Nonconformity (6 page)

Strolling the broken stones beyond the ruins of the City of God, out where the rutted roads begin, it is rumored vaguely, here and there, that certain unnamed sub-dividers plan the City of Man. So between the old town and the new they go, inventing new gods along the way.

“Junk is like God,” not-yet-twenty explains, “it makes a place in your heart you’ll never forget. You got to be punished for believing in it, but you go on believing all the same. It’s like being a martyr sort of.”

Some people say that junkies lie. But it seems to me that some people who aren’t even on Stuff don’t tell the truth all the time either.

How do you think Gene Krupa felt when Jackie Cooper came along?

H.
E. F. Donohue: I asked you to think about American literature. What did you decide? Algren: Well, you asked me what’s the matter with American literature and I think the trouble with American literature is it doesn’t know who it is. It thinks it’s Henry Miller writing to Lawrence Durrell, and then again it thinks it’s James Baldwin telephoning Norman Mailer, and then it thinks it’s Jack Kerouac, subsisting on Coca-Colas on a cross-country ride to nowhere—

Donohue: What
is
it?

Algren: Actually, American literature isn’t anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody. American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, “Isn’t anybody on my side?” It’s also the phrase I used that was once used in court of a kid who, on being sentenced to death, said, “I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow.” More recently I think American literature is also the fifteen-year-old who, after he had stabbed somebody, said, “Put me in the electric chair—my mother can watch me burn.” Even
more
recently, American literature is a seventeen-year-old kid picked up on a double murder charge, two killings in a boat, in a ship off Miami, who said he was
very glad it happened, he had absolutely no regrets, his only fear was that he might not get the electric chair. He had no vindictiveness toward those two people he killed. He said they were pretty good about it. They didn
’t
know, they had no idea, that he was going to come up with a knife. He had, in fact, a little bit of admiration for their coolness. One of them, finding himself stabbed, said, “Why?” He wanted to know. He said, “I can’
t
tell them why.” But I know he’s been trying to get out of it since he’s six years old. This is an honors student, you understand, this is a bright boy from a respectable home. He never remembers a time when he wasn’t fully convinced that death was better than life. And now he was very contented, his only worry being that he might not get the electric chair. He’s afraid of that. That’s the only fear he has, that he might have to continue to live. I think that’s American literature
.

—Algren and H. E. F. Donohue,

from
Conversations with Nelson Algren

1963
⁵²

E
VEN IF DREYFUS IS GUILTY,” CHEKHOV wrote to Suvorin, “Zola nevertheless is right, because the business of writers is not to accuse, not to persecute, but to side even with the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.… Even without them there are plenty of accusers, prosecutors and gendarmes, and in any event the role of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.”
⁵³

The function of the writer in the States as well is to champion the accused. There are already so many Junior G-men competing for posse duty that they’re paying their own expenses. “If you’re so innocent, what were you doing where the trouble was going on?” is the new Peglerism.
⁵⁴
“If you’re not guilty, what are you doing in jail? You admit you don’t know the law—how can you claim to be innocent?”

When Joseph K., in Kafka’s
The Trial
, charged by unidentified informants with a crime unnamed, is led at last out of the city by two strangers in top hats and propped against a boulder, one top hat draws a butcher’s knife and passes it, ceremonially, across K. to the second executioner—who
ceremonially passes it back in an Alphonse-and-Gaston act. “K. now perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his own breast.”
⁵⁵

“It may be no more than a coincidence,” Representative Busbey of Illinois comments on the suicide of a State Department employee, “that he worked in a government agency where Communists, Communist sympathizers and poor loyalty risks have plagued our security.… In view of the fact that Montgomery brought his own life to an end, we should not assume that he was innocent of such associations.”

For so deeply now do we presume the accused to be guilty by the act of having been accused, that it seems to us no more than an act of atonement to turn the knife on himself. The accused who stubbornly declines this form of confession is now advised that either the answers he
would
have given would have incriminated him or else he would not have declined. Refusal to reply thus becomes an automatic confession of guilt. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Leaving us with the implication that the men who devised the Fifth Amendment had in mind not the protection of the innocent, but of the guilty. How sick can you get?

That this is the same sickness as that of Salem, as has been indicated: one wherein we attempt to exorcise our devils by destroying the dissenters or odd fish of the tribe.
Our fear that Fort Worth and Oconomowoc are in imminent peril until Iceland and Morocco are armored like Fort Knox is not our true fear. If it were, the acquisition of great bases encircling the globe would greatly lessen it. But after five years of stretching our arms from the South Seas to the North Atlantic, we feel not a whit more secure than before. All we’ve done is to lose the trust of other peoples. We have gained a world, and lost it. When we were small, and beset by greater powers, we were less afraid. For the fear is not from monsters who walk abroad, but from monsters who walk in our own hearts.

