Timebends (56 page)

As an organizer Mitch had earned twenty dollars a week, if he got paid, at all, and this meagerness in his pockets had bred a certain aristocratic superiority toward money, which he had never imagined accumulating and which therefore had no emotional value for him; when he was desperate enough he could always hit one of his friends all over the city, men beside whom he had fought union organizational battles over the years.

But he had to have a job now, and it occurred to him that the only boss he had ever known at all well was Krauss, a sweater manufacturer on the Lower East Side, who, however, hated him for having led a long strike against his plant nine years before. Every morning for more than fourteen months he had marched his chanting workers around and around in front of the miserable factory, forcing Bernie Krauss to fight his way through to his office. And every morning Krauss had paused long enough to shake his fists at Berenson and scream, “You goddamned Bolshevik, may you rot in hell with cats up your ass!” Berenson would spread out his arms, giggling, and reply, “Bernie! Settle!”

So he was anxious as he approached the factory, but as he opened the street door the smell of charred wool and burnt wood distracted him. There, amidst puddle and stench, sat Bernie Krauss, a man of fifty now and aging fast, overweight and bald and looking as blank as death. But when he saw Mitch Berenson standing before him, the old resentment began to flow into his eyes.

“Wait, take it easy, Krauss. I just came to ask you for a job.”

“A job!
Me
you're asking for a job?” Krauss would have risen in fury, but he had just had a fire and the insurance company was refusing to pay for more than a fraction of his stock, claiming that the rest was not sufficiently damaged, so his spirits were low.

By the end of the afternoon Krauss had hired Berenson as a salesman and in no time at all was offering him a partnership. Berenson first turned the fire hose on the undamaged sweaters, reporting to a grateful fire department that he had quenched a new smoldering blaze, and thereby getting the insurance company to pay up. Next, he sold a bill of goods to Gimbels in Philadelphia, which, as was the frequent practice, they promptly canceled, causing the naively outraged Berenson to return to Philadelphia and make a speech of such powerfully eloquent indignation that the stunned executives rescinded the cancellation—an unheard-of triumph in the sweater business—and offered him a job at Gimbels.

Within five years Berenson was a millionaire several times over, having designed housing for the elderly that was immensely popular. Still chewing the cheapest cigars he could find and driving a wreck of a car, he all but ran the small suburban village he had moved to. “What I found out,” he said to me once, “is that the thing really is a democracy. The people really make the basic decisions in the end. It takes too long and they get fooled too often, but it does work finally, and it's beautiful.”

Almost inevitably he turned to mysticism once he had proven his power but had lost the heartwarming Marxist prophecy of doom and the redemptive promise that accompanied it; he had won the world and lost a religion, had become a normally happy, uneasy man.

At the end of his final lecture to our sophomore psychology class, the venerable Professor Walter Bowers Pillsbury looked out over the faces of the undergraduates and created an uncustomary pause. As the distinguished author of our textbook he had great authority in his field, but for me his fascination came from his having been institutionalized for some years himself. A tall, white
haired, tragically dignified presence out of an earlier America, he wore dark ties and stiff collars, and his gaze went deep. In the silence we all realized he was saying his farewell not only to us but to his career, for he was nearing retirement age. He said, “I do not presume to give you advice about your mental health, but there is one truth I hope you will always try to keep before you: never think about any one thing for too long.”

In 1935, when I was trying to concentrate my mind on my new craft and the country seemed scatterbrained in the face of its awful problems, this seemed silly advice. But now, in the early fifties, some fifteen years later, the old man's voice kept returning to me as I realized that there was something obsessional in my thoughts about my marriage and my work; great swellings of love and hope for my future with Mary were followed by a cycle of despairing resentment that I was being endlessly judged, hopelessly condemned. In an attempt to break out, I had begun analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, a Freudian of great skill, but it was ultimately impossible for me to risk my creativity, which he was wise enough not to pretend to understand, by vacating my own autonomy, however destructive it might continue to be. And so I have never pretended to a valid estimate of analysis even though it gave me a good man's friendship, above all, and a way of assessing human behavior perhaps more dispassionately than before. But I could not escape the fear of being bled white by a gratifying yet sterile objectivity that might be good for critics but not so good for writers whose fuel is the chaos of their instinctual life.

