merely eminent examples of a rigidity and blindness, a feebleness of thought, that have possessed the party at every level, reaching down to those Grant Wood delegates from North Dakota who spilled out from the elevators into my hotel lobby every morning, looking bright-eyed and war-hungry, or like Republicans, whom they emulated through becoming one of the few delegations that voted against the pacific minority Vietnam plank
en bloc
. It has been said that if various burdensome and antiquated procedural matters—the unit rule, for instance—had been eliminated prior to this convention, the McCarthy forces might have gained a much larger and more significant strength, and this is at least an arguable point of view; for a long while I myself believed it and worked rather hard to see such changes come about (some did), but now in retrospect it seems that the disaster was meant to be.

Recalling those young citizens for Humphrey who camped out downstairs in my hotel, that multitude of square, seersuckered fraternity boys and country-club jocks with butch haircuts, from the suburbs of Columbus and Atlanta, who passed out “Hubert” buttons and “Humphrey” mints, recalling them and their elders, mothers and fathers, some of them delegates and not all of them creeps or fanatics by any means, but an amalgam of everything—the simply well-heeled, most of them, entrenched, party hacks tied to the mob or with a pipeline to some state boss, a substantial number hating the
war but hating it not enough to risk dumping Hubert in favor of a vague professorial freak who couldn't feel concern over Prague and hung out with Robert Lowell—I think now that the petrification of a party that allowed such apathy and lack of adventurousness and moral inanition to set in had long ago shaped its frozen logic, determined its fatal choice months before Eugene McCarthy or, for that matter, Bobby Kennedy had come along to rock, ever so slightly, the colossal dreamboat. And this can only reinforce what appears to me utterly plausible: that whatever the vigor and force of the dissent, whatever one might say about the surprising strength of support that the minority report received on the floor, a bare but crucial majority of Americans still is unwilling to repudiate the filthy war. This is really the worst thought of all.

Right now, only a day or so after the event, it is hard to be sure of anything. A residue of anguish mingles with an impulse toward cynicism, and it all seems more than ever a happening. One usually sympathetic journalist of my acquaintance has argued with some logic but a little too much levity that the violent confrontations, like the show of muscle among the black militants, were at least only a psychological necessity: after all, there were no killings, few serious injuries; had there been no violence the whole affair would have been tumescent, impossibly strained, like
coitus interruptus
, and who would have had a bruise or a laceration to wear home as a hero's badge? As for myself, the image of one young girl no older than sixteen, sobbing bitterly as she was being led away down Balbo Avenue after being brutally cracked by a policeman's club, is not so much a memory as a scene imprinted on the retina—a metaphor of the garish and incomprehensible week—and it cannot be turned off like the Mr. Clean commercial that kept popping up between the scenes of carnage. I prefer to think that the events in Chicago were as momentous and as fateful as they seemed at the time, even amid the phantasmagorical play of smoke and floodlights where they were enacted.

One factor has been generally overlooked: the weather. Chicago was at its bluest and balmiest, and that gorgeous sunshine—almost springlike—could not help but subtly buoy the nastiest spirit and moderate a few tempers. Had the heat been as intense and as suffocating as it was when I first arrived in the city the Tuesday before the convention began, I feel certain that the subsequent mayhem would have become slaughter. I came at that time to
the Credentials Committee meeting in the Conrad Hilton as one of four “delegate challengers” from Connecticut, presenting the claim that the popular vote in the state primaries had indicated that 13 delegates out of 44 should be seated for Eugene McCarthy, rather than the 9 allowed the McCarthy forces by John Bailey. Although logic and an eloquent legal brief by Dean Louis Pollak of the Yale Law School were on our side, the megalithic party structure could not be budged, and it was on that stifling day—when I scrutinized from the floor the faces of the hundred-odd cozy fat cats of the committee, two from each state plus places like Guam, nearly all of whom were committed to the Politics of Joy and who indeed had so embraced the establishment mythopoeia that each countenance, male or female and including a Negro or two, seemed a burnished replica of Hubert Humphrey—that I became fully aware that McCarthy's cause was irrevocably lost. Nor was I encouraged to hedge on this conviction when, sweating like a pig, I made a brief
ad hominem
plea in summation of our case, finished, and sat down to the voice of the committee chairman, Governor Richard Hughes of New Jersey, who said, “Thank you, Mr. Michener.” Later, the governor's young aide came up to apologize, saying that the governor knew full well who I was, that in the heat and his fatigue he must have been woolgathering and thinking of James Michener, who was a good friend of Mr. Hughes—a baffling explanation, which left me with ominous feelings about life in general.

When I returned as an observer to Chicago the following Sunday, the lobby of the Conrad Hilton resembled a fantasy sequence in some Fellini movie, people in vertical ascent and horizontal drift, unimaginable shoals of walleyed human beings packed elbow to elbow, groin to rump, moving sluggishly as if in some paradigmatic tableau of the utter senselessness of existence. It took me fifteen minutes to cross from one side of the hotel to the other, and although I endured many low moments during the convention, I think it was at this early point, amid that indecent crush of ambitious flesh, that my detestation of politics attained an almost religious passion.

