Occasional Prose (6 page)

What was theatrical in Hannah was a kind of spontaneous power of being seized by an idea, an emotion, a presentiment, whose vehicle her body then became, like the actor’s. And this power of being seized and worked upon, often with a start, widened eyes, “Ach!” (before a picture, a work of architecture, some deed of infamy), set her apart from the rest of us like a high electrical charge. And there was the vibrant, springy, dark, short hair, never fully gray, that sometimes from sheer force of energy appeared to stand bolt upright on her head.

I suppose all this must have been part of an unusual physical endowment, whose manifestation in her features and facial gestures was the beauty I spoke of. Hannah is the only person I have ever watched
think
. She lay motionless on a sofa or a day bed, arms folded behind her head, eyes shut but occasionally opening to stare upward. This lasted—I don’t know—from ten minutes to half an hour. Everyone tiptoed past if we had to come into the room in which she lay oblivious.

She was an impatient, generous woman, and those qualities went hand in hand. Just as, in a speech or an essay, she would put everything in but the kitchen stove, as if she could not keep in reserve a single item of what she knew or had happened that instant to occur to her, so she would press on a visitor assorted nuts, chocolates, candied ginger, tea, coffee, Campari, whiskey, cigarettes, cake, crackers, fruit, cheese, almost all at once, regardless of conventional sequence or, often, of the time of day. It was as if the profusion of edibles, set out, many of them, in little ceremonial-like dishes and containers, were impatient propitiatory offerings to all the queer gods of taste. Someone said that this was the eternal Jewish mother, but it was not that: there was no notion that any of this fodder was good for you; in fact most of it was distinctly bad for you, which she must have known somehow, for she did not insist.

She had a respect for privacy, separateness, one’s own and hers. I often stayed with her—and Heinrich and her—on Riverside Drive and before that on Morningside Drive, so that I came to know Hannah’s habits well, what she liked for breakfast, for instance. A boiled egg, some mornings, a little ham or cold cuts, toast spread with anchovy paste, coffee, of course, half a grapefruit or fresh orange juice, but perhaps that last was only when I, the American, was there. The summer after Heinrich’s death she came to stay with us in Maine, where we gave her a separate apartment, over the garage, and I put some thought into buying supplies for her kitchen—she liked to breakfast alone. The things, I thought, that she would have at home, down to instant coffee (which I don’t normally stock) for when she could not be bothered with the filters. I was rather pleased to have been able to find anchovy paste in the village store. On the afternoon of her arrival, as I showed her where everything was in the larder, she frowned over the little tube of anchovy paste, as though it were an inexplicable foreign object. “What is that?” I told her. “Oh.” She put it down and looked thoughtful and as though displeased, somehow. No more was said. But I knew I had done something wrong in my efforts to please. She did not wish to be
known
, in that curiously finite and, as it were, reductive way. And I had done it to show her I knew her—a sign of love, though not always—thereby proving that in the last analysis I did not know her at all.

Her eyes were closed in her coffin, and her hair was waved back from her forehead, whereas
she
pulled it forward, sometimes tugging at a lock as she spoke, partly to hide a scar she had got in an automobile accident—but even before that she had never really bared her brow. In her coffin, with the lids veiling the fathomless eyes, that noble forehead topped by a sort of pompadour, she was not Hannah any more but a composed death mask of an eighteenth-century philosopher. I was not moved to touch that grand stranger in the funeral parlor, and only in the soft yet roughened furrows of her neck, in which the public head rested, could I find a place to tell her good-bye.

January 22, 1976

F. W. Dupee (1904–1979)

J
AUNTY, WRY, RUEFUL. FLASH
of kingfisher blue eyes. Edmund Wilson liked to say there was something French about him. A person of courage and irony. Much self-irony. Voice ironical with a sort of slide in it. Wrote particularly well about elegant, dandyish writers—James, Nabokov, Malraux—if anyone as elephantine as James can be thought of as a dandy or fop. He himself had a quality of elegance, but mixed, very appealingly, with innocence, the Joliet, Illinois, of his youth. Though he had the normal quota of parents, there was a sense of the orphan about him—he and his sister as two orphans in the big wide world. Was always like the boyish hero of a
Bildungsroman
.

