Outside Looking In (2 page)

My father was right in one way. Reading has made me not so much a participant in life around me as an observer. I have stood to the side of events. I covered many student protests and antiwar demonstrations, and had many marijuana joints passed to me, but never tried one. I never tried tobacco either. I always hated the smell of cigarettes—my father said he would pay me a hundred dollars if I did not smoke till I was twenty-one, and I won that money easily. Alas, he did not follow his own advice—he and my mother were chain smokers. To get out of the smoky house, I early formed the habit of reading while I walked outside.

I covered as a journalist many political campaigns, but never joined one, worked for one, or wrote a politician's speeches (though I was asked to). When I was on Jimmy Carter's campaign plane in 1976, his speechwriter James Fallows asked me if I did not want to see a campaign from within—I answered that one can be an entomologist without becoming a bug. I have been able to look in on places and events where I hardly belonged—jails, police raids, opera singers' backstage dressing rooms, strippers' changing areas, church rectories, Pentagon offices.

I stayed outside looking in. I was thought by some to be on the right wing or the left wing because I was closely observant of people there—I was, for instance, a friend of Karl Hess in both his libertarian right-wing days as a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater and in his anarchist left-wing days as an antiwar protester. But I have mainly been a conventional person, a churchgoer, one whom Lutheran scholar Martin Marty called “incurably Catholic,” saying the rosary every day. I have also been incurably (in a term of the time) square—middle-class, never bohemian or avant-garde (no James Joyce or Beckett, just Evelyn Waugh; no Pollock or Rothko, just Tintoretto; no John Cage or Alban Berg, just Verdi). I have been “stodgy” in my children's eyes, puttering around my midwestern neighborhood unrecognized. (I am normally so unnoticeable that I have trouble getting waited on in stores.) Since I was often writing at home, my children's friends asked, “Why doesn't your daddy go to work?” On the other hand, my daughter, when she was a child, said of a lawyer friend of mine, “He must be a professor.” Why? her mother asked. “Because he dresses like a bum, like Dad.” I remain old-fashioned to this day. I was very slow to come to the computer and the cell phone, and I have never had any traffic with Palm Pilot, BlackBerry, iPhone, personal blog, texting, Twittering, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, or other modern tools.

I am so square that I have been married for fifty years to one woman, Natalie, the only person with whom I have ever had sex. I agree with Hilaire Belloc: “It is well to have loved one woman from a child.” I have been “faithful” in other ways, teaching classes for forty-three years in two long stretches at only two universities, working with only three literary agents over half a century, in a profession where writers jump about frenetically. As someone so colorless, I am not interesting in myself, but I have been able to meet many interesting people and observe fascinating events, partly by being unobtrusive. My wife says that, because I am so unthreatening, dogs and old ladies loved me. Until I became old myself, old ladies did often mother me, and dogs followed me home (sometimes to embarrassing consequences with their owners). This book presents some of the figures, neither dogs nor old ladies, who fascinated, amused, or educated me. Call it the confessions of a conventional bookworm.

T
he 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was a swirl of action. I ran in the night from police sweeping demonstrators out of Lincoln Park. I stopped only in a doorway to help my friend Wilfrid Sheed, who had to use a cane from his young polio days. Later, I wiped away tears with other people at Grant Park as Mark Lane, a conspiracy theorist on the Kennedy assassination, flopped dramatically on the ground while his own camera crew treated him as a martyr to tear gas. I had known him since he sued me for an article challenging his conspiracy theories. On a later occasion, coming across me in jail, he would urge me to stay there while he defended me as a protester against the Vietnam War.

It was a mad and noisy scene that night in Chicago, but one quiet event was the most riveting for me. I was talking with a friend, the journalist Murray Kempton, at a checkpoint sealing off approaches to the convention center. High wire fences shunted even those with press credentials to another entrance. The comic and activist Dick Gregory was arguing with the police, saying his home was on the other side of the fence. The police said he could come in, but no one else. “But these are my friends,” Gregory said, gesturing to all those around, “and I have invited them to my house for dinner.” Kempton snapped shut his reporter's notebook and said, “I never turn down an invitation from Dick Gregory.” He went through the gate and was instantly arrested—he would write a beautiful piece that night from jail.

I was tempted to follow Kempton, who was a hero to me. But I was determined to be an outsider looking in, not a participant. I would keep to that standard as I covered other antiwar actions in Berkeley and Toronto, at Kent State, and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But events caught up with me in 1972. A recent acquaintance called me at my home in Baltimore and said, “You have written about many antiwar demonstrations. Isn't it time to put the rest of your body where your mouth is?” I resisted, saying how feckless most demonstrations turned out to be. He said that this one would be different. Lawyers were drawing up the constitutional grounds of the action. It would be a First Amendment petition for redress of grievance—a demand that Congress recognize the illegitimacy of funding an undeclared war. Some in Congress had agreed to present the petition on the floor, and we would block the entrance to the chamber until it granted our request. I thought of watching Kempton go through the gate in Chicago and shrugged. “I guess it's my turn.”

People I respected had already agreed to take part in this action, and they had been joined by a hundred or so others. So I went to Dupont Circle, to the hotel across from the Institute for Policy Studies, where I was a board member. A strategy session was convened there the night before we were to swarm like bees at the door of the House. The session broke into factional disputes over what to do if and when our petition was not met. We could refuse to leave when the Capitol Police tried to clear the entrance. We could resist arrest. We could move away from the door but hover near to chant our protests. The arguments droned in circles, going nowhere.