The Conrad Hilton is the archetypal convention hotel of the universe, crimson and gold, vast, nearly pure in its efficient service of the demands of power and pelf, hence somehow beyond vulgarity, certainly sexless, as if dollar hustling and politicking were the sole source of its dynamism; even the pseudo-Bunny waitresses in the Haymarket bar, dungeon-dark like most
Chicago pubs, only peripherally distract from the atmosphere of computers and credit cards. Into the Hilton lobby later that week—as into the lobbies of several other hotels—the young insurgents threw stink bombs, which the management misguidedly attempted to neutralize with aerosol deodorants; the effect was calamitous—the fetor of methane mingled with hair spray, like a beauty parlor over an open sewer—and several of the adjoining restaurants seemed notably lacking in customers. Not that one needed any incentive to abandon the scene, one fled instinctively from such a maggot heap; besides, there was much to study, especially in downtown Chicago on the streets and in the park, where the real action was, not at the convention itself (I only went to the Amphitheater once, for the vote on the minority report), whose incredible atmosphere of chicanery and disdain for justice could best be observed through television's ceaselessly attentive eye.

Since I somehow felt that sooner or later the cops would make their presence felt upon me more directly (a hunch that turned out to be correct), it appeared to me that they deserved closer scrutiny. They were of course everywhere, not only in the streets but in the hotel lobbies and in the dark bars and restaurants, in their baby-blue shirts, so ubiquitous that one would really not be surprised to find one in one's bed; yet it was not their sheer numbers that truly startled, as impressive as this was, but their peculiar personae, characterized by a beery obesity that made them look half again as big as New York policemen (I never thought I might feel what amounted to nostalgia for New York cops, who by comparison suddenly seemed as civilized as London constables) and by a slovenly, brutish, intimidating manner I had never seen outside the guard room of a Marine Corps brig. They obviously had ample reason for this uptight façade, yet it was instantly apparent that in their sight not only the yippies but all civilians were potential miscreants, and as they eyed passersby narrowly I noticed that Daley, or someone, had allowed them to smoke on duty. Constantly stamping out butts, their great beer guts drooping as they gunned their motorcycles, swatting their swollen thighs with their sticks, they gave me a chill, vulnerable feeling, and I winced at the way their necks went scarlet when the hippies yelled “Pigs!”

On Tuesday night I left a party on the Near North Side with a friend, whom I shall call Jason Epstein, in order to see what was going on in nearby Lincoln Park. There had been rumors of some sort of demonstration and when
we arrived, a little before midnight, we saw that in fact a group of young people had gathered there—I estimated a thousand or so—most of them sitting peacefully on the grass in the dark, illuminated dimly by the light of a single portable floodlamp, and fanning out in a semicircle beneath a ten-foot-high wooden cross. The previous night, testing the 11
P.M.
curfew, several thousands had assembled in the park and had been brutally routed by the police, who bloodied dozens of demonstrators. Tonight the gathering was a sort of coalition between the yippies and the followers of a group of Near North Side clergymen who had organized the sit-in in order to claim the right of the people of the neighborhood to use the park without police harassment. “This is our park!” one minister proclaimed over the loudspeaker. “We will not be moved!”

Someone was playing a guitar, and folk songs were sung; there was considerable restlessness and tension in the air, even though it was hard to believe that the police would actually attack this tranquil assembly, which so resembled a Presbyterian prayer meeting rather than any group threatening public decorum and order. Yet in the black sky a helicopter wheeled over us in a watchful ellipse, and word got back to us that the police had indeed formed ranks several hundred yards down the slope to the east, beyond our sight. A few people began to leave and the chant went up: “Sit down! Sit down!” Most of us remained seated and part of the crowd began singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Meanwhile, instructions were being given out by the old campaigners: Don't panic; if forced to the street, stay away from the walls and blind alleys; if knocked to the ground, use your jacket as a cushion against clubs; above all—walk, don't run.

The time was now about twelve-thirty. Vaseline was offered as a protection against Mace, wet strips of cloth were handed out to muffle the tear gas. The tension was not very pleasant; while it is easy to overdramatize such a moment, it does contain its element of raw threat, a queasy, visceral suspense that can only be compared to certain remembered episodes during combat training. “They'll be here in two minutes!” the minister announced.

And suddenly they were here, coming over the brow of the slope fifty yards away, a truly stupefying sight—one hundred or more of the police in a phalanx abreast, clubs at the ready, in helmets and gas masks, just behind them a huge perambulating machine with nozzles, like the type used for spraying insecticide, disgorging clouds of yellowish gas, the whole advancing
panoply illuminated by batteries of mobile floodlights. Because of the smoke, and the great cross outlined against it, yet also because of the helmeted and masked figures—resembling nothing so much as those rubberized wind-up automata from a child's playbox of horrors—I had a quick sense of the medieval in juxtaposition with the twenty-first century or, more exactly, a kind of science fiction fantasy, as if a band of primitive Christians on another planet had suddenly found themselves set upon by mechanized legions from Jupiter.