Unsuitable, often comic things were always happening to him, as when he worked as an organizer for the Communist Party on the waterfront while being literary editor of the
New Masses
. Or his being on the protective picket line for the students at Columbia in 1968, the day he got a new and expensive set of the finest porcelain teeth—example of rueful courage, since he expected to be hit by a night stick. On that occasion he stood up against his respectable friends of the faculty. Wrote about it—including the teeth, I think—for the
New York Review of Books
.

There was something permanently subversive about him, and he was attracted to the modern literature he taught so well—Proust, Joyce, Mann, Kafka, etc.—by the sense that it was subversive of established values and forms. Yet he was never a bohemian; he was too much attracted to style for that. Hence he was continually finding himself in incongruous positions. He was a lightning rod for the absurd and the incongruous. Or you could say that the dryness of his mind—he was very intelligent—accorded strangely with a wild streak in him, with curiosity and with an impressionable soul.

It was through him I came to Bard College to teach, and I think he was more at home at a place like Bard than he was later at Columbia—for one thing, Bard was more amusing, more incorrigible, like himself. Yet he was not, and never could have been, a cult figure. In his own way, he was an upholder of order and legitimacy, or, let’s say, a wry sympathizer with their efforts to stay in place. Not vain, unprejudiced, fair-minded.

March 8, 1979

REPORT

On the Demo, London, 1968
*

I
T WAS VERY ENGLISH
to call it “the Demo,” and no wonder the pet name stuck, conjuring up the specter of “demos,” the people (sometimes pejorative), but on the other hand “democracy” (good), which withstood the test of the demonstration. Small family-style states are fond of making up diminutives, whose effect is to diminish, make cosy; compare “the telly” to big gross American “TV.” Yet the striking fact about the October 27 dual march was that it was organized and directed by aliens in competition with each other: Tariq Ali, a young moustached Pakistani, leading the way to Downing Street, and Abhimanya Manchanda, a middle-aged clean-shaven Indian, to Grosvenor Square.

For the English, these rival pied pipers were difficult to swallow, let alone assimilate. A well-fleshed, somewhat lachrymose police sergeant sought to explain his obscure sense of injury relating to the Demo, which in principle he did not exactly oppose but saw as a conflict of rights: the right to push your pram, undisturbed, down the Strand on Sunday and the right, slightly less hallowed, to march. We were standing in a pub near a Central London police station on the eve of the demonstration. What stuck in his craw, he confided, leaning forward and lowering his voice, was “those foreigners.” “It’s the bill you’re paying for Empire,” I replied. He appreciated the point (English fair-mindedness) and laughed. The discussion continued. I made some feeble joke about seeing him tomorrow, in jail. “You don’t mean to say you’re going to
march
?” “Certainly!” “Stay home and watch it on the television. Take my advice.” He made a face, leaning forward in another burst of confidence and wrinkling up his broad manly nose. It wasn’t the “pushing and shoving” he minded in those demonstrations. “It’s the BO. Phew!”

Just then, a police car siren blew. “That’s my tune,” he said, grinning. Then another. Outside, cops were racing out of the police station, pulling on their coats, clapping on their helmets, and boarding police wagons. The sergeant hastily left his glass of lager on the bar. We left our drinks too and ran. A large force of alarmed bobbies was converging on Westminster Abbey, where some pink-cheeked, tow-headed schoolboys from Manchester, wearing red-and-white scarves, in town for the football match, had been apprehended on the sidewalk; their average age was maybe fourteen. A flash had come through that some unknown persons were breaking into the Abbey; possibly one or two of the little Manchester rooters had tried to climb the fence. In a minute, the police, embarrassed, were returning to base. In preparation for the Demo, they had been sleeping in at the police station, with a barrel of beer, occupying it, in short, like the students on guard at the London School of Economics. Both sides were nervous, gloomy, and gay. It worried me that with all that beer the police might have hangovers the next day, which would make them irritable. The sergeant complained that the pigeons under the eaves of his “dormitory” had been keeping him awake.

