All the Little Live Things (20 page)

“Don’t kid me,” I said. “You want this baby very much.”

“Yes,” she said happily, squinting at me in the sun-spattered shade. “Very
very
much!”

Friday night, July 3

Dear Marian,

Maybe I will send you this letter, maybe I won’t. But the more I think about our talk the other day, the more I feel inclined to write it. You thought I was pretty rough on Peck, and I have the impression you think I am suffering from some unhealed trauma about my son, Curtis, and am taking it out on Peck. It isn’t impossible, I suppose—few things are. But as I told you, I have been through all this before. Since Curt died I have been over it ten thousand times. If I could convince myself I was to blame, do you think I wouldn’t accept the guilt along with the grief? Do you think I would deliberately repeat history with this Peck boy, who reminds me so much of Curt? I can find plenty of things to blame in my temperament and my actions, but I can’t find the specific things that caused Curt. I can’t find adequate causes for somebody like Peck, I weigh his beliefs against mine and I can’t conclude that I am wrong. I have to believe, in fact, that it is my moral duty—which I’m not exactly performing—to resist him.

It would embarrass me to say to your face some of the things I expect to write down here. I was never one for the couch, I don’t unburden readily. If my conscience visits me in the night I assume it wants to be alone with me. To repeat our dialogues seems to me too often a sort of self-justification. But I will try to repeat them to you with as little of that as I can manage.

One of my difficulties in Curt’s case was that every time I acted according to my principles I was instantly at war with him. Every time I swallowed my principles, or let Ruth persuade me to be indulgent, I felt ashamed. So far as I can tell, I have not changed since Curt died, which doesn’t mean I don’t still have bad times over his memory and am not full of regrets. But my trouble is not the prick of conscience. It’s guilt, I suppose, but a guilt that I can’t justify. If I had it to do over again, I can’t see how I would have done it differently.

I am probably the last one to say what Curt really was, since I never understood what he thought he was trying to be, and was never sure he was trying to be anything. Maybe he was trying not to be anything.

He was crosswise in the channel of his life for thirty-seven years—he was born crosswise. I am not modem man at all, but he was modem youth to the seventh power. He never got over being modem youth. He was crypto-communist youth during the late thirties, pacifist-internationalist youth in the forties, and overage beat youth in the fifties, and nothing very seriously, and nothing for keeps. As I look back at him, I see that he
wasn’t
much of anything, he was simply against. I have read his life, and arranged for its publication, two dozen times: rebel in uniform, nonconformist who runs in packs and sings in close harmony with his age group. He was willful child, sullen boy, prep-school delinquent, army reject, postwar lush. Whose fault? It is usual for distressed parents to accept the blame our psychologists are eager to hand them, and I think Ruth and I would accept it if our judgment told us we must. Sometimes we did accept it, against our better judgment, and tried to cope with him by dealing with ourselves. But appeasement never worked, and no matter how many ways I tried to persuade him of my concern and my affection, I never found his guard down, and my patience was never long enough to outbox him. Put that down as one thing I accept blame for: impatience. Maybe you can make an explanation from it. I can’t. It explains a little, but by no means all.

Many of our friends probably explained him with that glib formula about sons with high-powered fathers, doing me the honor of thinking me more high-powered than I am. It could have been the other way around. He may have felt some secret shame that I was only a nursemaid of writers and not a writer myself. The apartment was always full of them, he grew up among celebrities, and he could have made comparisons. But that should have led him to treat me with contempt or condescension, perhaps with pity. Not with hatred.

Principles, I said a minute ago. Values—a very unfashionable word, since to hold any you have to deny the validity of their contraries, and thus seem censorious. I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don’t think too much of it was holier-than-thou. After all, we lived in the world, not in a parsonage. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn’t agree with a single value I held. I had got my values from wherever we do get them, out of the air or out of books or out of contact with people I had to admire, and he got his in exactly the same way except that he was immune to mine. Mine, say, were old-fashioned bacterial values. His were viral, and from my point of view virulent. He went absolutely unerringly to attitudes that he knew I disapproved or despised, and the only way to live with him in peace would have been to submit to his beliefs. Ruth was more willing than I was—after all he was her only child, and she loved him—but she liked the way he was going no better than I did.

