Timebends (27 page)

I had made no bones about being a rather impatient moralist, not even in interviews, where I was naive enough to confess that to me an amoral art was a contradiction and that an artist was obliged to point a way out if he thought he knew what it was. I had unknowingly picked up where my beloved Russians had left off, but without Tolstoy's and Dostoyevsky's privilege of a god whose unearthly resolutions, as in
Crime and Punishment,
one did not have to believe in reasonably but only sense to validate. I was striving toward a sensation of religious superreality that did not, however, depart the conditions of earth, a vision of avoidance of evil that would thrill even atheists and lead them “upward,” and perhaps even shame priest and rabbi into realizing how their “spiritualizing” of raw life had made a trifle of religions. The more exactingly true a character or dilemma was, the more spiritualized it became.

My walks, it gradually seemed to me, were in themselves indicative of some personality failure. I loved the city, was feverishly curious about all the lives lived in it, but moved through it alone, unconnected. My shyness tortured me. Life was always elsewhere. And yet, paradoxically, out of my aloneness I was communicating my feelings to thousands of strangers every week in the theatre. Still, I was fending off too much, condemning too much. Naive as I was, I knew that there was almost no space for me between sexuality and art. I even sensed, without being able to explain the reasons, that while fiercely protective of what I wrote, I was also vaguely ashamed of it, as though it were a sexual secret. On these walks flashes of accusatory truth would sometimes fly at me, showing up my fraudulent pretensions to monogamous contentment when my lust was truer and bewilderingly taunting. At moments it seemed that my relation with Mary and all women was thin and cautious out of some fear that surpassed sex itself. With no more Freud than rumor brought me, I could afford to admit into consciousness what a bit more sophistication might have caused me to suppress: I knew that somewhere behind my sexual anxieties lay incestuous stains that spread toward sister and mother. Playfully my mind would set up chessboard arrangements, the pieces being father, mother, brother, sister, each with different powers and rights-of-way, imperious in one direction while vulnerable and paralyzed in another. Regardless of how the game played out, it had to end the same way, in a confrontation with the father after I had picked off sister and mother and pushed brother beyond reach of effective action. The father could move in all directions, and his decree of punishment, of course, was always death.

Six or seven years on, trying to repair a marriage that mutual intolerance was slowly destroying, I would learn in analysis far less than what it simply confirmed. Somehow, relations between family members that are usually too fearsome to be made conscious had been matters of ordinary observation to me since childhood, and if it was “sinful” to acknowledge their existence, they were always clear to my secret vision. But they had only incidental identifications with my actual parents and siblings; I had, it seemed, always moved on two planes at the same time, the actual reality and a metaphoric one in which, for example, my father appeared as a deanimated and forbidding avenger who I knew was and was-not my actual father. My mother was and was-not the woman who was tempting me sensually to capture her from my father, and was both culpable of disloyalty to him and, as herself, perfectly innocent. Until I began to write plays my frustration with this double-ness of reality was terrible, but once I could impersonate all conflicts on a third plane, the plane of art, I was able to enjoy my power—even if a twinge of shame continued to accompany the plays into the world.

But a sense of power without a theme is one hand clapping, and I walked endlessly trying to find my way into the city and into myself. One day it registered on my mind that for weeks now I had been passing graffiti on walls and sidewalks saying, “Dove Pete Panto?” without ever bothering to try to figure out that it meant “Where is Pete Panto?” It was down near the piers that this mysterious question covered every surface, and it was not hard to guess that it was still more evidence of the other world that existed at the foot of peaceful, old-fashioned Brooklyn Heights, the sinister waterfront world of gangster-ridden unions, assassinations, beatings, bodies thrown into the lovely bay at night. Now the sentence began showing up in subway stations and chalked on Court Street office buildings. Finally the liberal press took up the cry, with
PM,
the progressive daily that lasted for a few years after its birth during World War II, explaining that Pete Panto was a young longshoreman who had attempted to lead a rank-and-file revolt against the leadership of President Joseph Ryan and his colleagues, many of them allegedly Mafiosi, who ran the International Longshoremen's Association. Panto, one evening during dinner, had been lured from his home by a phone call from an unknown caller and was never seen again. The movement he had led vanished from the scene.