In the occupied LSE, which we had just visited, the only drinks being served were coffee and tea. As at the Sorbonne last May and June, you could buy apples and sandwiches. Some students were already asleep in the corridors, but most were just milling about or reading the posters and slogans on the walls, many of which seemed to be copied from the French slogans. A local touch was a small notice: “Babies and Children Cared for during Demonstration. Please apply,” etc. In the big auditorium, movies were being shown of previous demonstrations: the May–June French marches and street fighting and the March 17 rally against our Embassy in Grosvenor Square. This made me think of the Marines at Da Nang watching old Hollywood Second World War movies—the hair of the dog. There were fewer jokes here than in the police station—less irony. An infirmary to receive the wounded was being prepared, and the next morning there would be an ambulance standing outside the entrance hall—a camouflaged truck from Cardiff. It was plain that they expected casualties.

“What do you hope to accomplish by this demonstration?” I had been asking Tariq Ali in the offices of the
Black Dwarf
on Carlisle Street, which was placarded with art work of Fidel and Che, back issues of the magazine, provocative slogans. There were photos of the enemy: Axel Springer, Paul Getty, Howard Hughes. There was a striking photo of U.S. Marines in bristling combat formation resembling a human porcupine ready to throw its quills. There was an art photo involving a discarded condom, and a typed list of first-aid stations by districts. In this show window of pop politics, like a vision from another world, hung a very big photograph of Trotsky, with his clear, intelligent, spectacled, professorial eyes (“What are
you
doing here, old friend?” I wanted to ask “the Old Man.”) A new issue of the magazine had just been printed, and young distributors were hurrying out with it. Someone ran in to say that one of the sellers had been arrested in Piccadilly Circus for “causing an obstruction.” (The British guardians of order, off camera, were still up to their old tricks; see “Freedom of the Park” in
The Collected Essays, journalism, and Letters of George Orwell
commenting on the arrests for “obstruction” of five people selling
Freedom
[Anarchist],
Peace News
, and other left-wing papers in Hyde Park. That was in December 1945, under an earlier Labor Government, and Orwell wondered how it was that you did not hear of newsboys being run in for selling the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Tablet
, or the
Spectator
.)

The
Dwarf
office, temporary staff headquarters for the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (Trotskyist, as opposed to the British Vietnam Solidarity Front, Maoist), suggested a
stage set
of revolution, with supernumeraries like spear-bearers entering stage right and left, bit players speaking lines of studied rudeness as in some up-dated Wildean comedy, breathless messengers, and a general atmospheric litter, the floor serving as a communal ash-tray. I could not resist the feeling that I had been cast in the role of audience and ought to have paid an admission. At the pub around the corner, just off stage, Special Branch men were posing as customers.

The words “What do you hope to accomplish?”, etc. had, I quickly discovered, the effect of a negative password. It virtually invited the bum’s rush. How narrowly I had escaped that, I realized the next morning during a pre-march briefing at the London School of Economics when a middle-aged man in a hat addressed that question to the chairman. “Get the hell out.” “Infiltrator.” “Spy.” “Get stuffed.” “There’s ladies present.” “Give him a chance, for Christ’s sake.” “This bugger didn’t come here to ask a
bona fide
question. He came here to cause chaos.” In fact, from the sneer in his voice, I too concluded that the man in the hat was there for no good purpose. His hat itself was a provocation. Yet whatever his intention (or mine), the question was a natural one, which the very scale of the preparations on both sides (forty doctors and nurses and four ambulances at the LSE alone) necessarily brought to the mind of the ordinary perplexed Londoner: “What do they expect to
gain
by it, I ask you?” the sergeant had mused, in the pub.

I had been thinking about the problem myself, in a U.S. context—would it do any good to march again on the Pentagon?—and it seems to me that there is a law of diminishing returns that applies to demonstrations, though nobody can be sure at what point it will begin to operate. But if a demonstration reveals your weakness, rather than your strength, it may not be a good plan to hold it. And built into demonstrations, as into any kind of warfare, there is the tendency to escalate, to make up in increasing violence what you lack in force, till the number of injured on both sides becomes the measure of the success of a march, and this is particularly true when modern means of publicity are focused on the combat. Here—the opposite of regular warfare—each side tends to overestimate its own casualties and to underestimate those of the enemy. Or, as a police inspector said: “We will be trying to
minimize
arrests. The students hope to
maximize
them.”