I have always resisted a final judgment on psychoanalytic claims for two reasons in particular. I had entered analysis in order to save a marriage, a distorting premise that raised the suspicion of self-examination for the sake of marital concord. But I was also being nagged by a suspicion born of that particular historic moment. While the country seemed to be happily exulting in Joe McCarthy's homegrown American paranoia toward all that was unfamiliar, including the mind itself, I was rooting about in my cobwebs, clearly a self-indulgence, even if only, as I hoped, a temporary one. Nor could I dispel my commonality with the flocks of liberal and left people excitedly discovering analysis just as a sharp and threatening turn in history was flinging us into space. My difficulties were surely personal, but I could not help suspecting that psychoanalysis was a form of alienation that was being used as a substitute not only for Marxism but for social activism of any kind. My conscience, in short, was at odds with my improvement.

New York, that riverbed through which so many subterranean cultures are always flowing, was swollen with rivulets of dispossessed liberals and leftists in chaotic flight from the bombarded old castle of self-denial, with its infinite confidence in social progress and its authentication-through-political-correctness of their positions at the leading edge of history. As always, the American self, a puritanical item, needed a scheme of morals to administer, and once Marx's was declared beyond the pale, Freud's offered a similar smugness of the saved. Only this time the challenge handed the lost ones like me was not to join a picket line or a Spanish brigade but to confess to having been a selfish bastard who had never known how to love. Whether psychoanalysis could have meant some glorious liberating conjunction of sensuality and responsibility I would never find out, if only because I was being forced back into defending the narrowing space where I could simply exist as a writer; I had to save myself in society before I could reorder my brains, for society was not being passive with me.

Again, it was not just the things I read in the papers that informed my feelings of anxiety and threat.
Cock-a-doodle Dandy,
a new play by Sean O'Casey, was announced for New York production, and the American Legion promptly threatened to picket the theatre. This alone would have been enough to make any producer think twice about the play's commercial possibilities, but in addition the chief backer, Mrs. Peggy Cullman, had not long before converted to Catholicism, and after reading the script, she decided it was anti-Catholic and withdrew her money. No doubt it was anticlerical, although not anti-Catholic, but the Legion was probably more interested in O'Casey's custom of wearing a hammer-and-sickle button in the lapel of his rumpled jacket, proclaiming that Communism had captured his Irish heart. He sounded like no other Communist I had ever heard of, and I rather suspected he was putting on the conservatives, especially the British, who of course remained irritatingly oblivious, while the Irish in Ireland, whence he had exiled himself, affected to forget his existence as they had that of Joyce before him, preoccupied as they were with emigrating from the country. In any case, given the gorgeousness of some of his plays and his wonderful autobiography, I was outraged that this genius should be hounded by Legion thuggery. When the producer of the play appealed for help from the Dramatists Guild—the Legion's threats having dried up his money sources, menacing the production altogether—I cooked up a motion and presented it to my fellow
Guild officers one afternoon. In attendance were Moss Hart, our natty chairman, whose beautiful pipes I envied, although they were too dainty and small for my taste; Oscar Hammerstein II, whose avuncular presence belied his sharp libertarian views; and Robert Sherwood, playwright, Roosevelt speechwriter, and activist for civil liberties, some of whose early work outspokenly raised the question of the individual being flattened by the steamroller of modern civilization. Also present, among a few others who escape memory, was Arthur Schwartz, producer and composer of numerous hit musicals like
The Little Show, The Band Wagon, Flying Colors,
and
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
and a man of quick humor and a caring charm.