I took to wandering the bars on the waterfront to pick up what
ever I could about Panto. It was a time when the heroic had all but disappeared from the theatre along with any interest in the tragic tradition itself. The idea of a young man defying evil and ending in a cement block at the bottom of the river drew me on.

It took only a couple of days on the piers to discover that men were afraid to so much as talk about Panto. Most of them were of Italian descent, many of them born in the old country and completely dependent on the favor of their leaders for jobs. As I realized after a trip to southern Italy and Sicily the next year, the hiring system on the Brooklyn and Manhattan waterfronts had been imported from the Sicilian countryside. A foreman representing the landowners would appear in the town square on his horse; a crowd of job-seeking peasants would humbly form up around his spurs, and he would deign to point from favored face to favored face with his riding crop and trot away with the wordless self-assurance of a god once he had lifted from hunger by these barely perceptible gestures the number of laborers he required for that day. In troubled times one more element was added—the armed
carabinieri.
During my time in Calabria and Sicily I once saw half a dozen soldiers with slung rifles standing by to silently instruct the peasants that this time-honored way of casually employing human beings was never to be changed.

But Italy was yet to come; now in Red Hook, Brooklyn, at four-thirty on winter mornings, I stood around with longshoremen huddling in doorways in rain and snow on Columbia Street facing the piers, waiting for the hiring boss, on whose arrival they surged forward and formed up in a semicircle to attract his pointing finger and the numbered brass checks that guaranteed a job for the day. After distributing the checks to his favorites, who had quietly paid him off, the boss often found a couple left over and in his generosity tossed them into the air over the little crowd. In a frantic scramble, the men would tear at each other's hands, sometimes getting into bad fights. Their cattlelike acceptance of this humiliating procedure struck me as an outrage, even more sinister than the procedure itself. It was as though they had lost the mere awareness of hope. Carlo Levi, the Italian-Jewish writer and painter who for years was banished by Mussolini to a godforsaken place called Eboli, had written a memoir of his exile,
Christ Stopped at Eboli,
that resonated in my head on those dark mornings on Columbia Street. America, I thought, stopped at Columbia Street.

On the Brooklyn Bridge the waves of traffic moved serenely above the heads of men who were enduring what without exaggeration
were medieval conditions. The idea of a longshoreman standing up to the arrogance of such power chilled me with awe, especially when the comfortably placid looks on the passing policemen's faces showed that anyone who had thoughts of change would have little to hope for from the men of power in the city. Pete Panto had become heroic for me. But after a couple of weeks I saw that I could never penetrate the permanent reign of quiet terror on the waterfront hardly three blocks from my peaceful apartment. I had all but put the waterfront out of mind as a hopeless project when, a few months later, a man I had never heard of phoned and asked to see me to talk about the subject.

Vincent James Longhi and his friend Mitch Berenson arrived that very afternoon. Berenson, I would shortly learn, was attempting to carry on Pete Panto's work of organizing opposition to the Ryan domination of the longshoremen's union. His base was the young American Labor Party in the Red Hook area, a dangerously inhospitable one for men of his views since they were fair game for the Mafia, which, in the antileft fever of the later forties, would hardly be reprimanded for making them disappear. The evolution of these two men remained for me for decades to come a kind of measure of radicals in our time.

Berenson, in his late twenties then, was a round, bullish worker with a pockmarked face, totally bald, with a high arching nose and a forehead as broad as Beethoven's, an overweight but powerful-looking man whose poverty showed in his rotted shoe soles, his frayed shirt cuffs, a stained, permanently knotted tie, and the five-cent stogie jammed between his teeth. Cheap food had distended his belly over his belt, and he walked like a barrel on wide-apart legs. It was impossible then to guess what a turmoil of conflicts was rushing through him when he seemed so tough and certain of his ideas. At moments I thought I noticed fleeting signs of some poetic fragmentation going on in his head.

