P.S. (8 page)

 

I think it has to be a kind of confession. I don’t mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. But I mean the effort seems to me is to—If you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms in which you’re connected to other lives, and they can discover, too, the terms in which they’re connected to other people.

It’s happened to every one of us, I’m sure, that one has read something which you thought only happened to you and you discover that it happened a hundred years ago to Dostoyevsky. And this is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person who always thinks that he’s alone. This is why it’s important.

Art would not be important if life were not more important. And life is important. And life is . . . Mainly, most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what’s going to happen to him from one moment to the next or how he will bear it. And this is irreducible, and it’s true for everybody.

Now, it is true that the nature of society has to be to create,
among its citizens, an illusion of safety. But it’s also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion, and artists are here to disturb the peace.

 

 

Yes. They have to disturb the peace; otherwise, chaos.

 

 

It is indeed; it is. It always is. It always is. And people have to know this. Some way they have to know it in order to get through their risks.

 

 

Yes. There’s no such a thing as safety on this planet. No one knows that much. No one ever will—let alone about the world, but about himself. That’s why of course it’s unsafe. And people in some way have to know this. And this is what the whole sense of tragedy is really all about. And people think, I think, that a sense of tragedy is a kind of embroidery, or something irrelevant which you can take or leave. But in fact, it’s a necessity. That’s what the blues are all about. That’s what spirituals are about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses. Or even not survive them, but to know that they’re coming. Because knowing they’re coming is the only possible insurance you have, some faint insurance, that you will survive them.

 

 

Yes, I think we do, and it’s incredible to me that—and I’m not trying to oversimplify anything—but it is incredible to me that in this country, where, after all, materially, for the most part, one is better off than anywhere else in the world, that one should know so many people who are in a state of the most absolute insecurity about themselves. So they literally can’t get through a morning without going to see the psychiatrist. And I find it very difficult to take this really seriously, since other people who have really terrifying and unimaginable troubles, from the American point of view, don’t dream of going anywhere near a psychiatrist and wouldn’t have the money to do it if they were mad enough to dream it.

It seems to me it points to a very great, well, not illness exactly, but fear. Frenchmen that I used to know, Frenchwomen, spend much less time in this dreadful internal warfare, tearing themselves and each other to pieces, than Americans do. And why this is so is probably a question for someone else. But it is so, and I think it says something very serious about the real aims and the real standards of our society. People don’t live by the standards they say they live by. And the gap between their profession and the actuality is what creates this despair and this uncertainty, which is very, very dangerous.

 

In the last chapter, the last part of your book
Nobody Knows My Name
, the black boy looks at the white boy—it’s your relationship to Norman Mailer—but the very last part says if he has understood them, then he is richer ; he, in this instance, the white boy. “Then he is richer and we are richer, too; if he has not understood them, we are all much poorer. For though it clearly needs to be brought into focus, he has a real vision of ourselves as we are, and it cannot be too often repeated in this country now that where there is no vision, the people perish.”

 

Mmm-hmm. I mean that.

 

 

Who, indeed! Well, I may not be able to tell you quite who I am, but I think I’m discovering who I’m not. I want to be an honest man, and I want to be a good writer. [A pause] And I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. I think you just have to play it by ear and pray for rain.

CHICAGO. Where shall we begin? For years the impression of Chicago in a popular sense, thanks to Warner Bros. movies, was Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson—Chicago was the home of the mob, Al Capone.

The name Al Capone and Chicago were at times synonymous, and Chicago was a tough, rough city.

Its beginnings were swampland, the Potawatomi Indians, who were pretty well scalped financially by the pirates who we call our Founding Fathers and after whom streets are named.

And Nelson Algren, a Chicago writer years ago, a great critic of Chicago in a very lyrical way, wrote
The Man with the Golden Arm
,
The Neon Wilderness
; he wrote a book called
Chicago: City on the Make
. It’s like a prose poem.

Chicago began with French
voyageurs
, and then the Germans came. Many were liberal Germans. In terms of the ’48ers—1848, you know, was the year of many rebellions, all of which failed, and so Chicago had a sort of liberal, to some extent,
German tradition. You find that in the arts. For example, the Chicago Symphony [Orchestra] was primarily Teutonic—Brahms, Beethoven, Bach.

At the same time, Chicago became what I call the key, archetypical American city—a blue-collar city. Not a New York, New Orleans, or San Francisco. There’s a glamour attached to each. Chicago never had that glamour, but it had something else.

It had a resettlement and reform program with Jane Addams, a social worker; she was the first in our country to have a settlement idea. She established Hull-House for a lot of the Italian immigrants.

So Chicago’s reputation on one side was Al Capone and on the other side was Jane Addams.

It also was a city of the blue collar because after the Germans came the Irish, of course, and the Irish had an advantage; they spoke English. So they became part of the political scene for a long time.

But the big thing about Chicago was the hands—“city of hands.” It’s an old-fashioned phrase for workers: “50 hands wanted.” In John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
, George and Lenny go down to skid row, and they see all kinds of guys with signs saying “50 hands wanted.” Chicago, city of hands—all these immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Chicago’s Polish population was at one time the biggest in the world with the exception of Warsaw’s. Then came the Mediterranean migration; then, of course, since then, the Mexicans and Latino people have come.