I proposed we announce immediately that in the event the Legion picketed O'Casey's play, we would call upon playwrights to form a counter-picket line in support of freedom of the theatre. An embarrassed shock went around the table, but Hammerstein looked seriously interested, and if no one was ready just yet to rush out and carry a sign up and down Shubert Alley, it did seem to me that our discussion was moving toward some statement in O'Casey's defense. At this juncture Arthur Schwartz, visibly upset to the point of unwanted vehemence, warned that if one penny of Guild money was spent to defend a Communist, he would lead whatever members would follow him out of the Guild to form a new playwrights' organization. The sudden prospect of such a split brought all discussion to a dead halt, and the subject died then and there. I now had no reason to doubt that should the Legion decide to picket my next play to death, I could look for no meaningful defense from my fellow playwrights, for these were the most powerful names in the theatre and they were either scared or bewildered about how to act. Such were the times. Indeed, it was not at all difficult to imagine an ideological committee of Legionnaires especially empowered to move their lips through all new plays and decide which should or should not be permitted on the New York stage. I had already had a taste of the Legion's power, for they had not only threatened the movie version of
Salesman
but had managed in two or three towns to close down the road company production with Thomas Mitchell as Willy, Darren McGavin as Happy, Kevin McCarthy as Biff, and June Walker as Linda—what the Boston critics had called the best Irish play ever. In one Illinois town the picketing was thorough enough to have left but a lone customer in the theatre. Mitchell insisted on playing the show just for him, but I never found out what he thought of it.

I was possibly more scared than others because I was scared of
being scared. But it was also that given my nature and time, I aspired to a rather exalted image of the dramatist as a species of truth-revealing leader whose brandished light would blind the monster Chaos in his approach. Dramaturgy was the physics of the arts, the one that failed when it lied and succeeded when it cut to the first principles of human life. With so joyously painful a burden, it was not easy to think of slipping away and taking to the hills.

When Bobby Lewis came to me with the idea of a new adaptation of Ibsen's
An Enemy of the People,
with Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, as the Stockmanns, it bucked me up that these veteran theatre people, whom I had never connected with radical politics, had awakened to the danger. I soon learned that the Marches were suing a man for libeling them as Communists; the charge had cost them film roles, and they saw themselves in the shoes of the Stockmanns, who were also crucified by a mob in the throes. Bobby Lewis, a veteran of the Group Theatre, whose tenderly imaginative staging of Saroyan's
My Heart's in the Highlands
I had vastly admired years before, had a witty detachment that had kept him out of partisan politics, and I tended to trust him as a showman despite my feeling that the project would do little more than move the lot of us closer to the bull's-eye of the Red-hunters' target.

The play, now that I read it again, seemed musty despite its thematic relevance to the current situation. But the producer, a wealthy young businessman named Lars Nordenson, the son of a Swedish senator, saw a swelling prefascist tide running in the United States and pressed me to work on the script. He would provide his own word-by-word rendering of Ibsen's original Norwegian, which he claimed was not at all wooden, like the translations, but slangy and tough, with scatological outbursts. After all, it had been written in fury and, for Ibsen, in an unusually short time. With Nordenson's first tentative pages of translation, in pidgin English with no attempt even to form sentences, I began the work and was soon convinced that I might capture Ibsen's spirit in the kind of fight I was sure he would have enjoyed.

As always, I would find out what I really believed through my attempts to dramatize my sense of life. The more familiar I became with the play, the less comfortable I felt with one or two of its implications. Though Dr. Stockmann fights admirably for absolute license to tell society the truth, he goes on to imply the existence of an unspecified elite that can prescribe what people are to believe. For a democrat this was rather a large pill, until I recalled myself telling the meeting of Marxists years earlier that an artist
had the duty to claim new territory, and that if I had obeyed either the Party line or the shibboleths of the national press during the war, I could not have written
All My Sons
—which, now that the war was over, was being praised for its courage, its insights, and its truth. Ibsen-Stockmann was simply making the artist's immemorial claim as point man into the unknown.