Herself (36 page)

None of my anti-war letters to the
Times
ever made it. I don’t blame the
Times
, which was never
for
the war, and hadn’t yet expanded its letters page. A more ancient force was at work, in journalism as well as history. People
believe
in war. They only dream of peace. In time of war it is always the believers who get the podium.

Three years later, long silent in this neighborhood, I wrote again, on entirely another subject, and this time the
Times
printed my letter.

Its genesis was simple. Two speaking engagements of mine that spring had coincided with two deadly weekends. Just after Martin Luther King was shot, I had to speak at Brandeis—a reading. Just after Robert Kennedy was shot, I was scheduled to address the Alumnae of Barnard College—and spoke out against the war. (Not receiving the usual thank-you note, or any, from the college, afterwards.)

Kennedy had been my candidate. I had met some of the people working on his Bedford-Stuyvesant project, and been heartened. Certainly he stood for my hopes in government more than the others. Because of his stand on the war, I had volunteered to work for his candidacy in New York. Though I was not part of the writer-artist “in” group around him, I knew most of them, as well as the exact nature of the glamour-glue that held them there, and had drawn them, in richly collegiate bonhomie, from “the Vineyard”—to travel west with him. Except for Jules Feiffer, a serious man, none I knew had had any political commitment before—even if old enough to. They were “casserole” Democrats. No other candidate would have drawn them. In personal grief—and yes, snobbery, they would now disband, fall apart. Yet their vital force, together with the young people who had been for Eugene McCarthy, might tip the balance against Nixon. For
another
Democrat. No pearl. But no Nixon. I doubted the young collegians could see this either, or bear it. But hating to be only a fireside Cassandra, I wrote;

Exhibit E:
Letter to
The New York Times,
dated Aug. 29, 1968, from Monhegan Island.

To The Editor:

Millions of anti-Administration Democrats now face a terrible disfranchisement. If we stay away from the polls, we shall most certainly help to elect Richard Nixon, who will most certainly mistake this as a sign that the temper of the country is with him—so to let loose in 1969 a violence sure to be worse than what we have seen.

Politics is the art of working with what you have. We Democrats now have an organization man, nominated under circumstances which no apology of his can disavow. Yet it is rumored that he had a noble youth. And it is said that the Presidency often brings out the better in a man.

Yet I cannot vote for Hubert Humphrey unless he and all know what my vote means. The duty now of all anti-Humphrey Democrats is to help us express ourselves in vote.

The mails exist, as a start, and they can be powerful. We must be provided with some immediate
en masse
means of saying to the nominee and to the party: “I am a Democrat opposed to Administration policy. Although you were not my candidate for the nomination, I plan to vote for you because I cannot on any score vote for Nixon. Sir, if you get the people’s mandate, remember me.”

Some such memo should be put in our hands as soon as money and mimeograph can make it—as the start of a program to provide us with a positive
modus vivendi
for the next two months. Democrats for the memo, and Republicans it may be, can be a force within the election, to be reckoned with now and after.

We, the deciding, independent voters, must at once have some honorable expression made open to us—and made clear to all—which will allow us to work with the Democratic party. Apathy now—which everyone of us feels—could be tragedy by winter.

Hortense Calisher

Monhegan Island, Me.

Aug. 29, 1968

No doubt the Maine postmark had helped. Or the heart of the
Times
letter-sifter who always returned mine (I seem to recall a lady named Martha) had been touched. The one-room Island P.O. sagged with mail from those who had been—and wanted to help, offering everything from money to mimeographing.

Winnie, the postmistress, said to me “What did you
do
?”

What had I?

Three years before, when an Air France plane, due to fly a group of us, publishers and writers, from London Airport to Orly just in time to connect with a once-a-week plane to Zagreb, had defaulted, I had suddenly heard myself say to the Air France hostess, “You must hold the Paris plane!”—and supply us another Channel one. “We are Marshal Tito’s guests—we have to be there.”

Technically this was true—we were five out of perhaps a thousand at the P.E.N. conference. Luckily I had spoken in English; when I saw the hostess had caught nothing but the “Tito,” I repeated it, many times with increasing authority. The plane was held for us on the other side.