Joseph Papp, the director of New York's Shakespeare in the Park, said it was pointless to get arrested once our demand was rejected. Besides, he had business back in New York—he could not afford to stay overnight in jail. Others demanded a more determined course. Weary of the back-and-forth, I went into the hotel bar. Eva Coffin followed me—I knew her from Yale, where she had been the wife of the chaplain, William Sloan Coffin. Though divorced from him now, she admired the spirited activist he still was. She said, “We need Bill here now.”

It was finally resolved that everyone should do what he or she wanted on the next day. Dr. Benjamin Spock said that nonviolent noncompliance was the best course, and most followed his advice, though some—Gloria Steinem and Marlo Thomas among them—would fade away when told that anyone staying was under arrest.

When we got to the Capitol, Congress members greeted us—Bella Abzug and John Conyers—and said they would offer our petition inside the chamber. We sat down and scroonched ourselves as tightly as we could around the entry, a bottle stopper to block those trying to go in or come out. At one point, Congressman Gerald Ford came to the door to stare at us. Karl Hess, the former Republican who had written speeches for Ford, got up and stepped over bodies to say hello to his old boss. He reminded him of the things they had said against Lyndon Johnson's war, but Ford, who now supported Nixon's war, did not remember such “good old days.” Hess, later that night, would tell me in the cell we shared that he was disappointed at Ford for giving him such a cold shoulder.

The rest of us squirmed around for hours, occasionally distracted by Judy Collins as she sang “Amazing Grace.” Gawkers circled the huddle. And then the arrests began, polite and recorded on police Polaroids. Down the Capitol steps, into buses, to be delayed endlessly in an underground garage. The women (about thirty) were taken to the women's detention center—including one who would become a very good friend later on, Ida Terkel (wife of the oral historian Studs Terkel). The men (about seventy of us) were driven to the D.C. lockup. Out of the buses. Our names were taken down by a guard who recognized Spock (“Hi, Doc”) from other demonstrations. I smiled to see that Joe Papp was among us, despite all his talk the night before against being arrested. Then taken up for fingerprints and mug shots. (I wondered what Richard Avedon would make of his official photograph.) One phone call (mine to my wife, not a lawyer).

Then into the cells—four of us in two-man cells—a bunk bed (two metal trays with no mattresses or pillows or blankets) and a metal john with no seat attachment. Across from our cell, Spock was rolling up his suit jacket for a pillow and sliding under the bottom bunk (he was too tall to fit in one of the trays). In the cell next to ours, someone complained that the john did not work. Spock shouted, “The john in cell 38, you have to kick the button in the wall.” Noisy efforts, with no success. “When I say kick it, I mean
kick
it.” Noisy success.

Someone was fingering a flute. The actor Howard da Silva shouted that he should give it to someone who knows music. “David” (the composer David Amram), “where are you?” When Amram answered, down the line, da Silva said to pass the flute to him. After some obscure fumblings from Amram, da Silva shouted, “Send it back!” At this point, Mark Lane went from cell to cell. He had signed the petition the previous night but had kept from arrest, and now entered the lockup pretending to be our lawyer. He came to our cell, instructing us not to plead nolo contendere and pay our fine in the morning, but to demand a trial and make a test case against the war, with him as our attorney. None of us were buying from the self-promoting con man. He wanted a big case he could write about.

Later, I would learn what the women's stay was like from Ida. She said that a guard brought them stew in a styrofoam cup and coffee thick as syrup with cream and sugar. The diet-conscious ladies in their cells—who included Felicia Bernstein and Francine du Plessix Gray—shuddered at the sugary mix. Ida explained to them that poor people all drink their coffee that way, since they are starved for nourishment. Judy Collins gave their cells better music than da Silva had been able to coax from Amram.

During the hours of that long night, I talked mainly with one of my cell mates, Karl Hess. We knew each other from being fellows at the Institute for Policy Studies. Hess was known for being Barry Goldwater's speechwriter in the 1964 presidential campaign. Since then, he had gone from being a libertarian to being an anarchist. He refused to pay taxes used for war purposes, and lived on a farm, creating metal sculptures. An autodidact and devourer of books, he asked what was the volume I carried with me through the arrest. It was the Greek New Testament. He asked why I had it. I answered that I read it every day for spiritual sustenance. Besides, “It's the most influential book in Western culture.” Yeah, but why Greek?

I said that learning Greek is the most economical intellectual investment one can make. On many things that might interest one—law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history, lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama—there will be constant reference back to the founders of those forms in our civilization. Politics and law will refer to Aristotle on constitutions and balanced government. Philosophy will argue endlessly with Plato. Historians must go back to Herodotus and Thucydides. Students of Virgil or Milton have to gauge their dependence on Homer. Drama harks back to Sophocles or Euripides for tragedy, to Aristophanes or Menander for comedy. Oratory is measured against Demosthenes or Isocrates, lyric poetry against Sappho or Anacreon. The novel begins with Longus and others. It helps, in all these cases, to know something about the originals. He objected that the remains of ancient literature seem exiguous. That is partly true. Only three of the dozens of Greek tragedians survive, and only about 10 percent of their output. But that gives a kind of detective-story interest to their study. To rebuild the social setting for judging them, one must call on the study of papyri, coins, inscriptions, vase paintings, and archaeological ruins. (The only art history course I ever took was a graduate class on Greek vases.) Karl liked the puzzle aspect of this.

In the morning, after the judge arrived, we were allowed to make individual statements before pleading nolo contendere and paying our fine (I had to borrow some money to pay mine). We scrambled for the few cabs outside the lockup. I ended up in one with da Silva and the writer Martin Duberman. The harried Duberman asked us to go first to Union Station, where he had put his luggage in a twenty-four-hour locker (he had not expected to get arrested). The locker held the only copy of his latest book's typescript (this was before computers), and he was terrified at the thought that the time had run out and someone had taken his luggage. Happily, he found the luggage with the book still in it.