I would not submit to his beliefs. I believed, and I still believe, that some periods of human history and some phases of human culture are better than others, and that it isn’t always the creeping toward perfection that I know you want to believe in. Some codes are better than the codes that displace them; and I believe this is a corrupt age because it accepts everything as equal to everything else, and because it values indulgence more than restraint. I guess I honor the Roman republic more than the empire. The one believed in austere virtue, and the other had bread and circuses, like ourselves.

There is a book of Ford Madox Ford’s, one of that fat tetralogy, that he called with characteristic ungrace
Some
Do Not. He was adenoidal, and they say he smelled like Jim Peck, but he had something. Some do not, if only to show that they can refrain. You don’t have to shoot yourself like a Dostoevski intellectual to assert the will. You don’t have to commit whimsical existential crimes to prove your freedom. You can take hold of yourself, like training a horse, and that is both pleasure and morality.

I never persuaded Curtis. I was neither a good enough teacher nor a good enough example. Train yourself for what? he would ask. To sell bonds? To be a good corporation man? To demonstrate shaving between the halves of televised football games? To make a lot of money? To contribute to this vulgarian’s nightmare they call a civilization? To acquire things? No, I would tell him, beginning, God help me, to roar. To be a man. Isn’t that enough? To be a man whose word is trusted and whose generosity can be depended on and who doesn’t demand something without giving something himself. Fair trade, he would answer me. Inviolability of contract. The morals of the stock exchange, which never cheats a customer but which goes up on every brush-fire war and skyrockets on every big one.

What should one do? If Ruth had had any better luck with him I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms. Ruth was infallibly gentle with him, though tartness is more her natural style. She didn’t push him, she followed him clear to the bottom of his burrow, trying to understand, she forgave him incessantly, she was the pacifying force when he and I clashed. And he went out of his way to treat her with even greater impatience and contempt than he treated me. His wretched treatment of his mother was one of the commonest sources of our quarrels. Sometimes I wondered if he didn’t abuse her because she tended to take his side—he wanted no mediator between us.

It does me no good to reflect that filial rebellion is common. Mutual respect, though perhaps not common, is possible—I’ve seen it. It becomes impossible only when the value systems of the two antagonists are irreconcilable, as they seem to be between Fran LoPresti, who is conventional, and her daughter, who is hell-bent not to be.

Curtis could have disagreed with us incessantly if we had felt in him some integrity that gave his disagreement weight. We couldn’t. I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can’t feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption. The twentieth century corrupted him, the America that he despised corrupted him, industrial civilization corrupted him with the very vices he thought he scorned in it. It encouraged him to hunt out the shoddy, the physical, the self-indulgent, the shrill, and the vulgar, and to call these things freedom, and put them above the Roman virtue that, so help me, is the only moral stance I can fully admire. And like Peck, he always had smoke screens, political or aesthetic, to hide his hypocrisy from others and perhaps from himself.

He was drunken, disorderly, and promiscuous from early adolescence. We might have thought those irregularities normal and exploratory if he had shown even temporary contrition about them; but he indulged them as if he must, to maintain his self-respect. Non
serviam.
All right, we could have taken that too, if we had found any fallen-angel grandeur of mind or spirit in him. But we had to observe that he was ungenerous, that he gave nothing and took all he could, that he felt responsibility for nothing, love for no one. He had such a gift for the wrong companions that it was fair to think of him, not them, as the bad influence. He had a good body that he abused, and a good mind that he used for nothing but searching out new forms of challenge and insubordination, new kicks, new ways to evade obligation. He sponged on people, especially women; he betrayed friends, especially women; and he fell for every crackbrained groupy arty-intellectual fad over a period of twenty years.