“It’s that black raincoat of yours,” an English publisher whispered. “She thinks you’re Madame Tito.” But as guards met us at Orly and whisked us forward to where the huge immobile thing waited (with Arthur Miller, due to be elected P.E.N. President and all the rest of his delegation sweating inside, though I didn’t yet know this) I had that sense of power (Is it merely a modern one? I doubt that.) which comes from having for once stopped the hostile clockwork of the irreversible world. Not by being somebody—that would spoil it.
By being nobody at all
.

“I wrote a letter, Winnie,” I said, taking the string-bound piles of them she kept handing over the counter. “And people answered.
You
see it happen all the time.”

As I laboriously answered them until they outran me, yes—it did feel a little like Orly. And this time, by God, an act of the pen. Looka me. Except that now, it would seem, I had to have an organization. Did
I
want one—or want to start one?

No. (I
had
hoped that the Democratic Party might use my suggestion.)

A lady came forward, just in time to save me—if not them. Wife of a Princeton professor, she wrote for permission to use the letter as a statement to be published in a Princeton daily by a group there, faculty and others, who wished to organize around the letter’s suggestion. Ultimately the
Times
ran a news story on the Michel Balinskis—to me, when later we met, the prototype of those young, energetically concerned Americans who ought to be one of the glories of our political life, but are increasingly scorned there (for being college-connected “intellectuals”) by a country which deeply mistrusts the “universal education” it is committed to.

Through the efforts of the Balinskis, and others on campuses all over the country, the campaign spread to many college and smalltown newspapers, and just before the election, I was told, the use of such a form-letter was being considered by a Democratic caucus held in New York State, and by some other states. Too late.

Meanwhile, to help out as I could—with the pen, which still seemed to me the proper way—I wrote the editor of the
Times
’ Op-Ed page (now expanding), asking to report the progress of this campaign. Electioneering—but why not? This was refused, but with the request that I write something for them on some other subject.

Months later, I did so. It wasn’t what I had asked to do—now a dead issue. But there was something else I wanted to say on civil rights, so I took the opportunity.

This, a short piece on “Civil Rights in Black Hands,” as the
Times
called it, was much reprinted nationally, though Southern newspapers cut some of it.

To what end any of it?—I begin asking myself. I can now see cynically clearer the odd paths to public expression; once you have been certified by the press as of sufficient interest or vigor, you can speak up on anything (and might learn to on everything).

Twice more in time of student riot, I wrote in. Once, from the City College, in defense of an open admissions policy. And once from Columbia, my own university, whose record on freedom of opinion had long shamed me, when it at last came out against the war. At the time, I was teaching in both of them.

If I hadn’t tired as suddenly of published letters as years ago I had of organizations, I might have been ready for one of the next steps in pop American personality. Public office. Political or educational.

God is my witness I wasn’t smart enough to think of it. When, not long later, a man tells me my name has come up for the presidency of a good university, I say “You’re kidding.” Indeed not; he is on the search committee; I need only encourage him. When I still laugh, he says stiffly “Maybe you don’t realize what a good image you have.”

Good? For an artist? I feel just as I had when the Nyack Library, putting in the basement some writers’ books as unfit for the young, hadn’t included mine. (Perhaps since repaired.)

American life often gives one these raw glimpses of the ski-slides possible between its professions and its power-lines—to the alert. Between being a film actor say—and a governor. Or a district attorney—and a President. Do you have to be what the public wants, or simply a hard wanter? Do you have to be charismatic to the public eye, or merely be there?

Artists often go pop, once they have money or fame—or enough of whatever else they came for. But often too it comes upon them out of their eagerness to be effective in the public world.

One step nearer, and I wouldn’t be sure what
was
pop. Except that my letters would be, if I brought forth any more of them. In public. In private they could remain what they had been. Sometimes an honest wrath, sometimes a self-righteousness that has soared past soup. Sometimes the ignobler part of the process by which I find out what I think.