Vinny Longhi, a new member of the bar with political ambitions, was of another sort. Over six feet tall and darkly handsome, he was a smooth talker who, at least in speaking to me, was clearly trying to jostle Italianate street accents out of his delivery in favor of something more cultivated. His awe for my novel,
Focus,
and
All My Sons
was somewhat embarrassingly overdone, but he was unconscious of his glamour-struck effusiveness. Unabashedly romantic, he reminded me of cousins of mine as well as guys in high school who lived for the single purpose of bringing girls down to bed level. His helpless sensuality moistened his gaze like a syrup.

He wore a lawyerlike blue suit that day, the sleeves snug around his strong, thick wrists. He would not feel pain too acutely.

They had “worked with Pete,” they said, to organize a rank-and-file anti-Ryan movement in the locals, and they outlined some of the fascinatingly corrupt rackets on the docks, the kickbacks forced from men who had to pay off gangsters for the privilege of being allowed to work, the specially designated neighborhood stores and barbershops where a worker rented a job for a day with a ten-dollar payment for a two-dollar bottle of wine or a seventy-five-cent haircut. It was like an isolated village ruled by a feudal lord, within sight of the traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and the vaulting skyscrapers of lower Manhattan. The main reform being touted by Berenson and Longhi was the establishment of a hiring hall where the men would register and get their jobs first come, first served, no favorites. Of course this would mean the end of a racket and was a dangerous idea to propagate, so they were trying to launch a campaign to raise money for a new longshoremen's movement to clean up the waterfront. I was their first prospect, being unquestionably a millionaire, what with a hit on Broadway, and undoubtedly pals with others of my ilk who might be patsies for this kind of pitch. In reality my only contacts in the theatre and film were with a few ordinary actors and would-be playwrights, but if I couldn't raise money I would love to find some way of writing about this sealed-off area of the city, which aside from everything else had always seemed so photogenic. They were eager to show me around, and I had my entry at last into what had become for me a dangerous and mysterious world at the water's edge that drama and literature had never touched.

Now, looking back, I see how volcanic this decision was for me. Out of it would come a movie script (never to be produced); a play,
A View from the Bridge;
and a trip to Hollywood, where I would meet an unknown young actress, Marilyn Monroe, and at the same time come into direct collision with the subterranean machine that enforced political blacklisting and the ideological disciplining of film writers, actors, and directors.

At the moment, of course, I was simply following instinct toward what I sensed was a tragic tale. But probably there was also something more; by 19471 believe I felt the beginnings of a cultural shift that was completely new in my experience. It may be that I was trying to fend off a certain rising ambiguity, both in my own life
and in the city and the world, where nothing like a hero was any longer really conceivable. And so it was challenging to be in the company of what I took to be unambiguous men striking out heroically against unjust power. But of course in that also I was in for some surprises.

It did not take me long to learn that the waterfront was the Wild West, a desert beyond the law. An electrical generator big enough to light a city in Africa, where it was bound, standing two stories high on a flatcar and worth millions, simply vanished one night from a Brooklyn pier. The exploitation of labor was probably a minor matter compared to the Mob's skimming of commerce moving through the world's greatest port, a form of taxation, in effect. And in this part of Brooklyn the name that stood atop it all like the name of a duke of the realm was Tony Anastasia, Tough Tony to the man on the Red Hook street.

But nothing was ever quite what it seemed in this Brooklyn Byzance. Tough Tony, it turned out, was fearsome mainly because his brother Albert had headed Murder, Inc., and was credited with having assassinated over a hundred men. Nine or ten years later, Albert would make the mistake of coming over from Jersey, where he was exiled by the New York authorities, and stretching out on a barber chair on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-third Street, where he was hamburgered by two killers while his eyes were covered with a hot towel. But at this point Albert was still very much alive, and kid brother Tony could bask in his bloody glory as head of the ILA local that covered this part of the Brooklyn waterfront. Thus, Berenson and Longhi understood that it would only be a matter of time before Tony was heard from, since it was his workers they were trying to organize into a rump faction that would contest his power and through him that of Joe Ryan, who ran the entire union from Manhattan.