In his earlier teens he had a political phase, walked picket lines, attended meetings of the Young Communist League, collected money for the Spanish Loyalists. Fine. For a while, though he alarmed us, we were even rather proud: he showed signs at least of a compassionate social conscience. Actually, he had no more political interest than a snowshoe rabbit and no more economics than a grasshopper. He liked secrecy and rebellion and dusty basement meeting places, and emancipated girls in lisle stockings, and the sound of broken-down mimeograph machines cranking out insurrection and intransigence.

When the war came on, he was swept naturally into pacifism—his canoe was already on those waters, he didn’t even have to paddle. Later, when he spoke of his troubles in prep school, he liked to imply that he was thrown out for his pacifist beliefs, and it is true that he was one of a group that in 1941 marched in tin hats and gas masks, bearing scornful placards, outside the classroom windows of a master who was hot for war against Hitler. But Curt wasn’t thrown out for his conscientious beliefs, and he was thrown out more than once. One. school sent him home because he had been scraped up drunk off the lawn three weekends in a row, and was insolent to the masters who reprimanded him. The second fired him because he and two other boys smuggled a girl into the dorm and kept her there for three days. A master coming to remonstrate mildly about the pacifist picket line found her there, locked in the bedroom with a lot of girly magazines, a bag of caramels, and a bottle of sloe gin.

For a few months in 1944 Curt was in the army, but he came out quickly with a PN discharge—homosexuality. From what I hear of the army, it does not throw you out on those grounds unless you go out of your way to be challenging in your aberrations. I don’t think for a minute that Curt was a fairy. He wanted out of the army and he had no more self-respect than to get out that way.

It is a painful chronicle, and I gain nothing but renewed distress by writing it down. There were two cheap marriages and two cheap divorces. There was a banjo-picking phase and a barefoot-saint phase. He rode a motorcycle across the continent, he tried Zen and poetry, the Village and, Sausalito. I found him jobs and he lost them or quit them within weeks or months. Once he worked quite happily for half a year as a mechanic in a garage (was it dirty enough to suit him, or did he find some queer heartbreaking security in the un-taxing performance of a simple skill?). That ended in a traffic accident and a drunk-driving fine. Mainly he lived on us and on the little trust fund that Ruth’s mother had been so ill-advised as to settle on him before she died. It gave him just enough to leave him free. You asked me if I didn’t believe in freedom and I told you I didn’t, not much. Freedom was the worst thing that could have happened to Curtis.

Once in a while, after he had passed his twenties and could no longer pretend that he was just postponing his life until he could “come to grips with reality” and “find himself”—my God the cant that apologists for these lost souls use!—he made half-meant, convulsive efforts to do or learn or be something. These fits came on him when, because he was ill or broke or at odds with some woman, he came back to the apartment for a spell of fatted calf. During those spasms he would be brisk and energetic; we heard him sing in the shower; he wore coat and tie when he went out on important errands. Heartbreaking, because we knew it was a false front, and yet it gave us glimpses of what it might be to have a son with whom we could get along.

False starts, he made a dozen. Once he signed up for a writing course in Washington Square—did you ever notice how pitifully these people are converted into believers by the word “creative”?—but he found the instructor tedious and retired to somebody’s cottage up in the Housatonic valley to write on his own. He and his guests wrecked the place and cost us a friend. Once he was going to study architecture—this when he was past thirty—and talked his way into a job as a draftsman on the strength of his facility at free sketching. Two weeks that lasted; he said he couldn’t stand drawing other people’s lines. One year he spent a lot of time in the Village, painting he said, and taking some extension class or other. That too faded away. There was a long and relatively peaceful year when he was abroad, living in an unheated room on the Nyhavn in Copenhagen, a place he was drawn to because he had heard it was the toughest of Europe’s waterfronts. Yet I wonder. I had a Danish phase myself, I went back there too, looking for something and not finding it. I wonder if Curt was trying to follow some raveling thread back through his labyrinth? It saddens me to think so, for I’m sure it broke, he ended up lost in the same old mazes.