Like Faust, we have two souls within a single breast. We profess to believe that a people may guarantee its happiness by military might, and in the same breath disclaim authoritarianism. We say the great word Democracy, and in the same breath align ourselves with Spanish, Greek, Chinese and Korean Fascism. We wish to inherit the earth, and yet have not learned to govern ourselves. We boast of our strength, yet display our fear. At the same moment that we set the world an example of corruption in our big cities unparalleled anywhere in the world, we cannot tolerate peoples governing themselves by other forms than our own. And support intolerance by plane and tank, by warship and bazooka. To paraphrase the old biblical saw, “The good that we would do we do not; but the evil which we would not, that we do.”
⁵⁶
And a fear of some disaster is companioned secretly within us by a yearning for that same disaster, swift
and soundless. A padding dread within will not be still.

We seem to be going on the strange assumption that if we can but put our fears on a mass scale, they will, belonging thus to all of us, be somehow wiser. We have come to the point where, in order to avoid the face of our own psychosis, we insist that all good men be psychotic.

For if we have not, as a nation, gone psychotic, how is it that we now honor most those whom we once most despised? Now the professional perjurer is called an “informant”—we used to call them something else. Blackmail in the name of “anti-Communism” is now dignified by the name of “research services.” Though we always believed, by and large, in rugged individualism, we didn’t until now like the idea of dog eat dog. If we don’t, what is the odious hulk of Fat Pat McCarran doing in the Senate? What is a man like McCarthy, whose mentality never equipped him for anything more than dealing three-card monte, doing there? Never before in our history has a man so puny-minded as Jenner been dignified by the title of Senator.

The late American humorist Jake Falstaff once did a prophetic little skit called
Alice in Justice-Land:

We have come to a time, George Bernanos wrote,
when evil is in its first beginnings. A time of the disaster swift and soundless. A time for the great gray wolves that run the winter wilderness. A time when suspicion has become an honorable trade.

“There can be no doubt,” Kafka’s doomed wanderer decided, “that behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case, behind my arrest and today’s interrogation, there is a great organization at work … And the significance of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in this, that innocent persons are accused of guilt, and senseless proceedings are put in motion against them.…”
⁵⁸

… T
hen one of them opened his frock coat and out of a sheath that hung from a belt girt round his waistcoat drew a long, thin, double-edged butcher’s knife, held it up, and tested the cutting edges in the moonlight. Once more the odious courtesies began, the first handed the knife across K. to the second, who handed it across K. back again to the first. K. now perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his own breast. But he did not do so, he merely turned his head, which was still free to move, and gazed around him. He could not completely rise to the occasion, he could not relieve the officials of all their tasks; the responsibility for this last failure of his lay with him who had not left him the remnant of strength necessary for the deed. His glance fell on the top story of the house adjoining the quarry. With a flicker as of a light going up, the casements of a window there suddenly flew open; a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and that height, leaned abruptly far forward and stretched both arms still farther. Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person only? Or was it mankind? Was help at hand? Were there arguments in his favor that
had been overlooked? Of course there must be. Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the high Court, to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers
.

But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’
s
throat, while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them immediately before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the final act. “Like a dog!” he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him
.

—Franz Kafka,

from
The Trial

1914-15
⁵⁹

“N
OW GIT OUT OF THE WAY,” MR. Dooley once warned us, “for here comes property, drunk ’n’ raisin’ Cain.” When wise old kings of Egypt decided to have a ball, so I’m told, they placed a mummy at the head of the table to remind themselves, even at the height of the festivities, of their own mortality. We today might, with equal wisdom, in this our own season of celebration, nod respectfully toward John Foster Dulles.
⁶⁰
Lest we too prove too proud.

For ball or no ball, any season at all, we live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote. The only real difference being that the England of Dickens and the Russia of Dostoevsky could not afford the soundscreens and the smokescreens with which we so ingeniously conceal our true condition from ourselves.

So accustomed have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV, establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest,
sanest, wealthiest, most inventive, tolerant and fun-loving folk yet to grace the earth of man, that we tend to forget that these are bought-and-paid-for witnesses and all their testimony perjured.

For it is not in the afternoon in Naples nor yet at evening in Marseille, not in Indian hovels half-sunk in an ancestral civilization’s ruined halls nor within those lion-colored tents pitched down the Sahara’s endless edge that we discover those faces most debauched by sheer uselessness. Not in the backwash of poverty and war, but in the backwash of prosperity and progress.

On the back streets and the boulevards of Palm Beach and Miami, on Fifth Avenue in New York and Canal Street in New Orleans, on North Clark Street in Chicago, on West Madison or South State or any street at all in Los Angeles: faces of the American Century, harassed and half-dehumanized, scoffing or debauched: so purposeless, unusable and useless faces, yet so smug, so self-satisfied yet so abject—for complacency struggles strangely there with guilt. Faces full of such an immense irresponsibility toward themselves that they tell how high the human cost of our marvelous technological achievements has really been.