A letter of indignation is its own best answer. Protests that require another’s answer aren’t indignation but controversy—wherein somebody else finds out what
he
thinks. I don’t mind.

(My friend says reflectively, later: “They are part of the writer’s soul, that cannot elsewhere be utilized.”)

But one day after (I confess it was on many days) I awoke feeling that in my pilgrim’s progress I had strolled too far from my first writing-innocence. The air was like that, Bunyan-clear. I felt printsick. Inside me, it was all paper news. How could I get back? Once, on a peace march, I had felt the same.

On that wistful, fashionable day (is it five years, seven, since a whole world of city thinkers with peace raging in them gathered to stand like angels on the daffodil pins of Central Park?) at precisely 2:28 in the afternoon, as our horde, every one of us an individual and finally on the move, oozed inch by proud inch from the field onto the open land of Fifty-Ninth Street, a bride and groom came out of the Plaza Hotel—it was thought to be from there—and briefly walked with us. Had they floated down to us from those reception rooms just over the canopy, which are so neuter-bleak to the morning walker, but at dusk such a champagne shadowplay? Nobody around us strictly saw. Each of us could see only the pilot cerebellum in front of him, or laterally the member profiles from whatever unit somebody had soul-attached to us by phone the night before. No, we couldn’t say from where or how those two added themselves to our number, (in itself a count never to be settled in the newspapers) and walked with us, beckoning from a romantic distance, a personal one, against which we for the day had absented ourselves. Who invited them, where did they go to, when did they disappear? Nobody quite said; we’d been standing since 7:00—most of us—or even the laziest liberal among us since 9:00. Who else saw them too, that Houdini couple? Have they gone?

We live two blocks from there, the two of us, ten flights up, or is it twenty, impaled on the stakes of the city, beleaguered, but we’re city thinkers, we’ll last. Hopefully, each as long as the other will. Our bedroom is a helicopter garage or nearly, but the mood between us is like any couple who have lived and loved gently lapped on the breakwater of city acquaintanceship: which one of us will go first, leaving the other to last? We can’t hope for the Titanic, so we never say.

But we know the cold-hot sea of city thinking the way you know that book you lost as a child of ten on the subway, and can pick up any day. We are companions in observances whose bond will never end. We’re that modern pastoral couple you know so well if you marched with us, or are marching presently. I could keep our genital particulars dark; as companions in this we could be anybody. But why deny that we two are a woman and a man? Consorts. Married maybe, now and before. Not much interested in weddings, never were. (Last one we went to was our butcher’s, our
family
butcher, if you please. In that Catholic church somewhere in the Fifties off Ninth Avenue—the baby’s now two. That day in the park, their love affair wasn’t even born yet. And Ronnie’s a hawk, even now. A Jersey-living Daily Newser, who gets up at 6:00 to cross the river for the wholesaler—and for us. We are the city. You always get a special greeting, coffee in the back and a special cut—for us. They come from Alsace or the Piedmont, or somewhere. A real family place). … Since I have to march today, I went there yesterday. They want Ronnie to marry. We had their
boudin
for breakfast just a few minutes ago, that’s blood-pudding; we’re international. We’re the city, that couple. And we are standing just inside the park entrance, on this corner that the journalism of life has brought us to—at about 8:00
A.M.
Of a wistful, fashionable day. The day you two got married, you brilliant Houdini pair.

The park looks like a vulnerable pastel. Not overcast, but no sun, and the day unlikely to go any further either way—though if you two came to the Plaza from Houston, or Connecticut, you mightn’t know that. Or even from Roslyn, or Rahway. Muted day, blended, ready for its promenade. Where our morning walk usually takes us is now a multitude far as the eye can see—or to Central Park West and the Mall. There’s a constant whirlpool eddying at one meeting-point, between the steady current of those who feel they must be a-moving, a-moving because that’s what it is to be serious, and the slow strollers—heads up, lids lowered as at intermission—who are waiting to see who they are here with. We’re not daunted though, any of us; we’re inside what a parade does for you. We’re not doing it for ourselves. What did it do for you two, when you came from wherever?