And of course the inner migration—the Deep South of the United States, the black people who as sharecroppers heard about Chicago. The big newspaper among black people for
years was
The Defender
—carried by the Pullman car porters. They were the aristocrats, when they came into a poolroom, or a barbershop or a restaurant, with their blue pants and their white stripes. They were carrying
The Defender
, which would give them news of the rest of the world—especially Chicago.

In fact there’s a blues song by Jimmy Rushing—he used to sing with Count Basie—he’d sing “Gone to Chicago, baby, sorry I can’t take you.” Chicago became the home for many black people because here were the steel mills, the packing houses.

Chicago was also a railroad center—a thousand trains a day would pass through and stop in Chicago. I remember coming here in 1920 as a little kid. My parents had a rooming house here. My father was ill. I remember coming on a train. Oh, it was exciting. Chicago: home of the skyscrapers.

So Chicago was unique; it was the archetypical American city. It had these immigrants who did the hard work and the labor in all these steel and farm-equipment plants. Actually every city had its uniqueness then. You’d get off the train and see this was Pittsburgh or this was Detroit. There’d be some landmark.

Today you get off a plane. What do you see? The Red Lobster [restaurant chain]. The Golden Arches. Marriott hotels. You can’t tell one city from another. This actually happened to me. I write these books called oral histories. In the past, I’d travel around on book tours. And so I’d go to maybe ten cities by plane, and so one day I’m in this city—and remember you can’t tell one city from the next—and I’m at this motel and I say to the switchboard operator: “Could you ring me at six o’clock in the morning because I’ve got to be in Cleveland by eight?” And she says: “Sir, you
are
in Cleveland.”

That’s how Chicago’s changed. Of course, it’s a change for all cities, the sameness. Cities have lost their uniqueness, their individuality.

All cities have neighborhoods, but the word has a special meaning to Chicago because of its Germans, the Irish; now we have Asians as well. Chicago’s known for its “two-flats” buildings: two apartments. One [owned] by some worker who’d saved his money and, up above, his son-in-law and his daughter. That was a big pattern—a family in two-flat bungalows. In New York there’d be tenements. A lot have become gentrified, but there are still these neighborhoods, good and bad.

Chicago was also the home of some of labor’s most bloody battles. There was Gene Debs, fighting to organize the railroad unions, fiercely battling against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman organized the ideal town for his good honest workman. No Irish allowed. The Irish were the blacks of their day. It was said of the Irish: coal in the bathtub, promiscuous, living on the dole—all the earmarks stereotypically associated with black people. That was a battle.

And of course there was 1886, the fight for an eight-hour workday. The first time that phrase was ever used anywhere in the world was in Chicago when local anarchists and others gathered to campaign for it. There was a meeting. The rains came heavily. The speakers went home, the mayor, Carter Harrison, a good man, was there on horseback and saw that all was quiet. Most of the crowd had dispersed when someone, we don’t even know who, threw a bomb. It killed several police officers and some laymen. The hysterical headlines of the local papers all said: “Hang Them!” The case caused indignation
the world over, from Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi to George Bernard Shaw.

Several enlightened industrialists were for commuting the sentence. But the merchant prince, Marshall Field I, with his white mustache pointing heavenward, said, “Hang the Bastards!” and they did.

There was also 1937, the Memorial Day Massacre, when the strikers of Republic Steel Company gathered for a mass meeting. The weather was fine; it was a perfect day for a picnic. Men brought their wives and children for a parade and mass rally. But five hundred policemen were stationed there, fully armed with guns loaded with real bullets. As the marchers, singing, made their way toward the plant, the cops began whaling away with their billy clubs. Panic. And then the cops started shooting. Ten men were shot in the back. Killed. Over a hundred wounded. There were strikes by the score in Chicago.

As for the black man, great as the opportunities were at the time for jobs, especially in the stockyards, the black man found few openings. Even Lake Michigan was divided. A young black kid happened to swim past the invisible division line. He was shot and killed, sparking the race riot of 1919. Martin Luther King Jr. visiting Chicago made an astonishing discovery: that where he had traveled was more dangerous than Birmingham and Bull Connor’s dogs. A rock struck Dr. King and left him with a bruise as a fond keepsake of Chicago.

So there you have it. Chicago’s god is Janus of two faces. The one that says come on here, there are jobs, all hands wanted. And the other that says, not you,
you
stay away.

IT WAS THE MOST SEGREGATED of all northern cities.

You must understand that our god is different from all others. We worship Janus, the two-faced deity. There is a full human being here, his sunny and his dark side: his life-liness and his necrophia. Former governor George Ryan, imprisoned in a state penitentiary for malfeasance in office, is a likely candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He struck the first blow against capital punishment and cleaned out the death cell allowing the condemned a new trial on the basis of the DNA evidence. Some who were due to be executed were freed, innocent of any crime.